Berry's on Main - Norwalk, OH — Restaurant in Norwalk

Building? Fantastic. Staff? Friendly and personable.

$2 upcharge for gluten-free bread? Highway robbery considering it's an upcharge from the brioche I'm already paying for and am not getting. It's even funnier when I'm pretty sure their burgers all have gluten from other sources, anyway.

Instead, I got the chicken burrito bowl. We're talking the white man's idea of mexican food. The chicken was excellent, a big, sliced-up slab of well-charred protein that took up most of the bowl, and the various toppings, sauces, veggies, and other bits were good.

But the rice.

Yes, I know mexican restaurants generally have bad rice, but this shit made that bad mexican rice look good. It was rice so white that corporate America declared it fit for putting in a bag and being sold as instant rice. It was the sort of rice a little old lady buys when the only rice she makes is once a year for rice pudding, the sort that cooks up with that cheap, half-cooked-before-you-put-it-in-the-water chalky starch between the grains.

THAT rice.

To make matters worse, THAT rice didn't so much as have a shake of salt or pepper in it. It was plain rice, to act as filler and filler alone, as though we were so north of the border that Berry's went over to Chipotle and wrote down what they saw.

But we're talking the white man's version of a rice bowl, so the idea of the rice needing to have its own flavor is... honestly somewhat irrelevant. Between the birria sauce- fatty and oily tasting- the sour cream, and the juice from the chicken, about half of that rice soaked up the flavor just fine. Were there less rice, it would have worked fine.

Alas, the rice was as populous as a city block in Jersey.

Considering the only good eats I've found in Norwalk so far are the pizza joints, this place is good enough for a return visit. Ready yourselves. I'll be wanting to go off the menu and request the chicken burrito bowl on fries instead of rice. You guys know how to...

Edited to Add: The response to this review shows the lack of reading comprehension. A lot of this was directed towards the previous iteration of Berry's, and the current owners still take offense to it. Incredibly thin skin, on top of everything else.

Several years ago, my father had to be hospitalized because of the previous owners giving him cottage cheese tainted with Salmonella. I'm not implying that that was the fault of the current establishment, but given the way the owner reacts to a review based on actual experiences of the current staff, I think I'll be going to other establishments in town that actually treat their customers with dignity.

Re-opened after closing due to a combination of gross mismanagement and the pandemic, and somehow, it's still bad.

None of the people they have hired seemingly have any experience in food service. Like, there are twenty different restaurants in town, at least, and more than half are local; that tells me that the owners don't want to bother paying a competitive rate. The wait staff are a bunch of kids who probably don't know they're being exploited by the owners and the crowd of baby boomers who come in expecting the restaurant to be the same as it was before it closed. Kitchen staff seems to be better at their job than the previous iteration of Berry's, but the food comes out in waves rather than all at once if you're dining in a group of more than three.

They also took down the majority of the historical 'kistch' when they re-opened, which was the main reason I went in there, because frankly, between cold and tasteless food and it taking half an hour for us to be served drinks, on top of multiple incidents of food poisoning under the previous owners, it wasn't worth going...

This historic restaurant has many new updates.

It had a very nice and relaxing atmosphere

You might want to make a reservation to be able to get seated in a timely manner

Once seated it took a long time just to get the drink order

And once we did order our food there was a very long wait to receive our meal

Kind of disappointed that the dinner did not include a type of bread or roll or salad

The meal came with two sides

No alcohol was available for this high-end upscale dinner which was also kind of disappointing

Are server was very young but very pleasant and patient

The server ended up being the owner's daughter

She did a very good job doing her best to answer all of our questions in trying to meet our needs

She was a very pleasant girl

We also had the opportunity to meet and Converse with the owner

And she had stated that they are in the works of trying to establish an alcohol permit so that they could serve alcohol with meals and also open up the dinky as well

The food was excellent 💯 The food tasted very good 😊 Portion size was minimal and the price for the meals were on the high end but the quality of the food was very good 😊

I recommend this restaurant for anyone who wants a very nice dinner in a very nice atmosphere for...