Mabank Cafe — Restaurant in Mabank

After reading the good reviews, we decided to give this place a shot. They even had signs within boasting their 2017 readers choice award for best home cooking. We felt pretty confident that this was going to be an enjoyable meal.

This was so not the case. First, I want to start by saying that the service was excellent. Our waitress was an absolute sweetheart. Aside from that though, the rest of our experience was awful. The wait for our food took at least 45 minutes and they were not busy. The waitress was polite in telling us our food would be out in just a few more minutes at least 3 separate times. When our food finally arrived, it was lukewarm at best.

We ordered a catfish basket, steak finger basket, chicken tender special, a breakfast plate with bacon, eggs, and sausage, and a chocolate Belgian waffle breakfast plate.

The fish was really pretty good, however the hush puppies were inedible. They were bland, tough little pieces of fried dough. The fries were even worse. Absolutely soggy and such a weird texture. The coleslaw was decent.

The steak fingers were decent but again, the fries were in a sad state.

The chicken tenders were the worst I've ever seen. They were soggy and not even close to a crisp. The breading fell off, leaving you with a disturbing looking chunk of chicken. The salad bar that came with the meal was OK, nothing special there. We ordered cabbage and fried green beans for the sides and both were below average.

Both of the breakfast meals were OK.

Sadly, my review will not reflect the others. This was not at all an enjoyable experience. The atmosphere was friendly and the service was great but we can't return to a place where you end up leaving with most of the food still...

Worse decaf and caffeinated coffee EVER! BEWARE the coffee is AWFUL 🤮🤮 And they refused to take it back. Even though it was obvious only a sip was taken they still wouldn't remove it from the table. They still charged for it. I even asked to have OJ instead because the coffee was SOOO BAD My husband's regular coffee was TASTELESS as well. He refused refills when normally he has 3 cups. The ppl behind us were making the same comments about the terrible coffee. The ppl across from us said they could not believe the manager would not discount the coffee. That they didn't care for it either.

Regarding service, we arrived at 1045am and were told they were no longer serving breakfast. They were not accepting any breakfast orders. Even though it's says BREAKFAST ALL DAY. Several ppl came in after us and were complaining that they had come just for breakfast. And said the same thing. How can it be, that they advertise all day breakfast. They were not happy. There was a breakfast buffet that we chose. It had what looked like "carton "scrambled eggs, a few biscuits gravy, one burnt pancake sausage patties, sausage link, bacon, potatoes and make it yourself waffles. We were told when we arrived to seat ourselves but all the empty tables were dirty. We cleaned off our own table. The floor was full of food crumbs. It was rather gross. We waited 10 minutes for a waitress to ask us for a drink order. Our waitress was kind. But the service was slow at best. The atmosphere was indifferent. Don't know if we would go back or even if we would...

My wife and I ate here for the first time 11/9/18 for our 5 year anniversary. I had the all-u-can-eat catfish with mashed potatoes and collard greens. My wife ate the chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and fries. I will give credit where credit is due...Our food was great. No complaints there. However, we were highly dissatisfied with the service. Our waitress took our order a brought us our drinks but never returned to check on us. She did not refill our drinks or bring me more fish. The owner brought our food to the table...not our server. On top of that, we had to get the attention of the other servers and even the busser in order to get service. My wife got so frustrated that she got up and walked out. I stayed an extra minute to at least finish my plate and just as I was about to leave myself, our original server finally decided to come over to us. By then, it was already too late. It wasn't exactly swamped in there either. There were other customers who appeared to be being taken care of without issues. My wife and I were disappointed. As I said, the food was great and that's the only reason I gave it two stars instead of just one. This could have been a much better review had our service...