Robke's Northport — Restaurant in Town of Huntington

Came for Easter dinner that was heavily promoted by them so I'm not sure if tonight was the standard of quality or not but the food was very tasty and I had no complaints. Overall I wouldn't say that anything we ate was top 10, or top 15 for any dish.

They have one bolognese dish in particular that I found it odd to use strogonoff style noodles for but it was a hit with our table of 10 people.

The chicken francese was also quite good, but nothing spectacular at all.

We had the calamari appetizer which was great, but that's hard to mess up, so not really an indicator.

Also had sliced steak, that was just a hair above average, enough that I ate it happily and didn't give it a second thought until writing this review. Didn't need steak sauce, it was tasty and juicy enough by itself.

The salads we ordered- the provolone salad was excellent, though the mushrooms felt and tasted old and soggy like they were grabbed barehanded from their storage container filled with shroom water in a knee-high mini fridge in the kitchen. The caesar salad wasn't good. It wasn't bad at all, but it wasn't good. Maybe add more cheese, some croutons, and somehow have it be less watery?

On the side of the steak were green beans and carrots. They were cooked well and I ate them but they didn't seem crazy fresh to me.

And finally, the ambiance. THIS PLACE IS tiny. I'm not a small guy at all, which made this the american ninja warrior equivalent of getting to my intended seat at the large assortment of round and square tables that had been fashioned into our 10 top. I was seated just on the other side of a beam that I had to kind of awkwardly side-step, not near a wall or anything just right next to our table, and when seated my chair back was exactly 3 inches from the person behind me. Anyone getting up to go to the bathroom was asking a lot of the people sitting in the way.

The wait staff here were a mixed bag. Our actual server was great and on the money, got the order completely correct and nobody was thirsty for longer than 30 seconds. The runners and setters etc were bizarre. Due to space constraints, they asked for our help in distributing the plates to the hard to reach people trapped by how close the tables are to each other. The only thing is, we had to ask for those plates. The little ones that came with the bread, and the salad plates. I even had one of them stop me when trying to hand him an empty water glass for a refill "I'll come refill yours because we're running out of glasses." And finally, the reaching across your face thing while eating, a huge pet peeve of my wife's and mine as well. Again due to the space, servers and runners are reaching across your face with reckless abandonment. You could be mid bite and someone is leaning over your head making contact to hand something to someone too far to reach. I regularly had things put down right in front of me that were intended for the whole table because it was going to be acrobatic to place it there themselves.

Overall, I won't be back unless I know it's freakin dead slow inside, and even then, I might rethink it because they don't accept cards. There's an ATM as soon as you walk in however, which doubles as a buzz kill when expecting to walk into a high price for food and ambiance place like this.

Recommendation: Somehow figure out how to expand or move or buy an adjacent lot and get bigger. The food has serious potential, but the size of this place affects everything within sight, and probably the stuff behind the scenes too. ...

PROS • Large portions • $14.95 lunch specials • Good variety of menu and specials • Relatively speedy kitchen

CONS • Exterior not marked as Robke’s • Insufficient parking • Bad service (our server; other waiters served other tables well) • Bread: flavorless, hard, burned • Fried Mozzarella: greasy, overdone, bland • Alla Vodka Sauce: watery, cold, under-seasoned • Inconsistent quality of entrees • Cash only • Evening pricing expensive for what it is

We tried this restaurant based on recommendations from an online dining group. We came at lunch, early, on Saturday, 02/01/2020. The building is not marked as Robke’s. Parking was a challenge even though the restaurant was less than half-full. We were seated with an older, tall waiter who was clearly unmotivated. Menus were presented and he seemed genuinely annoyed when we asked if items not priced were part of the attractive $14.95 lunch specials. We would have been better off to have dropped the menus on the table and left.

Bread presented as the opener was practically inedible; it was sliced, thrown into a hot oven and allowed to sit on the rack long enough that it was burned around the edges, darkly grill-marked, and dried hard. A good server would have never presented it. There was virtually no flavor (F).

