Szmania’s - a restaurant review

The annual Dine Out for Life event was held in Seattle a few weeks ago. Local restaurants donate 30% of the check to the Life Long Aids Alliance and there’s of course the opportunity to donate more cash at the table. This is a charity event we’ve done almost every year that we’ve lived in Seattle. We went last year with the girls, T-bone & Trixie, and had a great dinner at Veil. Now for those of you who actually read my blog on a semi-regular basis, you might remember that I swore off any LLAA charity events last fall because of their treatment of a local drag queen. I was talked back into supporting LLAA because I do like supporting AIDS charities and of course I’ll use just about any excuse to try out a new restaurant. Reservations were made and we were off for our maiden visit to Szmania’s Restaurant, a German place, in the Magnolia neighborhood.

We had reservations at 7:30, early I know but it was a work night after all, we got there about 10 minutes early and I expected to wait. In years past the restaurants have been packed with hungry diners and a wait is fairly typical. Color me surprised when we were taken directly to a table, a six top for the four of us, but whatever works. Unfortunately, that was the end of anything remotely swift for the rest of the evening. We sat for 20 minutes with our menus and nothing to drink or nibble on waiting for our waiter to arrive. Finally the hostess came to our table and took our drink orders claiming that the waiter would be by in a minute for our food orders. Slow service I can understand and even tolerate, if the place is busy, but honestly I’d say that the restaurant wasn’t even 75% full when we first arrived. By the time the cocktails arrived the waiter still hadn’t taken our orders so the hostess took those and got them in for us. We actually didn’t even see the waiter until he brought over the check at the end of the night.

Our food finally started to arrive and honestly I can forgive just about anything if there is good food involved, unfortunately there was nothing redeeming about this meal. For appetizers we had a cheese fondue that was tasty, but nothing spectacular. The cocktails were great, but I can get a good drink a lot of places. We moved on the the main course and the wine. First, let me say that the wine was freaking amazing, but that has less to do with the restaurant and more to do with the fact that I chose a Pinot Noir from King Estate Winery, a winery in Oregon. I ordered the Jager Schnitzel, Bryan had a rabbit and pasta dish, T-Bone had the beef tenderloin and Trixie had the fish special. Trixie’s fish was overcooked and the scallop that accompanied it was quite undercooked. T-Bone’s tenderloin was unremarkable and Bryan’s dish was actually pretty good, probably the best at the table. My Jager Schnitzel was overcooked and dry, the best thing on my plate was the red cabbage side. On the whole the meal was uninspiring, unremarkable and forgetable.

Plates were cleared and dessert menus were presented. We hemmed and hawed about dessert and finally decided that as unremarkable as dinner had been, the desserts were unlikely to be much better. We however, did decide to have either an after dinner drink or a coffee before we called it a night. We waited and waited and waited and still the waiter never came back. At this point we look around and we are one of 4 tables left in the restaurant - absolutely no excuse for such poor service. In the 20 minutes it took the waiter to come back we decided to skip the after dinner drink and just get the check. This took another 15 minutes to process before we were able to leave. Blast my Seattle sensibilities because I still left a generous tip though the wait staff certainly didn’t deserve it.

Out of 5 stars I give Szmania’s Restaurant 2.5 and that’s because I’m feeling generous. I love German food, but was disappointed from start to finish.