Barley’s Austin Family Restaurant

Awesome service and small town diner feel. Breakfast and lunch are really good. Haven’t had supper here, but I bet it’s good too.

After hearing good things from my wife and family, I decided to give this place a shot.
To start off the environment isn’t the greatest. The ambience is mediocre and the décor is on the older side. The service was a little above average for us (very nice waitress, checked in on us an appropriate amount of times) but it was also not a busy time. The menu selection is plentiful with 24 hour breakfast and numerous other options for dinner. They offer several daily specials (I had all you can eat broasted chicken at a very reasonable price) and the prices are very affordable. The food was appealing when it arrived to our table and was quite good. There are definitely some things that they could do to overall provide a better experience for their customers but what they got is a good start. Overall I’d recommend giving this place a shot and it’ll probably be somewhat of a regular stop for us.

We recently ate at Barley’s for the first time. We may try it again for lunch or dinner (or dessert) but breakfast was pretty much a bust.
Despite a great location with lots of windows, the interior atmosphere is very bland and has no discernible theme, motif, or inspiration of any kind. Our service was also pretty slow — even though the place wasn’t terribly busy — and one of our orders got mixed up with another table.
I would forgive these first two items if the food was good… but — like the atmosphere and service — it was just mediocre. This is one of those places that seems to think that bigger is better. Each of our breakfast portions was excessively large — no way could you begin to eat the whole thing… but you didn’t want to anyway. The food wasn’t BAD, but it wasn’t GOOD either. Just mediocre.
I think one of problems is that the menu is far too large (over 100 entrees to choose from). They need to focus on doing fewer things better. You sit there wondering how can this food possibly be fresh if there are that many items on the menu? When offered a choice of breads/​toast, I think they had six that day (white, wheat, sourdough, rye, muffin bread, and english muffin). We’d prefer if they focused on giving their pancakes a bit more flavor.
I’ve heard their desserts are good so we will try it again for lunch or dinner and update our review accordingly. But in the meantime, you might consider other local options for breakfast… or plan to share a meal because they are HUGE.
Pro: this place is CHEAP. The amount of food we got for just over $ 20 was almost ridiculous. You definitely get a lot for your money.
But sometimes less is more.