Fried fresh mozzarella, which had been recommended by the online dining group, with alla vodka sauce as a side instead of marinara, arrived darkly browned and swimming in oil. The sauce was runny, bland and served nearly cold; completely unappetizing. The mozzarella itself was bland and undersalted. We barely finished one of the two pieces (D-). The waiter boxed and bagged the remaining slice immediately and brusquely returned it to our very small two-top, where it sat in the way for the balance of the meal. Rude.

When the entrees arrived, the filet of sole Francaise was a very large portion, a good deal for the $14.95 price. It was buttery and lemony, but not adequately salted (B+). While salt was on the table, pepper was not; peppermills were clearly placed in a central location in the dining room but never offered. My dining companion’s Salmon Piccata was not quite as generous a portion, but very well cooked with a lovely braise on the surface; but the sauce was caper-heavy, not accenting, but making it too tart, spoiling an otherwise good piece of fish (C-). I asked for a refill of my ice water early on in the meal but it wasn’t served and I eventually had to ask a different server for it ten minutes later.

The passive-aggressive service was as much a contributor to our dissatisfaction as the average food. Clearly, the other waitstaff were engaging other patrons and were happy to be working there. Ours was as sour as the capers in the piccata sauce. Why does a place like this keep a server with zero personality?

Reviewing pricing for the evening dishes on the chalkboard in the dining room, we both remarked that we would never pay that price for the food we had just eaten. And just a note, don’t come without cash to pay for your meal, because they don’t accept anything but cash. While not a deal-breaker, it’s an inconvenience that you should be aware of.

There are so many places on Long Island to enjoy truly excellent Italian food…we give Robke’s a D, and at a 40-minute drive from our home, we have no reason to ever return. The food didn’t wow us, and our server, while not consistent with other waitstaff, brought the thumbs down on...

Let me start this off by saying Robke’s was highly recommended by my wedding venue for a rehearsal dinner location so I had high expectations and was ready to book.

We walked in and were seated with no problems. We ordered our appetizers and entrees, again, with no issues. However, at one point the chef came out to I guess look at who’s ordering “all this food” because as he was walking by all we hear is “wow good appetite” under his breath so we wouldn’t hear it but of course we do which just rubs us the wrong way. Which, by the way, I don’t think 2 appetizers, an entree each and a side of broccoli rabe to share between 2 people deciding whether or not to spend thousands of dollars there for a rehearsal dinner, isn’t a lot of food.

The food came out and it was delicious so I put the chef’s comment to the side and asked the waiter if I could speak to the manager to talk about booking our rehearsal dinner. The manager Joe came over and he put our names in the book and I told him my date and that we would have 30 people (he told me it would be $58 pp which would come out to about $2000 after tax and tip).

So everything else goes great until the bill comes. The waiter drops it off and my mom puts her card down and runs to the restroom while I wait for the waiter to come back. I try giving him the card which is when he finally proceeds to tell me they only take cash or check. That would be fine (I understand not wanting to pay the credit card fees) however, had we known this we wouldn’t have stayed to eat since we only had about $30 in cash between the two of us. Thankfully, I had my checkbook in the car so I ran out to grab it and when I came back my mom had told me to order another dish for my sister to take home so I called the busboy over to ask for the waiter. I assumed the waiter would come over but never did. The manager finally walked by and asked if we wanted to order something else so I said yes and he asked for a second so he can drop something off at the other table. Again, I said of course no problem. Thing is, he never came back. He passed our table 3 times doing nothing and never asked what we wanted to order so I figured he forgot, again no problem he’s human. I put my hand up to ask him to come over and he looked at me 3 times but looked right away as if to show he didn’t see me. We finally said okay no problem now they’re being a little rude so I wrote the check out and we walked out.

ETA: not only did all this happen but I just got home and took a bite of my leftovers and it’s as salty as the sea!!! They must’ve added a bunch of salt when they packed it up. God only knows why but it definitely was not like this while i was eating at the restaurant. I already knew I was cancelling my rehearsal dinner with them but this just solidified the fact that I will never be going back and telling my wedding venue to never recommend this...