Abomination at the Beach

The Sea Shell

10 South Atlantic Avenue

Beach Haven, NJ 08008

www.seashelllbi.com/ 

Earlier this summer, I had one of the most awful restaurant experiences of my entire life. It was truly abysmal, and I was embarrassed that I had even thought that the restaurant would offer the group of people that I went with a good meal. That restaurant was the Sea Shell Resort and Beach Club in Beach Haven, New Jersey on Long Beach Island.

I went with my girlfriend, my cousin and his wife and a group of their friends that were down visiting. It was a disaster from the moment we walked in the door. It was clear that there was a problem when we walked in and were told there would be a 30 minute wait while there were tons of open tables around the restaurant.

Now I understand that you do not want to overload your servers, especially if you are understaffed, so I gave the restaurant the benefit of the doubt. We walked over to the bar and enjoyed a few beers while we waited. After an hour, we still had not been seated and no one had come to update us on anything, so my cousin walked over to talk to the hostess, and they finally sat us at tables that were open since we got there. After we sat down, we ordered some drinks, which after an unusually long wait, proceeded to be dropped by the waitress onto my cousin and friend’s feet. I understand that it happens sometimes too, but she clearly didn’t know what she was doing because she put half the tray on the table and then pulled the drinks from the side that was sitting on the table, which clearly meant the tray was going to crash down onto the floor. She was clearly embarrassed and probably made our experience worse because she did not want to come back around our table any more after the incident. She was rarely around the table for the rest of the evening.

I looked around while we were waiting for our food, and I was appalled at what I saw. They would not clean off the tables of people that had left unless they needed that table to seat new customers that were coming in. One table was full of dirty dishes the entire time we were eating. Talk about piss-poor service!

We waited entirely too long for our food. After we had ordered, most of us having ordered sandwiches, myself a burger, we waited an additional hour for the food to come out. Not only did we wait far too long for our food, but the food was complete crap. I ordered my burger to come out medium, and it came out far past well done. The same went for someone else that ordered a burger. I took a few bites because I was starving, but I had to stop eating because it was so bad.  

My cousin, who normally does not make a fuss about things like this was pissed and asked to speak to the manager. There was no manager on the premises. But a hostess with an attitude came out to talk to my cousin, and then proceeded to argue with him about what he had complained about. It was completely infuriating to watch her try to prove him wrong, when clearly she should have been doing whatever she could to make us feel better about the awful experience we had just had.

Every aspect of the way this restaurant was run on that particular evening was horrendous. The service was terrible, the food was awful, and the management, or lack there of was atrocious. Stay away from the Sea Shell Restaurant at all costs, trust me. Cheers!