The Beach Bite – Restaurant & Lounge

The Beach Bite is an American restaurant in Rockaway, Oregon – located right on the Oregon Coast.  From the website:  “Fine dining on the Oregon Coast. We specialize in pasta, steak & seafood, fresh salads & soups. Everything is made to order including Our gourmet 1/3 pound burgers.”

“Fine dining” is a bit of a joke, but whatever.  I ordered the “gourmet 1/3 pound burger” with cheese.

The wait was a bit longer than normal, but our server was new and it was during the dinner rush so I didn’t care. The burger looked okay and tasted okay. That’s about all I can recall.

There isn’t a “fine dining” restaurant nearby, and this place is trying to fill that market.  However, I feel like they are just serving sub-par food on fancy plates in a faux-upscale atmosphere at ridiculously inflated prices.  Check out what they brought out to a table of four hungry patrons while we waited for our food to arrive:

LOOK AT IT.  Why would you ever serve this to a table of four people? THAT THING. FOR FOUR PEOPLE. Forget the size for a second – if you can-  and focus on the GLAZE. This thing fucked with my brain – it looked shiny and glazed so I expected it to taste like some sort of sweet honey roll, but it was just plain dry bread.  My mind couldn’t process this and I just felt confused and angry. Again – fuck this place and their tiny glazed buns.

Burger Ratings:

Burger: 5

This burger tastes like every burger I’ve ever eaten at a chain diner (Denny’s, Eat-n-Park, Kings, etc) except double the price.  It was merely “okay” – nothing good or bad about it.

Side: 3

I have mentioned my hatred of potato wedges before – and I will do it again. Steak fries/potato wedges are not french fries and should not be advertised as such. I hate them and I would have ordered a salad if I had know this. Fuck you, Beach Bite.

Environment: 4

The Beach Bite tries really, really hard to feel upscale, but falls miles short.  I feel like this place used to be a dumpy salt water taffy merchant that someone spent a ton of money on renovating into what it is now.  It’s kind of like a giant concrete rectangle with a bunch of brand new furnishings and soft lighting. There is absolutely nothing architecturally interesting going on, similar to a really cheaply-built condo. I’d much rather eat at a dirty hole-in-the-wall establishment compared to awful places like this.

Value: 2

I don’t recall the exact price on the burger – but a cheeseburger, an iceberg lettuce salad adorned with a frozen fish patty, and 2 drinks were somehow $40. Bottom line:  Upscale prices for diner-quality food in a shitty artificial environment. I’ll pass.

162 South Highway 101 Rockaway Beach, OR 97136 // (503)355.2073

Tags: fake french fries, opposite-of-value, rockaway beach, the beach bite, tiny glazed buns

Listed Under: 4 - Almost Average