18th Street Takeout Kitchen — Restaurant in Barnegat Light

This is a PSA (Public Service Announcement) for this restaurant based on my experience in completing reviews of 100's of restaurants. This place is among the bottom five of all time.

Know before you go... This establishment is extremely underwhelming and unfortunate when it comes to the level of cuisine for the high end prices charged for their food.

Look at the outside of the building on Google. It's essentially a mobile home double wide trailer. That's not normally an issue, unless the establishment charges Manhattan prices for tremendously basic fare and flavorless food. I respect simple dishes that you can taste the freshness or the subtleties of the meal, but the plates coming out of this kitchen were abysmal. The fish was killed, clams casino completely lost in vegetables, and the scallops rubbery and nearly tasteless. They also serve frozen baby circle pizzas for kids, which to me is kinda weak, but not that big a deal.

The inside of the double wide lacks any character - wood paneling blankets all of the walls a-la 1970. They also do not take credit cards, and when the average entree is $26 to $45, the lack of payment options is ludicrous. If you happen to have your checkbook, well you can pay by personal check. It's unreal to think an establishment with as a high end price per dish, doesn't take credit card - though you can walk down to the gas station and use their ATM.

I respect that this is a family run establishment with the owner working the tables and the chef in back, but for the outrageously high price, I expect much more. It was sadly a complete waste of money for the product produced in my opinion. They are good people I'm sure, the restaurant just majorly missed the mark for me.

Lastly, I also get that some people enjoy this place for sentimental reasons having been here for years. I respect that, so this review is really for the people who haven't been there before.

Always feel free to reach out to me on...

I really wanted to like this place however I just couldn't bring myself mentally to a place where I could find the food enjoyable. The bill was 166 dollars for 4 adults and 2 children under 3. I got the ribs and shrimp dinner. The shrimp were so overcooked I bit one and gave the rest to my dogs. The ribs were worse. Not sure how they were prepared but they weren't smoked, grilled or slow roasted. If I had to guess I would say they were also fried but not in a good tasty korean BBQ kinda way. In a I don't know how to cook so I am going to try this and see if it works kinda way. The only reason the dogs didn't get the ribs was the store bought BBQ sauce they put on them. I may have been able to force feed myself if they had provided some cocktail sauces or maybe some extra BBQ sauce. But our bags contained none of that. No utensils, no wipes for your hands, no ketchup for the fries(we got kids dinners) nothing at all. This...

How could I have missed this place. Fresh seafood and wonderful crab cakes. Although they do mostly takeout we snagged an outdoor table and had a great meal. Family run and operated for like 40 years. We had the blackened sword fish and crab cake Amazing!! And the vegetarian wife was satisfied with a huge portion of perfectly cooked broccoli spinach and sweet potato....