Cracker Barrel Old Country Store — Restaurant in Russellville

I honestly don't even know where to start... We were a party of 5 sat at a table for 4. Right in the doorway, I had plenty of rear ends right there at the back of my head. Our waitress, Jennifer, was HORRIBLE. She pushed things around on our table with her tray to make room for it so she could sit it ON our table. We waited for about 30 minutes for drink refills, and was only because we had to ask someone else to get us refills. She wouldn't clear anything off of our table, we had to ask and she was very upset that we even asked. When she came out with food the first time, wasn't even our order. None of it was. We sat for another 45 minutes for food. Ah and then it finally came. With 3 kids they were super happy the food was finally here. We waited for nothing. The food was cold and bland. My youngest ordered breakfast and his bacon was so hard it was painful to eat. Next kid, the Mac n cheese was mush. The noodles were just mush way, WAY overcooked. Oldest kid, (reason we were there. Her bday), got the chicken and dumplings. It was cold and mush, then to top it off, there was PLASTIC in the mashed potatoes. PLASTIC! We let the waitress know and she said "oh" and took a small piece of the plastic to the manager. 10 minutes or so later the manager, Debbie, comes over. Said "well it just happens sometimes with the way we wrap the food" she had zero cares about what had happened. Told us she took it off the ticket and seemed like we were the inconvenience. At this point our food was inedible. There wasn't anything other than the fried apples and the prepackaged applesauce that could be eaten. We decided to cut or losses and just pay and leave. But that would have been too easy. The gentleman working the register was having issues with our ticket. It wasn't ringing up right at all. Would only bring up the chicken and dumplings, ya know the one that dear Debbie took off for us. So he calls for a manager, he was patient and rang up the other items we had got in the store. We waited.... he called for a manager again. Here comes Debbie, she was rude to him. Acted like he was the problem, and physically grabbed the tickets from him. Which, she kept getting the wrong one. Of course it was Tyler's fault, the kid at the register. This was almost 30 minutes since we had been standing at the register just wanting to pay so we could go. Nope, Debbie again, she redid the WHOLE ticket while us and everyone else waited. Tyler was the only person in there that we came across that was decent. We will absolutely NEVER EVER, step foot at this location ever again. This was a horrible experience from the very start, and was beyond disappointing for our kids bday dinner.

Edit-my husband ordered the 3 cheese squash casserole. This didn't even contain squash. He didn't get any squash.... nothing but...

Cracker Barrel: A Gonzo Breakfast Baptism in Americana

By the time the pancakes hit the table, the air was already thick with the scent of syrup and fried hope. Cracker Barrel. A roadside cathedral to a vanishing America, buried somewhere between Interstate existentialism and a Norman Rockwell fever dream. I staggered in half-mad with hunger and nostalgia, looking for breakfast and maybe salvation. I found both.

The waitress floated over in a gingham halo, pouring coffee like it was holy water, and I ordered pancakes like a man possessed. They arrived hot, golden, and unapologetically fat—stacked like a carb-loaded tribute to the gods of comfort. I baptized them in butter and syrup, then commenced the ceremony. Each bite was a defiant slap in the face of kale-eating New Age ascetics. This was food that didn’t care about your cholesterol or your therapist. It just was.

After the last buttery forkful, I stumbled into the country store, disoriented but spiritually awake. The place is a warped museum of Americana—nostalgia weaponized. Moon pies, old metal signs, weirdly aggressive candy sticks that could’ve been props from a 1950s noir film. You don’t browse here. You time travel.

It’s like wandering through your grandmother’s attic if your grandmother was a Depression-era moonshiner with a fondness for peanut brittle and rocking chairs. They’re selling a dream here, wrapped in gingham and dipped in sentimentality—and damned if I didn’t buy a handful of it.

Final analysis: Cracker Barrel isn’t just a restaurant. It’s a greasy-fingered hallucination of simpler times, served with a side of hashbrown casserole and wrapped in porch-front capitalism. And if you’re lucky, you’ll walk out full, dazed, and holding a tin of licorice you don’t remember buying.

God bless pancakes. God...

Our server was lovely, the manager a little less so. We were seated Immediately at 8:15 pm. We Ordered appetizers and those came out in a timely manner, and were really good. However, when we put in the food order it did not arrive until about 9:20. We were very patient and didn't ask about it until a ridiculous amount of time had past. Right after we asked the waitress Brought out our food. The food, however, was not what we wanted. It was lukewarm at best. The steak was not cooked fully and the chicken was rubbery. We debated asking for a manager, but we did not want to pay for something we would not eat, so when we did, she came And we brought our concerns up to her. She assured us that they were busy and had 20 orders back there. Which I Didn't disbelieve, but then she said that the minute our food hit the window it went to our table. I do not believe this to be true because our Food felt cold. Everything was either dry or rubbery. The manager went back to the kitchen and gave us the complimentary golden tickets for the night And then said it was prepared how they normally prepare it and The taste was personal Preference and she didn't like that food either. We didn't expect a free meal out of it. We really wanted the food to be good. But we waited for so long, and the food wasn't up to standard and the interaction with the manager rubbed me the wrong way. We've been here before, no issues before tonight. But we was very...