TL;DR: Yes. Standards here are that bad. Don't go unless you want food poisoning or Covid.
Full review: The food itself is between fine (spicy chicken pity) and bland (falafel, also filled under 'dry'). Side salad came with rotten leaves, which I returned (because I...actually wanted the salad) and the replacement came out with a suspicious amount of topping (pomegranate seeds, roasted red pepper slices and dressing)... sure enough it still had rotten leaves throughout. Once is a mistake, twice is negligent. I don't know who was in the kitchen, but it wasn't a chef (or at least not one with any respect for themselves or their guests).
Staff were pleasant by Amsterdam standards (which are low) but did a great job at:
- avoiding customers (surprising difficult to do when there were so many of them and not that many customers... to be fair, they were no worse than the average Amsterdam cafe)
- making as much noise as possible when bussing tables (tip to the manager: add silicone stickers inside the cupboard doors to soften the noise of staff slamming them shut then you just have to do a training on not chucking plates in plastic trays next to customers)
- avoiding basic hygiene protocol... with a pandemic going on you'd think it's a nice excuse to clean your hands frequently but no, it's a nice excuse to eat ice cream directly from the serving station between serving and bussing tables (shout out to the waitress in dirty tracksuit bottoms and a spaghetti strap top- maybe the rest weren't as bad as you). It also would have been nice if they had a QR code to a digital menu or sterilised the ones on the tables, but no. I didn't see a menu changed or cleaned once.
It's a shame... the location is nice enough, the decor is lovely but writing this 16 hours later I'm haunted by that salad (and based on the stomach cramps I'll continue to be haunted for a while yet).
Maybe the owners should 'eat their own dog food' instead of adding another place to their combined portfolio (what is it? Panache, Bukowski, Botanique, Ramona, Waterkant, Ebeling, Pacific?). I get it, it's Amsterdam, as long as the beer is good and the place is cool you can get away with a lot but there's a reason this location has had a high restaurant turnover in the recent past (high rent, high costs, large space to fill I suppose and the standards weren't fabulous at the last ones either but at least LouLou and Du Cap only caused me hangovers not sickness).
There's nothing that couldn't be solved by decent staff (or training) and a bit more thought to the details. (Owners, managers: Just sit there with a notepad and observe what's working and what's not.)
Maybe chucking out lettuce that's gone bad costs less than mixing it with fresh stuff and sending it out to customers? (The beer they took off the bill as an apology is the immediate loss of revenue, but if half the customers got sick last night how many will be back? I'm happy to pay for my beer but I'm not happy to suffer the consequences of a jerk who sends out rotten food... twice... and tries to cover it up.)
Maybe a well-paid, well-trained member of staff will serve more tables (and have a better influence on others) than cheap, inexperienced but friendly servers?
Entrepreneurs and restaurateurs need support right now (it can be tough at the best of times) but wow, this place is not worth the pain.More
