Runway Restaurant & Lounge

Dirty tables/​floor, mediocre food, and terrible overpriced drinks. Ordered shots of goose that tasted extremely off and later found out from a former employee that they were not goose at all but svedka mixed with Schnapps. I heard the place got shut down recently and was extremely please to hear it.

I’m in Westfield, Massachusetts for several days of business meetings, and I finally had the opportunity to visit the Runway Restaurant for lunch. The Runway sits right on the airport property for Barnes Municipal Airport, and during my lunch I saw a lot of private jets and smaller prop planes flying in and out of the area. The restaurant is located in the brick terminal building on the right as you pull into the airport property. The have a private deck as well as floor-​to-​ceiling windows overlooking the airfield.
Today was overcast, so I really didn’t get the full effect of the Berkshire Mountains in the background but I know that the setting for this restaurant is gorgeous. I did enjoy watching the guys practicing their touch n go’s, and liked seeing the Barnes Air National Guard taking off in formation over the downtown area.
For my lunch I had Maryland-​style crab cakes served with spicy remaloude sauce, as well as a classic Greek salad with fresh assorted greens, Kalamata olives, Feta cheese, & pepperoncinis. A very nice meal in a terrific setting.

Good for lunch and basic breakfast. Dinner can be a challenge. I’ve eaten here countless times and I love the ambience. It’s relatively new and modern and clean. The deck on a summer afternoon or evening offers beautiful big sky views and green hills. Breakfast is great and lunch generally is too, but dinner, while always tasty can be a circus. Unfortunately, I believe the root cause is the menu selection for the size of their kitchen. The menu is relatively large but the kitchen is tiny and usually there is but one cook. So orders are slow to come out and people in your party will get served separately. It’s a popular place with roughly 20 tables so on a nice night it will be busy. Don’t come hungry because you will get hungry waiting on a night like that. I’d like to see this spot do better. My suggestion would be to drop the «Italian» menu and go with faster preparing deluxe burgers, pizza tacos and whatever else you can turn out faster with high quality. But if you stick with the current menu, reduce portion sizes a bit. My last meal was family sized. Literally three half breasts in chicken Marsala! Huge waste and cost. I love the location, recommend it for breakfast and lunch, but will avoid it on an evening with nice weather because of service and speed issues.

We went here after buying ½ off Pioneer Valley Deals (a service like groupon). We paid 25 for the 50 dollar voucher. The first time they gave us a hard time because it was Valentine’s Day and they claimed that since it was a holiday, that our voucher was invalid. The voucher did not specify any such a stipulation. It just said Monday-​Thursday. After some debate with the very rude manager, he told us begrudgingly that we could use it. The food was pretty good. I would recommend the wings and the butternut squash as a side.
We had bought two so we came back with the second deal. They were having a trivia night, but it wasn’t so bad, we played along with a trial sheet just for fun with our meal. My steak was a bit tough and a chewy, but I didn’t mind. When we gave the voucher at the end to pay the bill and my card to pay the tip, the waitress came over confused and said that the voucher merely meant that we get half off the meal. This wasn’t true, obviously, as we had already paid 25 dollars for the voucher. After explaining that, she went back and struggled for another twenty minutes. She came back to say that it was only taking 40 dollars off and that we needed to buy something else to bring the total higher. I asked if she could just arbitrarily add something for 2 dollars to bring the bill to the 50 before tax. She insisted we buy dessert. So we bought a 5 dollar dessert just to make the bill go to that. She went back to try to use the voucher, coming back to say that it was only taking off 44 dollars. I wished that I had just brought cash so we could leave the ten dollars for tip with the voucher so we were not trapped there for 40 minutes, but unfortunately, I did not apprehend such complications. Finally they came back over, and we said, «We really need to leave. If you guys do not know how to accept a voucher that you created, that is an inside issue.» The woman relented and gave me back my card, took off the apple pie, and said we could leave. I left a dollar in change because that was all I had. I felt bad for the waitress, but I had given her my card for 40 minutes, like I said, and they couldn’t figure out how to do anything.
Once we got home, we got a message from The Runway (they must’ve gotten the number from the information on Pioneer Valley Deals) saying that we owed them money. After embarrassing us at the restaurant twice with these things, they have the audacity to call us at our home to tell us we owe them ten dollars? Ten dollars that I was trying to pay but they couldn’t figure out? I thought this was incredibly rude and made the entire experience not worth it. The management is stingy with terrible customer service. Runway, don’t create a deal and then not honor it.

