Vince Lombardi Service Area

The Vince Lombardi rest stop is a worthwhile stop to refuel your car and stomach. The space is always clean. The attendees are very responsive. With a large selection of eateries, you’ll have the fuel you need for the rest of your journey :)

Worst service plaza ever! Would rate –10 stars if I could! Horrible food, horrible customer service, dirty as hell…

A lot of great options and it seemed very clean. Perfect place to stop for some food and relax during a long road trip.

It’s a service area in New Jersey, and that should be enough for you to go on. All of them, including this one, are operated by HMSHost. They have a government contract, and it definitely shows… HMSHost clearly doesn’t care much about customer service, nor do they care very much about their employees. They really don’t have much incentive to be good, because they have all of NJ’s service areas, and the NJ Turnpike has no exit guides. If you have been to a bad college dining hall recently, this will definitely be a familiar experience.
At this particular rest area, the restaurants are always understaffed, and the employees always seem miserable. Cleanliness is average, and food quality can be dodgy (it’ll definitely be at least a rung below the food you’re used to getting from the restaurant you go to).
The Connecticut service areas put this and the other NJ service areas to shame, both in variety and in quality of food/​service.

This station is well placed and well maintained. If not for VL I’d have to fill up on New York gas prices on my trip north. There’s ample parking space despite the hectic location and high traffic even in the rest area. Great place to have lunch since you’ve got half a dozen choices too.

Came in to use the bathrooms it was clean and decent. But have a selection of places to grab something to eat knowing you will be in traffic going back to NY
Gas prices were wonderful although i did not need gas to fill up.

Good: Both directions end up at the same rest stop. So if you need to turn around, you can do it. Well-​designed in that respect. This is north of the toll area.
Burger King, Cinnabon, Starbucks, etc. Lots of choices and reasonable parking. Cleaner than expected for a rest stop that is so active on a Labor Day weekend.

last stop before NYC if your are driving North and first stop after NYC if you are driving toward South and therefore there is a lot of rush because of cheap gas and food compared to the city. This herded place would be always hard to keep clean and decent but they are doing a good job. Bathrooms are usually dirty unless they were just cleaned before you go there.

It’s not newly renovated or clean. it’s just a place to pit and piss. Nothing to see here.

Disgusting. Filthy. Always a line to the ladies room that is covered in filth. The stall I was in had cardboard covered in pee on the floor. Every food place was gross. Even Starbucks had bugs crawling around in the food case. If I didn’t have my 3 year old who needed the bathroom, I would have left.

Hold it! Avoid this rest stop if possible. Very unclean, not sure who’s in charge of running it but they need to give it immediate attention

Awful. Dirty bathrooms despite a cleaning person literally standing with a roll of paper towels watching everyone. Went back later to change my daughter and the paper towels never made it to the dispenser. The automatic dryer was out too.
The line at Popeyes was reasonable (5 deep) so I got in to grab some dinner. I don’t know what was going on but no one was actually doing anything. The staff was just standing waiting for something but there was food cooked. It was odd. 20 minutes later and I wasn’t even next. I finally left and had some hot dog nuggets and called it a day.

you need gas? its got gas. You need to piss? its got bathrooms. You hungry? we got food: Nathans is all you need baby. LOL

I was impressed with how clean this area was. Definitely unexpected.
There are a lot of food options, but they are as overpriced as you would expect.
Just a heads up, some high speed winds can hit you on the way to the service area from the highway. Caught me by surprise.

Not much to say other than it’s a rest stop on the NJTPK. Don’t leave valuables in your vehicle, don’t touch anything in the restroom and you should survive the visit. Also, save your appetite as nothing but grease served here.

