Blackwall Barn & Lodge Columbia — Restaurant in Columbia

UPDATE after 2nd visit: We returned on a busy Friday night for dinner and this time was a terrific experience! Server Ethan took excellent care of us and there were at least 2 managers visible in the dining area ensuring guests are satisfied. My wife and I intended to dine alone but with a last-minute babysitter cancelation and both kids in tow, host staff were very accommodating in updating our table to 4 guests. We tried the short rib taco appetizer and it was very tasty, although the corn tortillas failed to hold together while eating. My burger was cooked to perfection and juicy. I also loved the butternut squash soup. It looks like our initial visit was an anomaly but if you do have a bad experience, management is committed to reaching out afterwards to ensure satisfaction. We look forward to returning again and trying more of the menu!

1st visit:

Very disappointing weekday dinner for my wife's birthday. We made a reservation and the hostess acknowledged the birthday upon checking-in, but the experience was downhill from there. The restaurant was nearly empty at arrival but drinks still took a while. My wife's first cocktail choice was no longer available (the server said they're about to change the menu) so she had to settle for her 2nd choice. The appetizers arrived fairly quickly along with some tasty cheddar biscuits. Both the brussel sprouts and the caprese flatbread (half priced on Tuesdays) were good. Then came a huge lull in service as the restaurant started to fill in with other tables. The mains arrived to the table 36-min after the appetizers, which is an eternity with 2 young children. The kids' menu comes with crayons, but is only printed on one side and has minimal activities for them to do or color...definitely not enough to occupy their attention for 30-min between courses. My wife ordered a glass of wine to be served with her steak, but it didn't arrive until 12-min after the food was sitting on the table. She was also unhappy to find the potatoes and vegetables accompanying her steak covered with the sauce that was on the steak. The picture of the entree on the website menu distinctly shows the sauce on the steak only, and she's not a sauce-lover so she did not like it. If our waiter stopped by soon after the food arrived instead of 12-min later with the wine, it might've been remedied but at that point she was already checked-out on getting what she wanted. I enjoyed the butternut squash bucatini and would recommend it even if you're not vegan. That brings up another issue with the menu... you're presented with a main menu of meat/fish offerings, but if you want gluten-free or vegan food you have to look in the little menu at the end of the table. I'm not on a gluten-free or vegan diet, but would prefer to see everything available to order in one place and our server never mentioned the alternative menus to us until I asked. The kids chicken tenders were ok, but they appeared to be regular frozen tenders and not hand-breaded like the menu says. The accompanying fries were lukewarm upon arrival and the whole tender/fries meal came out alone with no sauce to dip. It was a couple min wait for the food-runner to return with some ketchup, by which time the fries were completely cold. My wife wanted the smith island cake for dessert, and it arrived without a birthday candle or any other birthday fanfare aside from being comped on the bill at the end. The cake itself was dry and needed to be served with a scoop of ice cream to cut through the dryness. The tiny slice of cake still didn't last long between 4 spoons eating it, but again it was 10-min waiting with impatient kids before the server returned and then another 6-min before presenting the bill at our request. This place has some terrific decor/atmosphere and some food is really great but the slow service dragged the whole experience down. I bet things are excellent when service is working well, but there's so many great alternatives that I wouldn't recommend rolling the dice here and seeing what kind of...

I had brunch there this past weekend. The decor was really lovely and I settled in expecting to have a great dining experience. I was wrong! Service, lay out and food drink preparation left much to be desired. I’ll start with the layout- It is absolutely terrible. There are essentially two spaces for dining with one of those spaces also being where the buffet and carving stations are set up. There’s a hallway separating the two with a hostess station in the middle. If you are in the dining area where the food is you get easier access to the food but you also have people snaking around the tables waiting in line for food. If you are in the other dining area you have to walk down a hallway with your food and through a growing crowd of people standing in the middle of the path waiting to be seated. Now on to the service- My friend and I were in the latter group which was very inconvenient and weird. Used plates were not cleared from our table when we returned with fresh plates. Our first mimosa order was about a quarter of a champagne glass. Our refill order took forever to come. We ordered them immediately upon receiving the first order. It got so bad that we were ordering 2 orders of mimosas each at a time. Our server said that she had a large party on the other side of the restaurant and offered an apology. While I appreciated the apology it didn’t really make up for the lack of attention we received. On to the food- simply put it was very middle of the road. Some things were pretty good (shrimp and grits) other things were undercooked and under seasoned( have you ever had very al dente pasta salad?). I would have liked more shrimp and grits but didn’t want to wait for it to be refilled, or the bacon, or any of the other food they ran out of. The carving station was left unattended. While we stood there looking like idiots several staff members walked past one appeared to be a manager. I know they saw us and there was not one offer to help. I had to go to the bar and inquire about when they expected someone to come back. We were told that they were probably going to replenish the food except there was a whole ham and a pretty big piece of prime rib on the cutting board. Both were delicious so we decided to brave the disorganized chaos in pursuit of another serving. delicious so we decided to go back for more. There was a 5 minute wait and what came out from the kitchen was not prime rib. It was beef but it was not prime rib. I don’t know if the staff/kitchen wasn’t prepared for the volume of patrons that arrived that day or if they haven’t been appropriately trained. I think I will give the other location a try because I did not get the dining...

Really disappointed in this place. It's great that it has outdoor dining, and the area has a very eventful feeling, as it's in a town center where lots of people take advantage of the outdoors. However, it became clear why the other restaurants were much more popular.....

BLUF - good service; broken dishwasher (?) and no one noticing stuff you can see from space on your utensils/cups; great outdoor dining space; ambiance broken with cringe twang music; Get the brussels sprouts!; Chesapeake - broken sauce, no flavor, well cooked otherwise; rest of the food pretty meh

Long version - The cups and silverware....so much of it had visible food chunks stuck on it. I don't think we've been somewhere that so clearly had an issue with the dishwasher. It was embarrassing for them that they didn't check. It was so many things. And we're not the type to even examine our silverware/cups, much less ask for replacements. It was bad, especially for a restaurant that's supposed to be on the nice end.

Service was nice, just a little hard to get anyone's attention when the server was inside (IE - having to wait to eat soup bc you need spoons and no one to ask). Great servers, no complaints.

They also played really twangy cliche country music, which kind of ruined the vibe for us. But at this point nothing we would write a review on alone. But the food was so incredibly disappointing for a higher end restaurant.

The good - ordered the brussels sprouts for appetizer and can't go on enough about how good that was. STELLAR. Got two types of soup; both good, what you would expect of a decent restaurant. The squash soup was really sweet for me, so skip it if you don't prefer that.

The disappointing - there is one dish they tout a lot - the Chesapeake Pasta: sounds great, but was absolutely tasteless. I don't even know how it was possible to get it that bland. The homemade noodles were perfectly cooked, but the sauce was broken - all the butter/oil was separated from the rest. The seafood was fine, but even that didn't add anything. Had to laugh hearing a waiter recommending it to other tables as their favorite - what about it is there to favorite? Mine was actively more negative than good bc of the sauce issue.

Kids meals looked good, but they didn't have anything + or - to say about it, and the spouse had the Snakebite - it had a lot more flavor, but he said it was still a little bland/disappointing. His seafood was also meh.

So considering the prices you pay for it, this is a big skip. Might be fine if it were at a diner and I just needed food, not a nice celebration dinner. We...