Deer Park Tavern — Restaurant in Newark

TL;DR Extremely impolite and racist staff, with a general manager being the worse among them. Terrible food, and if you're in the military, be ready to be treated terribly.

In my entire life I have never been more disrespected by a business who wants to make any type of profit. I will start off with the food, which I have only had twice as the first time when I got a NY strip, it was overcooked and dry, and the waiter was no help whatsoever, so I basically payed $22 for a piece of beef jerky. Second time I had a Farmhouse burger, but I ordered it with no cheese, when I go and take a bite there was cheese in it, it's no big deal, I tell the waitress and I immediately get the most astounding look of disgust towards me, with a tone that sounded like she wanted to kill me, after I ate my new burger and left, I had a severe food poisoning to the point I had to go to the hospital, so I'm not sure if they served me an old patty out of spite or their food is just that bad. I will also like to add how nasty looking the place was, as if they didn't care about cleaning it from the night before.

I will now turn my attention towards their weekend nights, to which I usually don't think of Deer Park as the first place to go to, the only reason I go is because my friend lives on south main street, so walking I have to pass by it, and we always figure we can going for a second, see if anyone we know is there so we can all go to a more respectable place like Grottos, Finn McCool's, or Klondike Kate's. Walking in you have to go through this guy, as another reviewer puts it better than I do, "He's about 5'9-5'11, blonde hair, blue eyes, stocky.. I'm afraid he may have never developed proper social skills. He finds everyone on social media, and harass them. When you tell him you are not interested, he doesn't give up." Not only is he uncomfortable to talk to, he's also racist and apparently hates military people. I start off with one thing I heard him say to someone, as he takes the IDs of whoever is not over 21, but instead of shredding them like any regular human being should do, he keeps a "collection" at his house, and I'm not sure what he does with the people's information, if he looks them up as well and harasses them, sells them on the black market, looks at the pictures for his own personal pleasure, or whatever other thing he does with them, but that is extremely creepy and uncomfortable.

Not only that he has, in many occasions, been racist to people coming in, calling them and myself included names, in some occasions have heard and seen people being turned away as he calls them some sort of racial name with a smile on his face. He has also denied me entry because he thought my ID was fake, so clearly if he's going to be a bouncer, he needs to get his eyes checked. The one day I just completely lost it with this guy was when he took a look at one person in my group, and just decided to deny access to my entire group, I was dead sober at that point, I had just came out of duty in the Marines and all I wanted to do was have fun with friends, I went off on him and as soon as I mentioned I was a Marine, all he had to say was "so? I could care less about the military or what you all do." I'm sorry, but if you are at all trying to make money, having the first impressions of your place be that bouncer, I'm surprised you guys still have business.

I decided I had enough of it and called the general manager Tim, to put a long story short, he was more racist, more insensitive, and rude than anyone in the entire staff combined, did not listen to a single thing I said and just decided to pretty much flip me off. Now I don't know if just because he had the anonymity of not being face to face that compelled him to be more rude, or if that's just the way he usually is, but considering he's the last line of hope that place had, I do not expect anything other than filth from that place.

If you have any type of respect for yourself or anyone that you ever come in contact with, don't go to Deer Park, there's much better places on...

The only reason I gave the rating I did is because I've been coming to Deer Park for over a decade and love the bartenders. But this past experience was the by far the worst I have experienced at Deer Park. My fiance and I came in for brunch and started off with a Kettle One and OJ and a BYO bloody Mary. I have always loved the BYO bloody mary bar concept and was my first time making one there, great choices. My fiance wasn't that lucky, as he had a bug in his drink. We let our server know and she had it taken it back and brought another one and eventually had them both taken off. Which was nice. We didn't really see our server much, but when we did, it was very quick and seemed like she was more interested in going back to the group of other servers to socialize. The person who ran our food to our table, he was great and made sure we had everything that we needed. As two people who have worked in the food business for 10+ years (me) and 20+years (my fiance), we have learned that mistakes happen and sometimes it isn't worth saying anything, especially when we would have to search for our server to do so. He ordered the Deer Park stuffed burger, medium well. The burger was more on the medium/medium rare side and his french fries were cold and hard. I ordered the breakfast wrap, that according to the menu was scrambled eggs, sausage, two kinds of cheeses, with lettuce/tomato/salsa. When I received the wrap it, half of the wrap was just a huge glob of cheese that I ended out picking out and there was no sausage and just tiny bits of bacon. Which didn't make sense, because bacon wasn't even an option on the menu for that item. I chalked it up to maybe a kitchen error and ate my food. I took a bite of the wrap with some of the salsa that was provided on the plate and had to immediately spit it out. The salsa had a strong taste of alcohol and I knew immediately that the salsa had gone bad. My fiance (who is the kitchen manager at a local restaurant) took one smell of it and confirmed what I had already thought. Once again, there are 30+ years in the business between the two of us so, we just let it be. We can't win all dining experiences. We didn't know where our server was and the manager/supervisor on duty (it was very clear who it was) was too busy socializing with employees. When we finally saw our server, she got us our bill and my finace paid online and left. When we got home, I asked my fiance for the receipt and noticed that I was charged for tomatoes (on the breakfast wrap item) when I didn't ask for tomatoes and it clearly stating the wrap came with tomatoes. And I was charged for bacon, which explains the bacon on the wrap, but was not asked for. I don't know, I used to frequent Deer Park a lot and still come in here and there when I want a a few drinks at a friendly familiar place, but outside of the bartenders, the service has went downhill and clearly the...

Honestly this place was a complete let down. I am unsure if it’s because we came for breakfast, or if it’s because we came for breakfast on a Saturday morning (Their emphasis seems to be Sunday morning breakfast). There was a lot of trash (mainly what looked like Dunkin doughnut cups) in the parking lot right up against the building, making it look very unkept (This should have been our first red flag).

The place was DEAD at 10:00am and I mean DEAD. There was 6 employees standing around the hostess area alone (this was the second red flag and maybe should have been our hint to reconsider). As far as the menu went, very underwhelming as there was just omelette and egg orders with no variety, other then $10 overpriced pancakes.

My fiancé got the 2 eggs of your style meal with tater tots, scrapple, toast and a piece of cantaloupe. The eggs she ordered were scrambled. The eggs were half cold and half hot, when asking the waitress why, she said “It’s the way they sit in the the thing.” Meaning that these eggs are already precooked and cannot even be bothered to be made fresh and that the container they are kept in, is not equally hot. The eggs were also very watery and mushy. The scrapple was ROCK HARD. I’m not even kidding that I tapped it on the plate and was curious what would break first, the plate or the piece of scrapple. On the inside there was nothing, it was just a hardened exoskeleton of meat. The tater tots were wayyyy over cooked and were hard to eat. Now the toast, tell me how a piece of toast can be colored near black, but still be spongy. That doesn’t even make sense, but it’s what we got. The cantaloupe was also cut so near to the skin that a mouse would have had a hard time getting any actual melon.

I ordered the way overpriced pancakes and I will say, the pancakes were quite large. However, they were also overcooked and dried out.

Regarding service, we were one of 4 tables I could see. And every other table had a different waitress, however, after being repulsed by the inedible food, we had to wait 20-25 mins for our waitress to finally come back and ask how we were doing. I’m not kidding when I tell you that we sat there for that long, plates pushed away from us and staring at every single other employee that came relatively near us.

Overall an extremely terrible experience. I don’t leave many reviews, but after seeing this place, I did not want others to waste time or money here. After eating my fiancé and I walked .4 miles to the Walgreens on Main Street and saw 4 other breakfast cafes that were booming with business. What a terrible way to start...