Cellar Sports Bar & Grill — Restaurant in Kearney

Amended review: Called to see if I could place a to go order and the girl that answered the phone couldn't have been more rude if she tried.

Girl: (Answering) "Yeah...?"

Me: "Um, hi. Can I call in a pick up to go order!"

Girl: " You gotta come in to the bar to do that. Thanks." Hangs up

Tone doesn't come across over a text review but to say that her tone was flippant would be paying it a compliment.

I visited shortly after the restaurant's reopening. In a nutshell, the food was good but a bit pricey for the experience. Service fell short with congregating idle staff, and management should step up to avoid repeating past issues.

Atmosphere: Welcomed by friendly hosts, seated promptly. While the restaurant was nice & cool, everything was damp. The bar top, my menu, the beverage napkins (I leaned over to feel the top half) the straw wrappers. More than just a little damp as paper products and paper wrapped products stuck together. Kind of a bit off-putting a bit & the owners/management should seriously consider a couple of dehumidifiers. Especially when you take into account all of the TVs everywhere. It wasn't particularly humid today, so the weather doesn't really account for this.

Bartender was attentive to tickets, not to me, the only guest. I was the only guest at the bar so the bartender was able to greet me promptly. While he was nice & seemed to have a sense of urgency on tickets coming in and keeping stocked, he paid me little to no attention to me as a guest. I'm not talking about the need to make small talk or anything like that. I was the only guest and he didn't ask about my food until there were only two wings left and after being with a near empty beverage for most of my meal I finally asked for a refill. Silent service is one of the best tricks of the trade and if a soft drink is $3, refills should be promptly offered. Especially when sitting up at the bar.

Manager appeared to be present but lacked engagement. It appeared that there was a manager or owner sitting at the corner of the bar. All of the staff seemed to know him and I could hear him speaking with staff about restaurant issues, so I assume he was a manager of some type. Frankly, if you're going to be visible in the front of house for over an hour then you need to visit with some tables, encourage staff that may be lingering in groups to find something to do, etc. While he did talk to one table, it was the table directly behind where he was sitting.

Adequate staff but often congregating, with FOH staff often idle. A drink station was just to my right and most of my visit I had groups of staff just sort of hanging out either beside me or behind me. They weren't in que to use the station. They would just kind of stand there. Also, up at the window from the kitchen you could see folks standing there, looking at sitting food that may not have necessarily belonged to their tables, and instead of running dishes there they would appear to be waiting for their own.

Food: Ordered a soft drink, onion rings, and small portion of boneless wings, food was hot and timely. Portions are small considering the price. I made it a point to order the onion rings with my drink because I wanted to see if they'd come out in a timely manner before my meal of wings. They did. Both orders were promptly delivered and were nice and hot. For the price, I would honestly expect the portions of both to be a larger. While the onion rings are homemade, for the money of both menu items you could buy MUCH more at a grocery store or from Cashway or Sycso (likely where they get their wings anyway) for the same price.

Price: Lunch solo: soft drink, onion rings, small wings = $27 before tip. Pricey for an appetizer and...

It's been 4 years and the last way I described this place was as if old yeller needed to be put down. Well, they finally did, but it looks like some new owners decided to take out the dog from the back yard and put him into the pet cemetery and here we are today.

Because it's back, and it somehow got worse.

I'm going to try to keep this short for all of you though. First, I want to say that the waitress that we had was awesome. I have nothing against her at all, as she was only working with what the place had to give her.

So, let's get down to business. First, they removed the wall to the right side that used to be there to make the floorplan a little more open. Sounds good in theory, but what you're left with now is that it's gone away from its roots of being a place to get a good steak to "Wow this place is absolutely way too loud". As if you thought "Hey I'm going to go to a high school cafeteria to pay $30 for some burgers, onion rings, and a drink."

