Cook's Kitchn — Restaurant in Rahway

We are so disappointed with our experience at Cook's Kitch'n. We've been attempting to try your food for some time now. We didn't make it to your original restaurant and when we tried your Menlo Park location, it was closing. However, we saw your new location and we were instantly excited! To begin, your location does not look open to many. I follow you in IG so, I was aware you were open but colleagues and friends are under the impression you are not open for business. We walked in and instantly, felt cold. Literally, it felt as if the heat was not on. The young lady taking orders was wearing a puffy vest and giggled when I commented how cold the place felt. She was also very short with her answers but perhaps she was saving her energy to stay warm. Very poor demeanor, she just didn't appear she wanted to take orders.

Ok, time to place an order. Your displayed lit boxes of food images are very beautifully photographed, but we want to see a menu. I see enough of your food closeups on your IG and this is why I was there (plus owner is local and we want to support) Where are the food options with prices? Portion sizes? So we proceed to look at your menu on our phones and place our order. Pricey but we dismiss it with the anticipation it will be killer food. I mean, BOW says so, right? So now, we are told it will be 20 minutes but one, it's too cold to stay inside and wait and even if we wanted to wait inside, there is no seating anywhere. We proceed to our car and give it 20 minutes. It was way warmer.

Ok, we take it home to eat. We ordered the ribs over rice with mac & cheese, yams, and crab cakes with fries. The ribs were good but not the best I've had by no means. Don't understand the rice, it felt like a filler. The mac & cheese was ok but tiny portion for two people. Good thing we ordered an extra side of it. The crab cakes were flavorful however, the fries were inedible. A tremendous amount of salt, yikes!

Overall, we will not return to Cook's. I really wanted to like your establishment. The prices for your food are not justified with the quality. I hope these comments are taken into serious consideration. Do better. list your prices so it is visible and make the place more welcoming when we enter through those doors. It goes a long way. Endurance is the name of the game and it takes more than pretty...

I really wanted to like this place. I waited for months for it to open up. I stopped by midweek and was told there would be a soft opening on Sunday. I was so excited. I. I went over there with my daughter and we ordered a considerable amount of things from the menu including the Whiting poboy sandwich, a few lobster rolls, shrimp basketand, Chicken basket and a seafood boil. They were running a special on snow crab leg clusters for 5.99 per cluster. I inquired at the register as to the size of the snow crab claw clusters and was reassured they were not extremely small. There is nowhere to sit inside so you order your food, they take your phone number and you wait out in your car. This was perfectly fine for me especially during a pandemic. Once the food was ready they called my daughter and she went in to retrieve a very large bag. I encouraged her to check everything before we pulled out of the parking lot and everything was fine. So far so good the staff were friendly and professional and everything we ordered was in the bag. When we got home we soon realized that though the presentation was good everything that was fried was oversalted, With the exception of the chicken which had no seasoning at all . The bread when toasted was delicious but when not completely toasted it was very Doey and gooey. My daughter had the shrimp Poboy sandwich and the Whiting contained bones which she was not expecting.. The fried lobster roll was dry and had no type of mixture with it. The regular lobster rolls were pretty decent. The seafood boil did not have one complete crab claw cluster. You know what I mean where there are legs and/or claws missing and they were extremely small. At times I I wondered if I had a full body cluster at all . The corn in the boil was mushy and though you are supposed to be paying for 2 potatoes you actually get one potato sliced in half. I bit into a shrimp that was clearly not fresh and had to spit out a glob of shrimp into a napkin. I asked for a garlic and butter sauce and was told that they had 2 I opted for the creamy version. I did not realize it was loaded with hot sauce so in order to eat my seafood boil I had to rinse everything under water. I know that opening a business can be difficult and I also know that this was a soft opening. I hope the owner reads the reviews and makes the proper...

I firstly want to say that the staff was extremely nice and this review is in no way intended to put them, including the owner, down, it is just an honest account on the food I’d had. This was a few weeks ago, maybe almost a 3 weeks/4 weeks ago.

I ordered the Cajun chicken & shrimp dish which I believe was a take on jambalaya? I apologize as I don’t remember the exact name. I drove from far as I don’t live in the area, I live about 30 minutes away and though that’s true, I like supporting black-owned businesses and high-quality food. I’ve been seeing pics and videos of Cooks Kitchn food since last summer! I’m traveling from Old Bridge.

Unfortunately, as delicious as it looked, it missed the mark. I don’t want to accuse the chef(s) of putting bbq sauce in it but it tasted like one of the main ingredients was bbq sauce. The chicken bits were dry and rubbery tasting, and because meat tends to pick up the flavor of bbq sauce more than anything, you could taste it. The whole platter, which was a great size, had only about 3 pieces of shrimp as well which I found disappointing. It looked a bit different to the image which also had cheese sprinkled on top, the color was darker. It was just not what I thought it would be at all.

To make matters worse, there was a piece of hair in it. I never wanted to call and complain because not only do I not want to deter people from going to this establishment but I also didn’t want to potentially be fussy, or pester a busy restaurant about this. I was very disappointed though. I ordered a drink to go so I paid around $30.

I ended up throwing the meal away post finding the hair in it. I did also order a corn with sauce on it, as delicious as it was, there was barely any sauce.

Once again, I would never suggest that people shouldn’t patron this place because I do believe their staff, establishment and food is overall good. I just amount this down to the food I had being an odd example of their excellence. I am honestly unsure I’ll be going back here personally and that’s really because I am fearful of not having a pleasant experience with the food again (and I’m a foodie lol) but I think it’s worth a...