Steph H.
Yelp
This review is for the restaurant only. After our monster of a day going from Zurich to Luzerne to Interlaken to Bern, we were tired and famished! After walking around for a couple of hours in Bern with our eye on what looked good to eat, we decided on the Belle Epoque restaurant for its diverse menu, beautiful decor, and competitive prices. Inside is indeed very fin-de-siecle French, with beautiful black metal flora-inspired light fixtures and antique furniture and art. The staff was welcoming and used to dealing with tourists--their English was great (as was mostly the case all over Switzerland).
We started out with a couple of glasses of red wine while we perused the menu. We thought it'd be mostly French and Italian stuff but they had Thai and Indian dishes on there, too, which was intriguing. It's not a huge menu, but quite diverse. Anyway, I opted for escargots and the mushroom ravioli and my friend decided on the smoked trout fillets and spinach quiche. Well wouldn't you know it, they were out of the mushroom ravioli, so I decided to go for the quiche lorraine. Our appetizers were excellent, and I very much enjoyed my lovely snails drenched in butter, garlic and parsley, accompanied by a basket of white bread toast slices with butter. My friend liked her smoked trout fillets very much also. So far, so good. When our quiches came out I was surprised to see two little round quiches instead of one larger piece, but it wasn't a big deal. When we dug in we found them to be utterly delicious.
And then...as we near the centers of the quiches we discover that they are quite cool and then eventually downright cold! I think they must've been frozen and then reheated because the centers were cooked, just cold. I don't have a problem with previous frozen foods and all, but it'd be nice if they check to see if the darn things are hot all the way through at least. So I inform the waitress and she is very apologetic, and the offending quiches are whisked back to the kitchen to get warmed up. When they came back out they were fine and I finished them. The waitress then asked if she could offer us a dessert or coffee but I declined, as I was quite full. I was hoping she'd take something off our bill, but alas, she didn't. I supposed I could've asked, but it didn't seem worth the effort. She was sort of the manager-lady, I think, and our regular waitress totally didn't apologize or even acknowledge what had happened. This sort of apathy kind of bummed me out and dimmed my view of the place as a result. Overall it was a pleasant-enough place and I don't regret coming here, but would I be eager to come back again? Not sure...