I suspect that most rest stop patrons are basing their choice on convenience, rather than quality. So if nobody ever benefits from this review, I would not be surprised.
That being said, I’m bored at the moment and feel that it’s worth a shot to spread the word about this place.
In short, they’re understocked, understaffed, and not a single employee seems to have a shred of capacity to exert any effort or empathy whatsoever. The Popeye’s was mysteriously deserted. The Starbucks was silent. The parking lot, however, was a bustling hotspot of street racing kids with hydraulic suspensions. So. yay for entertainment.
The Burger King did seem to have a full-​ish staff working but had only 2 menu items prepared at any given moment, which sadly was still enough to place them at the top of our options. Employees were gruff and silent, and were seen leaving their sandwiches mid-​preparation to take breaks while customers were waiting.
The bathrooms were about what you’d expect from a rest stop. No baby changing station in the men’s room, but there was of course a «sharp biohazard disposal» available for the convenience of heroin users who are apparently a higher priority than fathers of small children.
The janitors don’t give a F about anyone in their path; while my wife was washing her hands in the bathroom, they mopped right over her foot. But it’s okay since she was wearing flip flops. So they were basically doing her a favor right?
They earned a second star by having lowered expectations to begin with. Congratulations!

The second-​worst service plaza that I had the misfortune of stopping at on the long, traffic-​filled drive from Avalon, NJ to Massachusetts. Depressing and filthy. There was used toilet paper under the toilet. Lines for everything, from the bathrooms to the gas station. It’s right on the NJ side of the GW Bridge, surrounded by eight-​foot-​tall cattails that make you seriously question how safe your car is for the ten minutes that you spend here. Creepy people are abundant. Avoid if at all possible, but if you’re stuck in bridge traffic like we were, you may not have a choice.

The Vince Lombardi service area ought to be the super bowl of rest stops, but I’m afraid it is anything but. I understand that they do a lot of volume, being situated where they are in a high traffic part of NNJ. However, it appears as though those water fountains have not seen cleanser in over a month. Whether or not this observation was true, it was very grody, even by HMS Host standards.
Also, the bare minimal selection of popeyes, burger king, Nathan’s Famous Dogs, and a starbucks had to be the worst line-​up of any rest stop I have seen in this state. There was nothing that made me want to pull over, but since we were there I had a sandwich from starbucks which was just ok but a little bit weak on the sauce and tasted mostly like dry ciabatta bread with lunch meat stuck in between. The sandwich costed $ 7.50, whereas the convenience mart was serving slightly larger ones for $ 9.00, and I felt these were the only tasty food options to satisfy the hunger from an afternoon summer drive. A perfume shop in the lobby was a supreme oddity, seeing as how I can’t understand how anybody who enjoys perfume would actually leave the house without putting too much on to begin with and certainly wouldn’t run out while driving down 95.
Coupled with the fact that this is a popular trucker stop, I’d say avoid this place at all costs. It was barely passable. The most offensive feature of this parking lot while I was there was a skeevy blue minivan with handwritten scrawled into the dust of the windows had staked out illegal parking right in front of the entrance, blaring mexican music out of the car stereo, while the «driver» undulated all over the front seat with his boots sticking out the window, kicking at air to the beat. It was such a disgusting and uncoordinated individual that I couldn’t even find humor in what could have been a funny sight.
The restroom urinals are rated ONE GALLON per flush which is barely good in this day and age for a regular toilet, let alone one that is supposedly designed to conserve water. I wonder how many gallons a year these units have wasted! And, straight out of the 1980s, these potties still had those old fashioned and unsanitary hank cranks instead of the ones that operate automatically using infrared.
Bottom line, I’ll never stop here again except in an emergency. I would much rather keep driving.

Awful. Just awful.
This service plaza is gigantic, and as such you will have to wait for every single service that they offer here.
Need to go to the bathroom? Get in line. Want a coffee? Get in line. Worst of all, if you need gas, be prepared to sit in a 20-​minute line.
It’s frustrating because there are a lot of places to eat here, but I don’t think it’s worth the stress.

Get your cheaper New Jersey gas here before jumping on the GWB and heading into NYC! Last rest stop before the city!
As rest stops go this one is not too bad. It’s clean enough, but on the smaller side. Kind of a winding way around it to get to the gas pumps but it’s full serve. Food choices are the basic fast food Burger King crap. TCBY, Popeye’s, and coffee mart too. Bathrooms to take that last pee before getting back on the road are sufficient enough.
But what the heck is with the stands and kiosks with knock-​off pocketbooks, perfumes, and sunglasses. I think it’s some sort of conspiracy that all these rest stops have these on sale.