Love Lane Kitchen Visited 7/5/2014 3 Forks

Love Lane Kitchen 240 Love Ln, Mattituck, NY 11952

Love Lane Kitchen is one of those places that has so much potential as it is the quintessential adorable North Fork restaurant.  If it just wasn't for the awful service we had, I could have seen myself giving this place 4 forks  A bunch of us were visiting Jenn and Eric at their gorgeous house in Mattituck and went out for brunch at what looked like the only local brunch spot.  The surrounding neighborhood is peaceful, calming and much more my speed than the craziness of the the other side of Long Island.   Everything about this part of town seems much more rustic and low key.

Love Lane Kitchen is a classic small town farm to table restaurant.  They have cute long wooden tables and lovely local flowers as centerpieces.  Unfortunately, since we were such a large party, they had to break us up into two different tables, which was fine.  But when  5 of us sat down at the larger table, I noticed that the hostess had seated different group of 4 right next to us.  I didn't understand why they couldn't seat our other group of 4 next to us.  Oh well.

In terms of the menu, all the dishes sounded like they used ingredients just picked from the local farm and many of the breakfast/brunch options sounded like your standard comfort dishes.  We had arrived right at the hour where you could either do breakfast or lunch and when I saw that they had a lobster roll on the lunch menu, I was immediately torn about what to order.  I decided to opt for the lobster roll since I was "on vacation" ($24) and I don't really eat it much in the city.  While they did have the specials listed on the chalkboard behind us, I was a bit annoyed that our waitress did nothing to talk about the specials unlike some of the other waitresses around us.  It would have been nice to at least have them described to us before making a decision. Anyways, it was fine since I knew I was getting the lobster roll and I know what a lobster roll is made of.  Then this is where things went down hill.  We must have waited almost 40 minutes for our food.  Tables who clearly came in after us were getting their food before us and our other friends who were sitting at another table got their food so far ahead of us that they had to leave because they couldn't sit at their table any longer.  We had flagged our waitress several times and she kept saying it was coming but I think they clearly forgot and instead of being apologetic about it, they kept deflecting.  Finally we got our food and I will say that the good thing was that lobster roll was very full of lobster - which is always a great thing.  But two comments that bothered me about the dish:  (1) there was way too much celery in it.  I was picking out tons of huge chunks of it and I just don't think you need any celery in a good lobster roll (2) they split the bun directly in half, so all the filling came spilling out.  Ideally, the bun should still stay intact on the bottom so that all the lobster filling can stay in place.  So it ended up being a really messy dish.  It wasn't a bad lobster roll but it also wasn't my favorite.

All in all, this place is still adorable and given the lack of much else in the area, I would still definitely go back.  It's possible that the service was just off on that particular day but after reading Yelp, it sounds like it might be a consistent flaw to the place - which is too bad.  Total bill:  $24/pp with tax and tip

Photo Credit:  Yelp