The Barn Restaurant & Tavern — Restaurant in Pawlet

I went to this restaurant about 3 weeks ago. I went with my Brother and Sister in law. It was a late celebration for my Birthday. We were so looking forward to this special dinner! First, parking was horrendous. A tiny lot for so many guests. My sister in law and I got out near the door to check in. My Brother had to park on a steep hill. The lot itself was not lit well. Not the best. We went inside and we had to wait for someone to actually see us standing there. Another party arrived at the same time and they were also waiting. Finally seated, we ordered our drinks. Just soda and a lemonade. We then placed our orders. Now, when we got there it was busy but not packed busy. We received our bread. Time went by. Nothing. No check ins by our waitress. We were also seated near the kitchen door and the macro system for the wait staff. So it’s not like we were in a corner. An hour goes by, finally my brother and his wife get their French onion soup. It smelled amazing!! Their bowls were cleared and we expected to eat shortly after that. But, we had to wait another full hour. My sister in law had to ask a different waitress for more drinks. Our waitress didn’t even acknowledge us at this point. Finally, we caught her before she moved onto a different table and asked the status of our meals. She checked with the kitchen and said our order is next. This is after other parties that came in after us already had their entrees!! Finally our food arrived. My brothers steak was luke warm. My sister in law and I ordered the shrimp scampi. Mine was cold. It didn’t even taste like scampi. We ate because we were starving. Overall this dining experience was terrible for the amount they charged for the dinner, we expected something top notch. Now, we all work in the service industry, we all know about the shortage of staff, but this was really inexcusable!! We didn’t even get an apology from the Manager!! We drove from NYS to this restaurant thinking it was going to be great, so very disappointed! If you are seriously thinking about going here, it’s not worth it. Your hard earned money can be spent at another better...

Sent this to the barn email a week ago with ZERO RESPONSE???!!! I am a person that grew up in the area and still have a lot of family in the area. We often come back to the area and will be moving back full time soon. We ate their last night (sat2-21) and I was truly stunned by the experience. We know mark (old owner) and was glad to see when he was able to sell the location to you guys and move on. I assumed that the quality and experience would be very consistent since you have been there for some time. We had 6 people Sat upstairs even though we generally like to be downstairs. Here is a Run down of the night. No one to greet and seat us. It looked like there were basically 2 servers upstairs. The one girl just walked by us without even acknowledging that we were standing there. Probably took 7minutes or so to be greeted and seated. Seemed longer when you are ignored. We were there early so the room was not at all busy. Drinks- first round took too 35 minutes to get (bad start- we like to drink). Salads then came maybe 50 minutes into being sat. Entrees were very very long. We mainly had steaks 5 of the 6 items. ALL cooked to med well. Very dry. All were ordered from rare to med rare. No one ever came by to ask how the steaks were cooked. We were already 2 hours into the dinner so no one wanted to wait for a recook. Ran totally out of drinks every round with no one asking for a refill. We had to chase down the server to spend more $$$. We eventually did have 3 rounds. The one gentleman paid the entire bill so I didn’t even see the total but it had to be over $600 for all. All steaks, some apps and 3 drinks each. Seems like staffing issues in front and would guess kitchen too. The other issue was there was zero mgt on the floor monitoring or helping with anything. The staff was just doing whatever they wanted with no direction. We would like to see you do well and support you guys as we did mark for years. Looking forward to a...

Could use more parking, people were parked along the road on the steep hill. Definitely make reservations. I didn’t expect it to be as busy as it was at 5:30pm.

Started with a sweet potato coconut bisque from the specials menu as well as the cheese sampler. The bisque was good, but the cheese sampler stood out. Presented on a barn shaped cutting board, there were dried figs, apple slices, some sort of amazing jelly and crackers along with 4 types of cheese. This sounded a bit pricy to me($12,) but was very good and worth the price.

My husband got a salad and a pasta dish with chicken. He said the salad was fine, there was not much chicken on the main course and the pasta was very al dente(which is fine with him,) flavor was good. I got an angel hair pasta special with sun dried tomatoes and a big ball of soft cheese on the top. My pasta was cooked perfectly. The dish had great seasoning. I also tried their cider on tap: Citizen Cider. Was quite dry, but nice, it grew on me:) Served ice cold in a pint glass. My husband got the draft root beer, quite good.

About half way through our meal, the power went out. There were big storms raging through the area. It was still light enough outside and there were enough windows in the dining area that we weren’t left in absolute darkness. The staff took it in stride and were providing paper credit card receipts and taking credit card info down on paper. It did take longer to pay because of this, but a delay was to be expected under the circumstances. Overall, the price was delightfully lower than I expected($60ish without tip for the 2 of us, considering we got drinks, appetizers and the like.) My dish was the priciest($17).

Service was quite good considering how packed they were and the power outage. The repurposed barn interior is very cool. We would come back when...