The Barley Mow (Orleans) — Restaurant in Ottawa

My parents are up to help me move and we decided to pop in around lunch time for a meal. The atmosphere is definitely pub/bar, old wood topped tables with the finish coming off, TVs with the game on, etc. They were pretty quiet for the lunch period, so service and food was fast.

So my Dad is a professionally trained chef and uses a hearing aid, which often makes going to restaurants not an enjoyable experience for him as they are often too loud and he usually ends up saying he can make better at home. So we expecting some standard hearty but slight greasy pub food.

Both my dad and I order a burger and ceaser salad and the food was incredible! I have to rave about the ceaser salad!!!! The salad came with a full, perfectly crispy slice of bacon on top, real parmasean, capers! And garlic infused curton chips. My dad commented that the dressing was likely made in house too. I was worried when I saw the capers as I thought the salad was going to be too overpowerjng or salty, but the flavours were well balanced.

The burgers were also top notch as well! And my mom got the donair which she did not share lol, which she always wants to share her food when we go out.

Also even though it's a bar atmosphere, the music wasn't blaring and it was easy for my dad hear and participate in conversation. (I imagine its much noisier when they are busy).

I highly recommend poping for lunch and will...

My family and I have gone to Barley Mow regularly for many years, but the service and food quality has deteriorated significantly in the last six months or so and today will be our last visit. We arrived as a party of five for dinner at 4:30 PM and the restaurant was relatively quiet. It took 15 minutes for the waitress to take our drink orders, 10 minutes to get the drinks, and 10 more minutes before she came back to take our food order. The food was finally delivered for 3 of the 5 people in our party 45 minutes later - 3 orders of chicken fingers and cold, hard french fries. The fourth order came shortly after with one piece of fish and cold fries. Finally, 1 hour sfter ordering and 15 minutes after the other meals were delivered, the final meal arrived - a veggie burger (with the WRONG toppings) and a Caesar salad. After finishing our meal, we had to wait yet again for 20 minutes to receive our requested bills. If this was a one off I wouldn’t be writing this review. However, we seriously debated whether we should even go there tonight given multiple poor experiences over the last 6 months. Usually, it is the service that is exceedingly slow but the food is generally okay, although sometimes not hot. But today the quality of the food was just as bad as the service. We were given discounts and an apology, but this isn’t an experience we ever wish to repeat. Regrettably, we won’t...

I used to like this place but have not been there for a year. Our experience on Mother’s Day was awful. We did not have a reservation but the place was not full at all around 5pm (half empty). We waited an hour and half for our food, nothing complicated, a Caesar salad with blackened chicken, veggie wrap (gyro) with blackened chicken and a beef sandwich, it took for ever. Some other people came after us, were served and left … and we were still waiting for our food. When it finally came, the Caesar salad looked like a 5yr old made it, chopped lettuce, Caesar dressing and one whole slice of bacon on the side, that’s it … worst Caesar salad ever, not tasty at all, the chicken on the top was ridiculously burnt, like all burnt with a bitter taste. The same burnt chicken was used for the gyro wrap, like how can you serve something like this ? I did not taste the beef sandwich but seems like it was not great but okay. I suspect the server knew because he never asked if we liked the food. Did not bother providing feedback at that point, but definitely not going back to this place ever … may be it was a bad day but we definitely wasted our...