Menu - Le Donjon

Despite visiting this lovely French village several times I had somehow missed that Le Dongen has a beautiful atmospheric secret courtyard if you walk through t... read more Despite visiting this lovely French village several times I had somehow missed that Le Dongen has a beautiful atmospheric secret courtyard if you walk through the restaurant to the back. I'm not sure how I've missed it before. Lucy and Etienne are lovely Anglo French hosts and my children were made welcome despite us arriving without a booking. The family had the salmon rilletes, goats cheese salad and charcuterie for starters. All prepared in house to perfection. The steak was reportedly excellent, my lamb was to die for and the main courses came with enough vegetables for our English preferences! The cheese board was lovely, child 3 had a delicious chocolate hot dessert and we all tried Etiennes amazing and really unusual homemade pistachio ice cream. A really lovely relaxing evening and good value for a family of 4 with a set price for either 2 or 3 courses. We drank the house red and it was a good match for the food and reasonably priced.

This was the rudest and most disgraceful service I have ever received in all my life. Outrageous. My wife and I were looking for somewhere to have a coffee in t... read more This was the rudest and most disgraceful service I have ever received in all my life. Outrageous. My wife and I were looking for somewhere to have a coffee in the afternoon and thought the café looked nice and so we sat at one of the empty tables. There were no menus on the table and we therefore looked at the sandwich board outside the café and chose two smoothies from it. The waitress (a blond middle aged lady) came to take our order and we discovered she was actually English always a nice surprise in such instances. We ordered two smoothies and a bottle of water When she went away we realised that there were menus at other tables and I went and collected two from a nearby table and saw ice cream advertised, so when she returned with our smoothies and bottle of water I also ordered an ice cream. The ice cream was then duly served, but we realised after this that we had no glasses for the water. However, we didn 't say anything as it wasn 't that important. Ten minutes later, after we 'd finished our smoothies my wife decided she wanted a coffee and an ice cream. The waitress was nearby and so my wife ordered her coffee and was just about to say 'and an ice cream ' but the waitress had already shot off. When she returned with the coffee my wife completed her order of the ice cream. The waitress began to walk away but then turned back to us. We thought she was about to exchange some pleasantry or other with us as we were English, but instead she said very abruptly Do you think you could order everything at the same time as otherwise I have to keep coming in and out. and then turned on her heels and walked off. We were stunned. Had there been some mistake? The waitress was telling us off just for ordering things? We 'd not said or done anything to annoy her; a mistake obviously. We waited for her to return with the ice cream and I began to explain that we had tried to order the ice cream at the same time as the coffee, but she just cut me off in mid sentence saying Yeah, yeah, whatever. and marched away! Her behaviour was unbelievable. I was becoming annoyed and shouted after her that we were still waiting for glasses for our water she just kept marching. After 2 minutes of waiting I had had enough and went inside to complain. She saw me coming and deliberately turned her back to me, busying herself at the counter. I started to complain about the service but she refused to hear me, she was just very physically aggressive in blocking me out and verbally aggressive saying that she was too busy to listen to my complaints and she had other customers to serve. Voices were raised. She refused to even turn to look at me. Eventually I just threw 5 Euros down on the counter and we left. This was by far the rudest waitress I have ever encountered. We did absolutely nothing to annoy her we sat quietly and didn 't complain when our water glasses didn 't arrive or that we hadn 't seen a menu it turned out that there were actually three menus but we didn 't even see one. Needless to say this encounter completely ruined our day and it is only now, some five days later that I 've been able to write about the incident. All I can say in her defence is that my wife thought that maybe she had some form of mental problem. I thought that she was downright rude and aggressive. Whatever the case, I would strongly advise against visiting this establishment whilst this waitress is still working there unless you want to run the risk of a similar experience. Avoid at all costs.