Barley’s Sports Bar & Lounge

To all of our TPR faithful-

We appreciate your viewership and support VERY much, we truly do. We knew it would happen eventually, but we have to voice our dismay with this Sports Bar & Lounge we went to visit last weekend. Our first negative review? You mean we can be negative? lol

So we as a TPR team went to try Barley’s off of a positive recommendation from someone who made a visit a few weeks prior. All we can say is that we experienced the very antithesis of what was referred to us! But before we run off on the bad, let’s start off with the good: They had live music…… yeah that’s about it.

Barley’s Atlanta…. Where to begin?! When you arrive, it’s $10 to park. You walk inside? It’s $10 cover. Do you want to play pool like we did? It’s $10 an hour for pool and I did say per hour. We are clueless to what happened as the night progressed but when we initially arrived our waitress was pretty good. But as the rest of our group arrived she gradually became short lipped, lazy, and had a bit of an attitude. So we make a firm attempt to ignore all of the negative so far (and the 25 minutes it took to get our food) that when we finally got it, it was average at best lol Still for the sake of positivity we TRY to ignore the $10 cover, $10 parking, and at the moment, $20 worth of pool we had played, the 25 minute wait for the food, AND its extremely par taste ….. and then we get the bill.

This part right here is a small factor to some but in Atlanta it separates a great experience from a horrible experience. Nobody informed us that they don’t split bills. Well there were 8 people in our group and 1 bill and refused to split it. Our very slow waitress (but quick when it was time to collect the money) then came to us and explained that it was their policy. We explained that their policy wasn’t posted and then questioned where the 15% added gratuity came from? Now granted, in a lot of menus at restaurants it speaks of gratuity added automatically to groups larger than  (insert quantity of people), but I can’t remember seeing any that posted 15%. Even if I had, I know for a fact it wasn’t on everything, because this 15% was on EVERYTHING. Food, drinks (which had more ice than flavor), and pool (yes they put the billiard use on our total bill)! I was wondering when our waitress brought our bill why it looked like a tie (referring to its length!) but after reading it, it was pretty clear. The ownership at the place is pretty shoddy and it’s obvious they are used to a particular clientele. We weren’t 40+ but it’s not like we were a rowdy bunch. We played pool and laughed like everyone else in the pool hall. We are still clueless to why as the rest of our party arrived the service of our waitress continually went downward lol

So before you even step foot inside prepare to pay $20 (unless you live close or take a cab), good music, average food, and make sure to read over your receipt CLOSELY. The last insult to injury was that one of our team members didn’t get her license back (you have to leave it with them in order to get a pool table lol) so she checked the website which said hours 12pm-12am on Sunday? She went at 2:30pm  only to see hours posted on the window which state “6pm-12am.”

Like stated in the introduction, we don’t ever look for problems and were really just looking forward to an enjoyable night with live music for one of our members’ birthday. Unfortunately we ran into problem after problem after problem. We did make every attempt to enjoy the night even after the bad food and service, but once we received our bill and their very tacky “policy” was explained to us on gratuity and why it couldn’t be split? We had to let people know lol No matter what area of business you’re in, it’s still a business; Which means a certain level of professionalism is expected and should be displayed at all times. In this case, our waitress said, and I quote “well ma’am it’s our policy I’m sorry it doesn’t fit for you. We changed our policy because we had problems with people walking out on bills and not tipping” and that’s me paraphrasing. Throw in about 5-10 colloquialisms with a smart-aleck overtone and some eye rolling and boom, that was our waitress.

Needless to say WE won’t ever be going back for any reason. If you go we can say this, you’ll enjoy the music more than anything. But even that may be by random chance because others who have reviewed this particular Bar/Lounge stated the live band was subpar at best. So the night that WE went, the band was good 🙂 Now I’m sure if they knew that we did reviews they would’ve sucked up to us like most places do, but this should be a good experience for them. Because our experience was truly a horrible one and almost ruined our team members’ birthday. Owners need to learn instead of penny pinching to suck every dollar you can possibly get, delivering great service and creating a memorable experience can overshadow anything. That in turn will bring more people to your establishment, rendering the need for excessive fees meaningless. Or maybe we live in an imaginary world where we need to solve this by making The Peach Review™ Cafe. Plus we’d serve peach tea 🙂

-TPR

You can also find our review on Urbanspoon