Which I get the mindset, somewhat. It's supposed to be more themed to be a sports bar, so let's get rid of the good foods, charge super high amounts for all the food, and only serve extremely low tier bar food.

We got two sodas, a side salad, and a 14" pizza today. We waited for about 40 minutes and then our waitress came out with a rack for the pizza and some plates, and we had to tell her we would have to leave soon because we had other things to get back to. She came back just a few minutes later and then told us that the pizza oven was actually down at the moment and our pizza hadn't been made in that time.

We told her we would have to leave as we couldn't wait for the pizza, and she apologized and took the pizza off the bill. She comped us for the side salad and the bill was left with 2 sodas and a basket of onion rings.

The total amount for those two sodas and a basket of onion rings? $19.00 ($3 per drink, $13 for the basket of onion rings)

I've included pictures of the food experience, where you can see that the salad was definitely old and how the onion rings looked awful and tasted pretty bad too. It was if someone breaded them, then deep fried them just for a few seconds, and then barely shook off the grease and let them sit in the kitchen the whole time.

One of my favorite parts was seeing them bring out a "Clothesline" of bacon to a table of two guys. The bacon was basically hanging from some pins on a little line. We were across the room, and I could tell the bacon wasn't cooked properly enough and the kicker is they had someone come to their table with a COOKING TORCH for the bacon.

I don't know if it was to spill bacon grease on whatever was inside that basket, or if it was to cook the bacon longer... But I know that I saw the guys try to eat the bacon after the torch lady left and the guys struggled with cutting the bacon with a fork.

Oh, another thing. All the women that I could see that were serving had a "Lemme get some of that sweet thang" on the back of their black employee shirts. Then the guys from what I could tell were all wearing red employee shirts that said, "Cellar Bar Junke". Do I have to say more about that?

Keep in mind, you can still look up the prices from when they were last open, and a basket of onion rings were listed as following:

"These are why your friends recommend The Cellar! Hand sliced, breaded in a secret blend and cooked to a crisp. Hours of labor go into making these perfect! Served with our housemade ranch dressing. Large 8.99 Small 6.99."

Now you only get one size and they're $13 a basket.

The only thing they got going for them right now is that they're not as bad as Bico's was when it reopened the most recent time, but dang they managed to get pretty...

I wish I could give a better review of this resurrected eating establishment, once my favorite , but I cannot. My first experience was calling in... eager to place a pickup order for the ever famous onion rings and western burger only to discover when I arrived to pick it up that the order was not placed due to inaccurate information about ordering over the phone. I was treated very coldly by almost everyone in the restaurant with only one server kindly offering to place my order right then. I indicated I would come back because they were busy. No one except for that server even bothered to apologize for my inconvenience. In fact, one server rudly barked out "We aren't even taking orders over the phone!" Several weeks later I decided I would call to ask about placing an order to go but no one would answer the phone. I tried several different days to do this. Still wanting to try the onion rings and Western burger I decided to drive to the restaurant and placed my to go order. When I came back to the restaurant to pick it up there were only four or five other people in the restaurant yet no one wanted to wait on me. One lady even made a point to ignore me and fill some drinks for perhaps some other owners sitting at the bar?? rather than even acknowledging that I was waiting. When I checked my order once in the car, I realized that the side salad hadn't been included so had to go back inside for it. Again I felt ignored and had to speak out about the missing salad. One woman, who had watched all of this, did walk by to let me know someone was getting my salad. She was the first person who had even smiled in the three times I had been at the restaurant. The prices are not in line with other restaurants of a similar menu exemplified by a $13 order of onion rings that had exactly 13 rings.... Undercooked to the point that I couldn't even eat them all. The $2 extra side salad was nothing but lettuce with 4-5 small chunks of tomato and perhaps a teaspoon of cheese. The western burger was the best part of the meal but unfortunately not as good as I remembered and certainly not worth the $15 price....yes that was the cost of just the burger since the side salad was extra. For all of these reasons I will not be returning to or recommending...