Bite Food & Coffee Co — Restaurant in Fair Lawn

Nice restaurant with a lot of options for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. The Fairlawn location just opened. It is a different dining experience in that you have to use your phone to look at the menu. Environment is really nice, seating is comfortable, but the different Bite locations seem to have different ways of ordering. Some require cell phone only, like the Hackensack location, and the Fairlawn location can take your order at the table, but you still have to look at the menu on your phone, which I found a bit annoying. Paper menus and having a large sign with options make it so much easier to see everything without having to click on each item to see what it is and menus aren't expensive. I found the experience annoying, but that's just my opinion. I guess once you get to know the menu, it probably isn't so bad. Anyway, on to the food. I had the Brisket sandwich and the Brisket Bowl through several visits. The Brisket sandwich was excellent, but though it was a bit too salty. I'm surprised that it didn't come with fries or a side though. The Brisket bowl was really cool in that you had a lot of different side options to configure whether you wanted more veggie options or carb options (Potatoes in various states, Quinoa..etc) or a mix of the two. The Brisket tasted the same, but I liked the option of the mix of items in the bowl. My son had a burger and fries, and I thought it was pretty good, but thought it was pretty large; wish they had a smaller burger option for kids. My only complaint is I thought everything was a little expensive. Just me and my son at Lunch came out to a little over $50 with drinks, mostly because I had to add fries after I got just my sandwich, but waitress didn't tell me that. When at the Hackensack location, Two Burgers, a Brisket bowl and a little pizza came out to over $72 with no drinks. This is where the traditional dining experience helps with figuring out what to get and getting answers from a menu that spells everything out. At the Hackensack location, no waitresses come up to you at all, you kind of wander in and find someone at the front to answer your questions. There was a 91 year old woman that came in after me, and luckily, they were able to take her order, because of course, she doesn't have a cell phone.

Now, to sum everything up. All the service people are excellent and very helpful when you ask for help at both locations. The food is very good no matter what you get, but be aware of saltiness of dishes; I'm sure they can modify if you need it. The breakfast options I saw on someone else's table looked pretty amazing. So, my only grief is not having the ability to see everything on the menu in one swoop that you get from a menu and the prices of dishes and the extras they charge for small things. I saw on coffee that adding 1/2 and 1/2 is an extra $2; Can't you just include that in the price? 2 oz or so of 1/2 and 1/2 does not cost $2 even with the profit mark up. All in All...

I’d advise to hire REAL servers and not have baristas doing serving/people who’ve clearly never been servers before. My partner and I came in and there was literally only one table seated and it still took quite a while for anyone to seat us, and the between having a server come to our table to take our drink order, coming back with the TWO drinks (it took 15+ minutes, there was no one even there so it wasn’t due to customers and no — no ordering systems were going off cus you can hear the app notification noise when it does) and then placing our order it was already over a half hour so we needed to order our food to go because it wouldnt have been ready in time for us to leave and pick our son up. We got there with an hour to spend in the cafe, we couldnt even place our food order until after 30 mins of being there. Also the server didn’t understand that I wanted cheese added to my sandwich. She kept saying cheese sauce when I was asking for cheddar cheese to add to my sandwich and then when we got home and opened the order it was literally diced cubes of cheddar cheese in a container which was ridiculous. Your system isn’t working, there is zero sense of urgency or care. It was vastly different from our first visit because our first had been much smoother (which is why we decided to come back but won’t be after this visit) your employees should be more on top of things and you need servers that actually know how to be a server.

The auto 20% is definitely weird on a 2 person table and is another reason we won’t be back because the service didn’t warrant a 20% tip and I’m saying that as someone who’s worked 14+ years in tip based customer service. I always tip, but I tip based on my service and experience and it was lacking.

Fix your system and get better training in place because there’s no reason for someone to have waited that long to be seated, have their drink order placed, get the drinks and get...

I can count on one hand how many reviews I’ve given in my life, but I felt compelled to give one for this place. The food was good and that was the only thing good about this place. The service was awful. Upon arriving on a Monday afternoon, they wanted to put my son and I at this tiny table, literally with no room and I requested a booth given the fact that it was a Monday and it wasn’t busy. They were OK with it but not happy about it. After waiting for 20 minutes to take our order I was approached with a “HiWhat can I get you?“ Not even a “hi welcome to bite… Can I get you started with something to drink?“ so zero effort on warmth. I’ve worked in the food and restaurant business and that is the least you could do or say when greeting a table. I was not checked on the entire time and had to ask for a napkins, utensils, etc. you name it. Already in my mind I knew I would probably leave only 15% tip because that was deserving of the service but to my surprise, they included a 20% tip on the receipt anyway which I asked to have removed. Honestly, if the service was good, I wouldn’t have even budged but out of principal. I didn’t feel right leaving that amount. The reason the waitress gave me for the automatic tip was that “people assume that because it’s a café that we don’t need to leave tips“ so because other people are ignorant, we have to suffer and get an automatic charge? Doesn’t make any sense in this place is literally going to go downhill. Also, their cloth napkins smelled like mildew. Definitely that type of place that looks cutesy, but it is not...