Old Home Place: Located in Knoxville TN

Restaurant Reviewed:

The old home place, located at 1506 Callahan Drive Knoxville TN, specializes in home cooking.

Family Friendly: No

Recommend to others: No

Why?: Bad customer service, food okay, but not worth the price
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My husband and I had been wanting to try the new restaurant, since believe it or not, there are not many down home cooking restaurants in Knoxville as you would suspect there would be.

One bright beautiful afternoon we took our three daughters there to have lunch. Looking at the restaurant from the outside it was adorable, even if the parking lot was a little small. Once inside however, you did not feel at home.

Everyone was starving, so we ordered some cheesy bread, fried zuccini, and mozerella sticks from their appetizer menu. After waiting for half an hour for our cheesy bread and the mozerella sticks we were expecting more than about five pieces of the frozen kind of bread sticks with a little bit of cheese sprinkled on top. The mozerella sticks weren't much better, and only four were served with the appetizer. The zuccini would've been delicious if it had been cooked thouroghly.

We had already ordered or we would've left right then. I would've understood if it took a half hour to get our food out to us if it had been busy in the restaurant, but it wasn't. In fact, there was only one other table that was seated with three people. I believe there is no excuse for our food taking this long, especially when it wasn't cooked all the way and there was hardly anything to cook.

Their menu, although it included 'kids meals' was not kid friendly. About the only thing my kids would eat off of the menu was speghetti or hot dogs. For the price they were charging at the portion they were served was outrageous.

My husband ordered the meatloaf with mashed potatoes. The meatloaf was tasteless, and the mashed potatoes were underseasoned. I on the other hand ordered a shrimp basket. I REALLY wish I hadn't. We had wasted quite a bit of money on that tiny shrimp basket. Let me explain.

To start off with, the shrimp were extremely tiny, there were very little in the basket, and the shrimp they serve are NOT deveined. To those of you who are wondering what deveining is or why it's such a big deal that they didn't devein the shrimp, I will go into more detail just for you.

Deveining is a process where the vein in the back of the shrimp is removed. This is VERY important since this is, I'm going to be blunt, the shrimps' poop chute. So unless you like eating poop, make sure before you order shrimp that you ask if it is deveined. I forgot to ask that day and ended up wasting quite a bit of money.

The only good thing about this visit to the Old Home Place was that we had come in on a day where you got a free desert. I also have to say that the bread they served before we even got appatizers was quite good also. However, the desert and bread did not make up for the horrible service. And I'm sure you'll agree that a few pieces of bread and two slices of pie was not worth our over $50 check that didn't include a tip.

With the service and food that we had recieved from the Old Home Place, I don't expect it to be around for long.