Bedem - Varazdin

Bedem restaurant is a hidden gem! The food was outstanding, the atmosphere cozy, and the service impeccable. Highly recommended!

Let’s start with food, food was good. I had a steak which was a bit too raw for medium rare but overall was ok. Service was subpar, our waitress didn’t offer daily menu nor two people special, we overheard about both specials from the table next to us. The worst part was definitely the heat in the restaurant, I would strongly advise you not to go there during summer months, there is no a single fan or ac. Everyone was using menus to cool themselves. Owner should really invest into cooling.

We waited 1,5hours for the food to arrive, and nobody said anything about the waiting time being this long. (And we booked the table hours before our arrival for 9people to avoid this kind of chaos) When we asked how much more time will it take (after 1,2hour) they became angry and grumpy. The whole situation was unacceptable. The portions are small, the food is not the worst but it wasn't warm. We ordered one soup, they said this one would take 20minutes but the other one not, we asked for the second one and waited waaay more than 20minutes. We wanted to order dessert and coffee as well but did not wanted to wait 2 more hours. This is not how a (michelin guided) restaurant should operate.

Upon ordering we were told the soup is just being made therefore they would take about 20 minutes to arrive. We agreed and as agreed the soups arrived in ca. 10 minutes. After one hour and twenty minutes of waiting time we asked our waitress wether our main courses were forgotten, or if there is a problem and we were told that our food is coming up in 2 minutes. After further 10 minutes we adressed a group of waiters and told them that we are more than happy to pay for the soups and beverages that had already arrived, but we would not like to wait any further for the main courses. For this proposal the answer was that our meals ar due in two minutes, beyond that we are free to leave. We were about to leave when our food finally arrived. The meals themselves were decent, even tasty, but rather small in portion relative to their price and some of them have sadly alread lost a measurable amount of heat. When we complained about the long waiting time, and the fact that if we were told beforehand we would not have ordered the food at all. The by this time rather grumpy waitresses answer was that we did not tell here that we are in a “hurry”…. In my opininon any self respecting establishment should be aware of their estimated waiting times, and if it’s longer than usual the costumers should be notified of such. Overall a big dissapoinment from a restaurant that looked really promising on google.

The food was flavourful but that’s as far as the positivity goes. The portions are small but that was sortve expected. The service was absolutely horrendous. Our experience kept getting worse as time went by. Very inattentive staff. The server took about 20 minutes to take our order. The food didn’t take long but after that she did not come by once to see if we wanted another drink or if we wanted dessert when we finished.. My fiancé and I had an empty glass for the next hour or so. We could have spent another 30 euros or so but they just weren’t interested. We had to call the server over to eventually get our bill after about 45 minutes of being done and when we asked for the bill she went to go have a shot with some locals I assume standing near the front door. So we asked to go inside and pay because we didn’t want to wait around any longer. When we came inside to pay, there were four girls behind the registry. They looked up at my fiancé and didn’t say anything. For a second we thought maybe they didn’t even speak Croatian…In the end we could have walked out without paying if we were bad people, that’s how inattentive they were. Just really bad and would simply not recommend.