Lalezar Restaurant

This could have been a nice experience, really. The Lalezar is an enormously spacious place on the river, with probably several hundred tables — and still it doesn’t feel all too crowded. It’s a really nice location, close to the picturesque bridge, and actually not a very long walk away from the center of Edirne.
Sure, it may not be the restaurant’s fault that this was probably one of the busiest weekends of the year. As close to Greece as Edirne is, the Orthodox Easter Sunday obviously lets the number of guests rise a lot — and on top, there were lots of travelers in town to visit the Gypsy festival.
The Lalezar is happy to accept lots of large tourist groups, which are placed at long tables a bit to the side of the tables for «regular» customers. As expected, they are making a good job of getting the huge amounts of food to the groups, they are really working hard.
Still, it seems as if this weekend was clearly testing their limits. A few of the waiters were clearly forgetting to be nice to their customers, one of them was already getting a little rude. Our main course was far too late, and it was not good to see two big groups arrive a good 20 minutes after us, and happily munching away on their köfte way before we did.
And what really killed me was the music — for a good 40 minutes, we were hearing the same kitschy Greek love song over and over and over again, and when we were requesting to maybe select a new one, they said that their comuputer was choosing the playlist. Stunning. But in the end they did manage to get rid of that horrible Antonis Remos song (thanks, Shazam!), and we did have something to joke about for the rest of the day.
About the food — really absolutely nothing to complain about. Actually, if it hadn’t been for the issues above, this place would probably be worth a fourth star. The lunch special included a really good Mercimek Çorba, fresh salad, Köfte and/​or the local specialty, fried liver, and a very fine dessert — all for 22,50 TL. And considering the fact that the food is really tasty, that’s an unbeatable offer.
So — DO check out the Lalezar. But maybe on less busy days, when you can enjoy the scenery a little more, and when the personnel is a little more relaxed. I’m sure it can be a very nice place.