Pretty good grub, nice specials awesome if you’re flying outta Barrnes Aiport

The Runway Restaurant came highly recommended to me from a few other pilots who I know. I finally got a chance to fly into Barnes, which gave me the opportunity to try this place out. I was very pleased!
Everything about the flight into Barnes was perfect. I’ll write a separate review for the other stuff. I parked at AirFlyte Executive Terminal (which is just off to the left from the main terminal), which was convenient because the restaurant is just down the hallway from them.
According to the kid at AirFlyte, I timed my arrival perfect because I missed an apparent onslaught of patrons at the restaurant. It was apparently packed all morning into the early afternoon. I arrived for a late lunch and it was pretty quiet when I got there.
The menu offers a pretty decent selection of stuff, from grinders to burgers to appetizers. I ended up just ordering a meatball grinder, which came with potato chips. Service was very friendly and attentive. The kitchen was quick too. When the sandwich came out it was pretty big and there were a ton of potato chips, so it was well worth the $ 7.50 or so that it cost. All together with soda and tax, it came to just a little over $ 9. Not bad for a good meal.
My only complaint is that the table seemed a little dirty, but knowing that they had just faced a blitzkrieg of pilots, I was OK with it. It wasn’t so bad anyway, and they were working on cleaning up tables throughout my time there.
I’m definitely going to eat here again.

I flew in to Westfield from long Island on a solo flight on Sunday in july 2011 and had breakfast at the Runway restaurant. service was great and friendly staff were very helpful. Breakfast was great with a lot of selections on the menu. Bright spacious diner with a good view of the Runway so you can see and rate your fellow pilots approach and landings. Will definitely fly in here to westfield again for breakfast or maybe lunch next time. If your a pilot its an easy airport to get to with bradley approach very helpful, friendly and helpful air traffic control and the FBO is quick to attend if your in need of fuel. All in all, great place to fly to and eat at .
happy flying and happy dining.

Descent food, limited menu. Not bad for a small airport based café.

This is very cute hidden treasure if Westfield. The drive to get there is pretty beautiful (depending where you’re coming from lol). The restaurant actually looks out over Barnes Airport, so you can watch small, private plans land and take off while you’re eating, with the Holyoke mountain range as the backdrop. Rumor has it the Cosby’s and Mariah Carey all have small planes here. I guess Mariah has a house in the Berkshires.
Anyway, the food is very breakfast/​lunch café style, and is homemade in terms of soups, salad dressings, recipes etc. The prices are great, and what a fun view while you’re eating!
I hear they have an amazing patio too!

Top restaurant in western mass! I am astonished to see any kind of bad reviews on this place. Had dinner here on a saturday night this past summer with my husband and another couple. I had lobster and my husband had chicken parm. Both were excellent. HUGE portions, and cheap prices. My friends, one had the NY Sizzler on special. EXCELLENT. My other friend had Shrimp Scampi, also excellent. We also started off with a couple appetizers, the Artichoke-​a-​la Lexi was excellent. It was like an artichoke franceise. Service was good. The view from the deck of the runway is amazing. There was also live entertainment! Great time, great food!

I have eaten here 3 times, once for lunch which was overall pleasant, twice for dinner both experiences were disastrous! The first time they brought out our appetizers at different times then they brought out the wrong appetizer and had to make a new one. Our enterees also came out at various times, most of them cold and one was inedible so my friend sent it back, she was so frustrated and disgusted at that point she declined their offer to make something else for her. We gave them another chance this summer however it only got worse. AGAIN they managed to input our appetizer order incorrectly so we had to wait and received our appetizers at different times. When our entrees
finally came out and they served chicken Picatta on one plate with a side of pasta with red sauce, when we explained that the piccata was supposed to be on top of plain pasta they took it away and then brought it back mixed together in a much smaller portion. Meanwhile we had not recieved our salads, when we mentioned this to the waitress she said «thats my bad» and then returend with wet lettuce drenched with way too much dressing, disgusting! The pasta with clams tasted good but was drenched in butter and made me very sick. When we got our bill they had indeed charged us for the incorrect more expensive appetizer at this point we didn’t even care, we just asked them to split the bill between 2 credit cards. That night they called us after 11PM asking us for our credit card number because their computers crashed. Sure enough they charged both credit cards the full amount. The transaction posted to our accounts on Tuesday they did not compensate us until Thursday and I had to go there to get the cash.
Yes the deck has a nice atmosphere, other then that I have nothing good to say about this place, they need to get their act together.

This must have been an April Fool’s joke. This was the absolute worst restaurant experience we have ever had. We waited for one hour before we got our meals. The broiled fish platter was soaking in butter and cold. The baked potato was partially cooked and the vegetables were cold. The chicken parmesan was raw! (not even partially cooked… when cut into, the meat was red) We called the manager over and he said they were very busy with the upper deck. I’m still sick to my stomach thinking about the food that we were served. We left hungry because we could not eat our meal. We took one bite and refused to pay.

Had dinner with my girl and friends out on the deck at the Runway. It was a gorgeous night out, and was packed to capacity, which was kind of surprising for a Thursday night. A live band was peppy, solid, and fun. Our beers were delayed as they switched over to a new keg. My friend’s Chicken Française was disappointing, but I enjoyed my New England pot roast. Overall the food was average, but if it’s a nice night out, and you want to do something different, it’s a fantastic spot with great views of the surrounding hills, and of course the small planes taking off and landing. It may be an even better spot for lunch than for dinner.