The Barge Restaurant, Bar & Grill

I used to be a fan, but when they reopened this year the food was sub par, the prices were raised and the service was horrible.

The Barge is literally a floating restaurant, with fine dining upstairs and downstairs is the bar and outdoor patio. We chose to sit at the bar, which has A/C, thank God! It was a bit hard to find this place, as there aren't many signs to direct you into the nondescript parking lot and down to the water. If your timing is good, there will be a guy around the lot to drive you up and down the hill to the restaurant so you can make sure those calories stay on your waistline.

The service was smiley and young (think teens on summer break), but they got the job done mostly. I ordered a crab cake sandwich and a sweet tea. The tea was tasty and actually too sweet for my northern tastes, but yummy nonetheless. The crab cake sandwich was okay. It was really... squishy. Everything about the sandwich was so soft, I could have eaten it with a spoon. The flavor was okay, but I doubted the crab cake was made in-house. Oh well.

I can't comment about the "fine dining" but I can see how sitting on the deck in the summer for lunch would be the only thing keeping this place hopping. Its a great view and breezy feel, so maybe just go for happy hour.

This is what you get when you have a beer joint in the bottom of a fine dining establishment. The food is bangin'. I had the turkey caprese wrap with homemade potato chips and the hubs had the cajun black and blue burger. The turkey caprese wrap was surprisingly good, considering tomatoes aren't in season here yet, and mediocre tomatoes can ruin caprese. They were chopped up in the wrap, with some fresh spinach and italian dressing, in addition to the mozzarella, basil and balsamic. The hubs said his burger was the best he's had in a while. It had blue cheese cole slaw on it. Homemade chips were pretty good, too. Get there REALLY early if you want to sit outside on the river. Tables fill up fast. We didn't get there in time, so we ate inside at the bar, but our bartender was really friendly and gave us outstanding service. Thursday night happy hour was $9 buckets of Landshark, which I thought was a really good deal.