Cracker Barrel Old Country Store — Restaurant in North Township

Cracker Barrel is one of my favorite restaurants for consistent service, good food and friendly atmosphere, breakfast, lunch and dinner.

This location is terrible, the hostess is not friendly and some of the staff are immature, not customer oriented at all. Age is not an excuse for ignorance. I've been in many establishments where the staff is youthful, friendly, courteous to customers.

We had to greet the hostess, (no other customers were standing around like normal just us) she told us the wait was 15 minutes and we began to look around and when I realized she did not ask us for a name after waking around for 15 minutes only to discover our names where not on the list for a table. I asked her are we on the list, she asked my name, she then said no, do you want your name on the list? also we were told that it would be 15 minutes. So after a half an hour past I begin to inquire how many people before us and we were told 5. The hostess claimed she told us 50 minutes after we requested a manager. At this point we invested so much time waiting I decided to stay, I was starving, but then the hostess started soliciting her fellow coworkers, it was like high school.

I was uncomfortable with staying to eat at this point but the manager convinced us to stay and gave us complimentary teas. She also stated this was not the first complaint regarding this hostess and that she was fed up and will address it at a later time. We already knew this statement to be factual, because while we were waiting we witnessed her treat another party the same way to the point she aggravated them. She even disrespected an elderly lady when she could not understand the time she was quoted, took down her mask and said to the lady 5, 0 minutes. That lady didn't do anything to her, she was just taking it out on her..

So, the manager seats us, gives us the tea and our waiter then asked if we wanted any drinks, other than the drinks the manager gave us, and I quote "TO APPEASE US".

Breakfast was good but we had to wait to long for additional silverware, ice, and butter on my pancakes. Instead he gave me the cold packets of butter, in which he stated. They put butter on her pancakes and not yours. He saw that when he brought my plate out. So...

Truly the experience of a lifetime and a night we will NEVER forget… we are frequent travelers and we were excited to stop at this Cracker Barrel as it’s probably the last one along our route east and it was right across from our hotel. I never thought I would regret ensuring my travel companions that every Cracker Barrel provides a comfortably bland experience, because this was so far from that.

We started noticing some strange behavior from the staff as soon as we walked from the store into the restaurant. Our table for 3 was big enough to seat 6, and was in the corner standing in a pool of water, still sticky. Our waitress was very abrupt, but we tried really, really hard to assume our humors just didn’t click and assume she wasn’t trying to be downright rude, which got harder and harder as the meal went on and our dishes were literally thrown or dropped on the table. We were planning to order a LOT of food for the table - one appetizer, three entrees (one to go), three desserts. When we finished our entrees, the waitress tried to tell us that they didn’t have ANY dessert left - possibly thinking we only wanted the s’mores skillet that she had personally recommended when we sat down. When pressed, they still had two of our three desired dishes so to their apparent horror and our apparent lack of self preservation, we still ordered those.

We found out as we were leaving from another table complaining to the manager that the kitchen staff made them feel extremely unwelcome because they were only very recently sat by the hostess and it was very close to closing time - we know this can’t be the entire story of what’s going on back there because we were sat over an hour before closing and the threatening aura of aggressive sweeping and angry bussing was happening in our section from the get go - but overheating this made the whole dessert debacle make a bit more sense.

If you have never been served Kansas City Sweet Barbecue Sauce with your undercooked beignets and for some unholy reason WANT to have that experience, I simply can’t recommend this location...

Ordered carryout to see what all the hype was about - this ain't it. Maybe dine-in is better, but we paid so much for so little...

I'm not sure if the portions I got were what they're supposed to be, but the volume of the food itself was NOT worth the money. It not only looked so small in the large container it came in, but it was very far from filling.

When I got to my car and checked the bag -not a very far walk from the restaurant- and found the food got tossed around so much due to the empty space in the containers. It looked like they played a game of football with it before handing it to me.

My final and biggest disappointment with this order was the missing items. In addition to the entrees, we had two sides and a dessert but we only got one side with a note on the receipt saying they ran out of the rest. This would have been fine IF anyone at any level of the restaurant would have attempted to make it right before I walked out the door, such as offering a substitute or processing a refund right there. They really looked at the receipt, handed it to me, and just expected me to go home and not get what I paid for.

I did end up getting a refund, but I received a snarky tone as if I was asking for too much. This is a bad business practice to take advantage of people who may not notice these things.

When someone is hungry and willing to spend money at your business, take care of them from the start! It'll make all the difference as to whether or not they come back and give you more business. For me, I'll never order carryout from Cracker Barrel again. Perhaps one day I'll try for dine-in if someone invites me to tag along... at a...