Ripped of at RestaurantWeek.be

Kris Buytaert — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:01:37 +0000

My mother suggested that she would babysit while the 2 of us went out to eat yesterday. The idea was to have a good dinner in one of the restaurants that took part of the Restaurantweek.be action.

The idea is that you get a 3 course dinner for 25 Euro a person in a good quality restaurant .. therefore no brasserie or pubfood. With different of the top restaurants of antwerp taking part of the action we decided to pic a new one we didn't know yet.

Branche Restaurant , which is the restaurant of the new Golden Tulip Hotel next to the Antwerp Train station.

When we arrived there yesterday we got asked for a voucher for the 2 for 1 action. We were pretty clueless at that point as we never heard of the 2 for 1 action. We were there for a culinary action from Restaurantweek.

The menu for the evening was going to be schrimp salad, pepper steak and tiramisu. WTF ? I can make that myselve, or If I`m hungry and I need to eat that's what I grab in a tavern, that's not what I wan't to have when I go out to eat !

But it was only going to cost us 25 euro for the 2 of us claimed the waiter.
Well.. we had to eat anyhow so why not ..

Somehow they forgot we had ordered one steak well done, and neglected to ask about how the other one. So we sent the rare steak back to the kitchen. I actualy had to get up and go ask where it stayed after about 20 minutes. By then the fries were cold.. so I asked for new ones.. by the time we got those.. the steak was cold. We got offered a free drink for the delay .. but never saw that drink anyhow.

We had dessert ... and asked for the check .. obviously I was kind of surprised that they had charged us 2x 25 Euro, unlike what they had told us upfront.
The waiter explained that he didn't know about the Restaurantweek arrangement and he mistakenly assumed we had the other , the 2 for 1 offer, the 2 for one offer got that menu for 39 Euros for 2 persons. And well.. they had given us the same menu for 2x25 euro ..

We weren't there for some cheapo fries and steak in the first place.. we went there for a culinary dish. And 39 euro's for that menu would have been a big RipOff anyhow. The only reason why we accepted the offer was because it was damn cheap and we had to eat anyhow. So now we had had crappy and way to expensive food, and bad service as well and we were inadvertedly informed that most of the tables around us that actually had the 2for1 offer even paid 10 euro less for the same menu.

Upon asking for a "btwbonneke" the waitress was absolutely clueless, c'mon .. if you work in a restaurant in Belgium you have to know what a 'btw-bonneke' is.
She didn't , luckily her collegue knew.

So Restaurantweek really should have communicated better with their restaurants that people signing up for the offer expect something different from Steak with Fries and a small schrimp salad upfront.

And as for the Branche Restaurant service .. well.. guess you'll never see us again .. and I gues you'll never see the table that was sitting next to us again either. The least you should have done was actually give us the menu for 39Euro's like some of the other tables and give us another drink as you had promised anyhow.

But all you got now .. was bad publicity. But then again .. you won't go bankrupt ..as you are part of a hotel, and a hotel needs a restaurant anyway so why should you bother in the first place.

Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - restaurantweek

Ripped of at RestaurantWeek.be