Every summer, a good friend from B-school invites a few of us down to Spring Lake for a weekend of relaxation and unwinding. It's such a nice reprieve from the city and while it's definitely got its fair share of giant homes, it has a much more relaxed feel than the Hamptons.
This summer the weekend that my friends and I all went coincided with my friend Richelle's birthday, so Kristin booked a reservation at Bareli's on Saturday night. The view is great as it's literally right by the water and the set-up is open and spacious. We were running a bit late from our 7:30 reservation, so we called to let them know and the guy on the other end said it was no problem at all. Great! We head over as fast as we can and get there by 7:50pm and the hostess there was clearly not the same person who answered the phone. She looked at us with this deadpan look and told us our reservation was at 7:30, which we said we knew and that's why we called. After a bit of discussion, she walked us to the back room and asked if we could wait at the bar while they cleared a table for us. We had actually reserved a table outside but, hey we were late, so we couldn't really argue with that. The table that was supposed to be ours was already cleared, they just needed to put silverware on it, which literally took them 20 minutes to do. I know it's a busy Saturday night but it shouldn't take that long to set a table.
We finally did sit down and it kind of all went downhill from there. One caveat is that I will say our waiter was very nice and attentive. I don't think any of the service issues were his fault but I'll get to that in a second. The menu here is pretty standard sea-side Italian food. Kind of what you would expect from and for a Jersey crowd. We started with an order of the calamari ($13), watermelon salad and a penne ala grappa ($18) and then most of us ended up getting the scallops ($35) for our entree. The starters were totally fine - nothing mind blowing but satisfying starters none the less. I personally find watermelon feta salad to be really weird combination and this one seemed like a salad that someone threw together for a backyard BBQ. There was just something missing from it. Then we waited and waited and waited for our food. We must have waited over 40 minutes for our food that even our waiter was embarrassed by it. While he was very apologetic, in my opinion a good restaurant would offer something in return for the wait, either a round of drinks or some kind of appetizer because we were all ready to keel over in hunger. Mind you, scallops should be one of THE fastest dishes to cook because they taken no more than 5-10 mins to sear on each side. At this point, half the restaurant had cleared out and it was close to 10pm. We finally got our food and it was one of those moments where you were like "this took 45 mins to make?". I know the restaurant was busy and I can empathize but any wait past 30 mins for your food is quite ridiculous. I'll give credit and say the dish had about 5 very large and firm pieces of scallop which was great but the side of veggies with it was a bit underwhelming considering the wait.
Since it was a birthday, we had to get a dessert (especially since they put giant sparklers in them). We ended up getting a chocolate lava type cake which was fine but we were all really tired and slightly drunk by that point that we didn't really enjoy it all that much.
Part of me feels bad giving this place a low rating because the food wasn't terrible and our waiter was truly very apologetic but one of my biggest pet peeves is an egregious wait for food with no reparation. Unless the food is truly outstanding, bad service always leaves a bad taste in my mouth (no pun intended). If we had gotten our food on time, I probably would have netted out at a 3.5 fork rating anyways. Total bill with drinks: $100/pp with tax and tip
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