Classic Grill has a 4.7 overall rating on Google. It is serving grilled Serbian food. What could go wrong?
We hoped for a great and fun Sunday lunch but instead we actually started our disastrous food tour in Szeged here.
Make sure that after reading our honest review you also check out our disastrous tour’s second stop, Virag Confectionery.
Hopes For a Good Start
Classic grill is located in the heart of Szeged, it has a pretty good rating on Google, and it’s serving grilled Serbian food.
You have to know that Szeged is the closest Hungarian town to Serbia, only 28 kilometers (17 miles) from the border.
So this must be the place to try authentic Serbian food and have a great Sunday afternoon for foodies like us.
Or at least we thought so.
But oh boy, were we wrong.
Amazing Grilling Smells
The first experience was actually pretty good. You enter a door downtown Szeged which looks like an old house gate and get to a large patio that’s located inside the city block.
Amazing smoky smells of a great grilling place invite you already from across the street. The aromas get so intense once you step through the gate that you know, or at least think, that you’ve come to the right place.
Let me add one thought here though. The smell was exceptional for us, restaurant guests, but also very intense. But just by looking around, we saw a lot of offices and apartments in the surrounding buildings. All those places are basically inhaling grilling fumes all day every day. Man, I would not like to live or work there, honestly.
Anyways, on a sunny day you get seated in a very friendly garden. It has a nice vibe, the music very pleasant. You still feel like being in the right place. No idea though where you could be seated on a winter day, the room downstairs, on the way to the restrooms, did not look that inviting at all. But the garden is definitely great, and you’re obviously waiting for an excellent meal after such a nice intro.
An Hour-Long Waiting
And here is, unfortunately, where our great experience ended. Our waiter was kind, no complaint about that.
But we waited literally more than an hour to get our meals even though the restaurant was less than half full when we arrived.
And if that’s not enough, there was not a single “we’re sorry” or anything like that from their part.
And if that’s still not enough, the pita bread, that was part of our meal, came about 20 minutes earlier than the actual food. This looked great at first as we were hungry, and the bread was delicious while warm. But it completely cooled down and got crispy by the time we got our food. I repeat, it was not a complimentary bread, but part of the food we paid for.
Mediocre Food
Despite the amazing smells, the food itself was also a big disappointment.
We ordered the two classics of Serbian cuisine; cevapcici and pljeskavica. Both had a wonderful smoky flavor, but otherwise were at most mediocre. Chewy meat that seemed to be thawed directly from a cheap supermarket bag. I’m not saying it was, it just felt like that.
Both came with an extremely small bowl of ajvar, medium quality at best, and chopped raw onions in some unidentifiable watery sour cream spread. No doubt this was as delicious as it sounds.
I ordered pan fried potatoes, sauerkraut and ham as side dish, something typical of the region. It was extremely salty and oily, almost kind of borderline inedible.
I also didn’t quite get why all the food had to be topped with a dash of dry balsamic vinegar. It looked like if somebody had decorated all plates at once at the beginning of the day, and then food was placed on them later. This balsamic decoration did not go well with the food flavorwise, wasn’t appealing and it was dried out.
On the bright side, I have to mention that their lemonade was fantastic. Too bad that’s just way too little to make up for all the bad experience we had at this place.
Where Is Classic Grill Szeged Located
I’m not saying you shouldn’t try this restaurant. Maybe they just had a bad day, maybe we were just too picky. And the ambiance is still great anyways. So find Classic Grill Serbian Restaurant Szeged below on this interactive map.
Szeged, Széchenyi tér 5, 6720 Hungary