Alex’s Railside Restaurant

This place is a joke I use to eat there, but never again reason is I heard owner and cooks talk about sex and staff grabbing my wife’s chest and slapping her butt to me that is sexual harassment if it was up to me I would close it down. It was a way better and well mannered place when Alex owned and ran it

I’m routinely disappointed when I get breakfast here. I do not recommend the coffee. Sandwiches/​lunch is decent. Not spectacular but okay. The pie and ice cream are fabulous. The roast beef sandwich is pretty good too, very filling. I’d recommend it for lunch, dinner or dessert, not breakfast.

Waitstaff not very attentive or friendly. Food is just ok. The reason for this rating is halfway through our breakfast my husband found a hair in the middle of his omelette. The waitress didn’t seem too surprised but did say sorry and offered to remake it. By that time we had both lost our appetites… as finding a hair in your food usually does. The owner took $ 3 off our bill. Half of the price of the omelette… I suppose since he ate half? The owner then said ‘The scary thing is I’m not even sure where that came from! Both of my cooks are bald’. This didn’t help matters. Will not be returning here.

Pretty good place to get lunch. They have a buffet table, and a nice staff.

Great food. Good portions for decent prices. Servers are always friendly and down to earth. Family dining experience. Good salad bar. Lots of deserts. We love to go here a few times a month and the waitresses always remember us.

This restaurant is indeed «railside,» or at least rail-​to-​trail-​side; it’s a convenient stop for bikers and hikers using the Rails-​to-​Trails Midland-​Clare route. We will occasionally eat here for breakfast or lunch if we’re o a tight schedule and just need to eat something, but it’s not really a destination dining spot for us.
The food is… okay; basic diner fare. (Although I do have an issue with stuff like putting «walleye» on the menu board, then adding «pollock» in parentheses next to it – come on; we’re in Michigan; most of us can tell the difference between real walleye, which is worth paying some decent dinner money for, and pollock.) The restaurant does have quite an amazing variety of pie for sale on any given day, so dessert lovers might overlook some of the «meh» entrees for this.
We haven’t always had good luck with service/​general ambience here; it’s one of those places, apparently, where if you’re not a local regular all eyes fix on you as you walk into the dining area; and the waitstaff is, shall we say, a little distant. (The last time we visited, we also detected a real difference in the quality of waitstaff attention between tables with only women and tables with only men. I’m aware that in some restaurants it’s the managers, not the waitstaff, who encourage this type of thing because they think men are better tippers, but please be aware that at least some of us notice what’s going on and will call a manager on it if it’s too blatant/​inconveniencing.) We also had an instance where a male employee — maybe the owner? — was a little too «sweetie» and «honey» for our tastes; it was patronizing and unprofessional.