August 2009
Copenhagen - Denmark
http://www.boef-ost.dk

This restaurant was not supposed to get a review now, as I was just getting a quick lunch, since I was in town anyway, and most of us know Bøf & Ost as a stable restaurant where you get polite service and proper food at the price, but boy was I wrong!

My wife and I both choose a freshly caught fish fillet, which was supposed to be fried, as that is what it said on the menu. 3 minutes after we have ordered, the Swedish waitress arrives with two portions of destroyed deep-fried breadcrumb coating, which might at some point long ago have resembled a fish. In this connection, I should mention that we do not eat deep-fried food unless we have an enormous hangover, and the closest place to get that kind of food is a seedy take away place.

Well, I call the waitress and inform her that if the food is deep-fried, they should write that on the menu, so that the guests do not feel cheated. She apologises and says that we will immediately get a fish fillet fried in a pan instead. While we wait for this, I tell my wife that I already know that the next fish fillet served to us will not be okay either, because if they really had freshly caught fish, they would never ever deep-fry them, and unfortunately, I was right. In comes the fillet fried in a pan, which might as well have been a piece of indefinable thoroughly fried meat, and I must contact the waitress again. This time, she is not so nice any more, and now she has to talk to the chef first, even though I show her the fish and say that she must be able to see that it is not freshly caught, but she does not agree. I can now see that the waitress thinks that I am being very difficult and actually do not know what I am talking about, so I choose to give her one of my business cards, and suddenly she takes a completely different tone. A few minutes later, the chef himself comes to our table and apologises, and says that we can have a freshly caught fillet on the house. I choose to decline, as I am now thoroughly annoyed, and it should not be necessary to “threaten” with a negative review before getting what you have actually ordered from the restaurant’s menu.

Later, it was time for the cheque, and just as the restaurant tried to cheat us with the food, they actually tried to cheat us with the cheque as well. The two fish fillets that we sent back are on the cheque, and when we inform the waitress, she simply gets angry and sullen. I refuse to pay for food that I have not received, and in this case, the restaurant should actually have credited the entire amount, as our lunch had been ruined, but I did not want to discuss this, so I gave them the remaining amount without any complaining.

This is the second time within a year that my wife and I eat at the square Gråbrødre Torv (the first time was at restaurant Sole D ´Italia), and both times, it has been attempted to cheat us! Eating at Gråbrødre Torv is starting to resemble the public squares in Italy, where all the restaurants are tourist traps.

That the standard in Denmark has become so low, with regard to guests (as the restaurant apparently gets away with this often) as well as with regard to chefs without any respect for their profession, is a mystery to me.