Bread House — Restaurant in Manalapan Township

The food here is delicious, especially the bread since it is a bakery. But food alone is not going to make a restaurant successful. All the other problems with service, favoritism, etc. seem to come from what is evidently poor management. I have visited this restaurant with a bunch of friends about a year ago and had an overall great experience, however when I stopped by for lunch recently, I got to observe pretty much everything that could possibly go wrong, go wrong. Understandably, these are COVID times, but it’s actually all the more reason to have it together. Firstly, there was a new waitress and it was her first day on the job. We came in to what looked like a completely empty and uncomfortably quiet restaurant, with only one other couple eating there. As soon as we approached the waitress she asked if I spoke Russian (I did) because she did not speak any English. We ordered and were served our food promptly and then it all went downhill for this new lady. More customers came in to eat and pick up to go orders - the line piled up and quickly 5-6 people were waiting 45 minutes to pick up food they ordered to go. The orders were missing items as what it looked like everyone in the kitchen was scrambling to cook random things and box them up to go. The other customers dining in were served portions of their meal, some waiting 20 minutes to get the rest. Meanwhile the waitress had no idea how to use the POS system and told everyone the credit card machine was down so cash only. At this point we had been finished with our meal for about an hour and were waiting to pay. Having observed this disaster I decided to offer my help with the POS system so that we could pay for our meal with a credit card and leave. I rang the order up myself, printed the receipts and then showed the waitress how to do it. Not sure how big the Georgian and Russian community is in the area, but if this restaurant wants to have other customers, the management really needs to get it together. Again, no one is going to wait for an hour to get a khachapuri, no matter how good it is. What also baffles me is that they use their prime front counter space to display canned goods and drinks instead of using it to display baked goods (since people who come in shop with their eyes). Why are you hiding your best product? Love the food, would be terrified...

One of the worst service experiences we have ever had at a restaurant. We placed a take out order and they told us it would be 2 hours. The food is really good so we were willing to wait.

When we arrived to pick up the food, they told us they no longer has half of the things we ordered. They had not even started our order and now they couldn’t fill our order.

As if this wasn’t enough, we ordered other stuff to replace the things they could not provide and they gave all of it to us cold. Ice cold. The pulled it out of the fridge in plastic containers and gave it to us.

I asked if it was supposed to be served cold and they told me to microwave it when I got home. And for this I had the pleasure of paying full price.

They were unorganized, and to top it off, one of the people in the kitchen was smoking a cigarette right where they were preparing food.

The food is usually quite good. And we know it is a small restaurant so we are more than willing to wait. But two hours after our order, to tell us then that they don’t have what we ordered and replace it with ice cold leftovers from the walk-in fridge is unacceptable.

They seemed uninterested in making it right and it really made me think about whether the usual quality is worth giving them a...

Vegetarian review: This is a beautiful restaurant with fancy upscale coffeehouse decor to it IMO. The bread baking kiln is out in the open and it is very interesting to watch the bread kneaded and baked. The lady server helped us pick and decide our vegetarian options from the menu after which we settled on 3 items. The service at Bread House is superb. The young gentleman who served our table was very attentive and pleasant.

The Pkhaali Trio with the eggplant roll is a cold appetizer which was excellent. The beet and eggplant based items in this selection were very good.

The size of the dishes justifies the average $12 price on the menu.

The next two items were Megruli and mushroom Soko. It is my personal belief that when patrons are ordering at a restaurant, it is the duty of a server to point out when two items are derived from the same base and us will lead to overlapping experiences. Neither of these items were exciting and ended up being way too cheesy.

Lastly the bread here is fantastic however the butter with which it was served felt as though it was without salt and it's quality was not commiserate everything everything else served.

Improvement suggestion: Clearly identify which appetizers are cold...