The 88 Restaurant and Lounge

The pictures on here are misleading.  The restaurant is elegant but not in a ritzy way.  The prices are reasonable and the portions are just right.  You enjoy the meal without over eating.  The waitress was helpful in our selection and very attentive. You must try the stinky fries.  They are delicious but not overbearing. I definitely want to stop again when we are going through the area.

I was on vacation and came to dinner here with my friend and her fiance. They heard this restaurant was very good.

I was concerned when our drinks, salad, and appetizer arrived at the same time. My friend's fiance pointed this out and asked that things slow down a bit. The waitress was friendly and ensured we had some time between our appetizer/salads and dinner. The salad was fresh and our hummus appetizer was of high quality. I am very picky about my hummus, and it was excellent.

Our entrees were all beautifully plated and tasted excellent. We shared carrot cake for dessert and was some of the best carrot cake any of us had ever had.

They also have a very nice and reasonable wine list.

I would come back here if I come back to Buckhannon.

Came here one evening very early on a Friday to celebrate our anniversary.  The restuarant was not crowded; there was only one other couple dining when we arrived.  The time was about 4:30 in the evening, well before the dinner crowd.

We were seated immediately.  We ordered our drinks and got them promptly, and the waitress brought out rolls for us, which were delicious and had a great texture.  Unfortunately, the experience went downhill from there.

I ordered a sausage hoagie with fries.  My wife ordered the lasagna. We waited for well over 35 minutes for our food to come out.  This was especially puzzling, since they undoubtedly had the lasagna ready in advance, and the sandwich shouldn't have taken very long to prepare.

In the meantime, my wife got a salad. It was mostly greens with a single cherry tomato and a slice of onion.  The ranch dressing was good, but the salad itself was sparse.

Finally, our food came. First, the lasgana.  It was a very small portion, completely drowned in sauce.  My wife is not a big eater, but she was disappointed with the diminuitive portion size.  And, the amount of sauce was overwhelming.  My wife felt as if the excessive amount of sauce was added simply to make the dish look larger.  

She found the lasagna palatable otherwise.

My sandwich contained sausage, peppers, cheese and sauce on a 6" hard roll.  Instead of slicing the roll in half and making the sandwich traditionally, they attempted to cut the roll down one side and stuff the ingredients in. The cut was approximately 4" long, meaning there was an inch of bread on either end.  Since there wasn't a lot of room for ingredients, the sandwich ended up being mostly bread.

There were fries with the sandwich, but again, the portions were small.

When I bit into the sandwich, it was excessively hot, to the point that I burned my mouth rather painfully.  Since all of the hot ingredients were tucked inside the roll, the sandwich was slow to cool, meaning I had to wait even longer to eat it.  It didn't make sense to me that our order took as long as it did, yet this sandwich was so excessively hot when they brought it out.  Maybe they nuked it right before serving because it got cold during the 35 minutes that we waited.

The sausage in the sandwich didn't seem all that great.  "Cafeteria grade" sums it up.  It was not particularly flavorful, and tasted somewhat "processed".  The cheese, peppers and sauce tasted OK, but the sausage was a letdown.  

All in all, I can't say that I was impressed by the 88 Restaurant.  I would probably eat here one more time in case the first visit was just on a bad night, but if I had a similar experience, I'd probably stay away for good.