***1 1/2 stars***
It's pretty rare for me to go below two stars, but we literally couldn't find any redeeming qualities other than a kid-friendly chalkboard off to the side. Rough, rough lunch and I'm picking the places going forward. I came here with my top-tier chum and #1 honorary young pup chum for a midday meal yesterday. This was an unfortunate recommendation by my chum, but in her defense, the biggest selling point was that they had a young pup section of the menu (which many of my suggestions didn't). This may have been a sign that it's time for the young pup to just order off adult menus going forward.
This is probably a weird time of year to be over here anyway; this restaurant recently moved next to the baseball stadium, and December just isn't the greatest page on the calendar for America's pastime so it feels a little wasteland-ish right now. There were also a few random amusement park rides that we had to walk around to access the entrance (apparently more for a nighttime winter festival of sorts?) so the vibes were a little off to start. The interior was fine though - there's an interesting looking bar off to the left and high ceilings, so it feels more spacious than it actually is, given the overall square footage you're dealing with. I also enjoyed the cow decor, though I might be missing the joke with some of the cow/pig hybrid animals on display.
My chum remarked that it seemed like the menu was designed by someone who'd never actually tasted the food, and certainly wasn't the same person who cooked it. Definitely a possibility, but my general impression was that this is ostensibly a family restaurant (remember the chalkboard?) with a menu only targeting young female adults, from the bar food to the cocktails. It's very strange.
I wish there was a nicer way to say it, but the cocktails were terrible. I had their version of an Old Fashioned, which had coffee in it. Just did not go well together at all; there's a reason why Irish coffee with Bailey's was invented - not every dark spirit is going to work with coffee. I find it hard to believe this was taste-tested before being added to the menu. Never again. I felt worse for my chum though, who got a holiday twist on a margarita with cranberry. It was so beyond tart I could barely swallow it and it honestly tasted like cough medicine. In a quasi-NSFW comment, my chum mentioned that this drink might be helpful for a UTI, but alas, we were at a restaurant, not a pharmacy. At the very least, they need to retrain their bartenders on basic portions of a cocktail, but when the ingredients clash, that's a management issue.
We got the Cow Wedgies to share as an app - basically, flattened mozzy sticks. I like the flattened concept but these were pretty bad. I'm assuming the issue here is they were in the deep fryer for too long because they had pockets of grease that would pop when you bit into them, almost like a pimple. One of those pockets exploded and stained the front of my hoodie. Not great - an unappetizing appetizer.
The impression I got was that The Barnyard were pretty aggressively touting the chicken/waffles section of the menu. I went with the Winner Winner, which was another example of not understanding basic palates and taste profiles. This is a savory item - it has chicken, mashed potatoes and this gravy/corn concoction. Inexplicably, they then added this weird tangy sauce that would be better served on a bang bang shrimp app that completely ruined the dish. It's such an unforced error I don't understand how it happened.
It's going to come as no surprise, but the service matched the overall quality of the meal. There were very few customers on the premises and yet our waitress was mostly MIA. She never came by to check on us after serving the food, despite making multiple trips to a table near us to inefficiently clear it practically one item at a time.
It's very hard to give constructive feedback when an experience is this bad, but to me it starts at the very beginning - make sure the items on your menu taste good and that your staff is properly trained on basic hospitality concepts. The Kingdom of Sussex deserves a lot better than this. read more