Station Bistro & KTV — Attraction in Malden

I'm rating this place 2 stars because the clerk was very helpful and flexible in finding us a room on a busy Saturday night and their sound equipment was excellent. Otherwise my experience with this venue was not very positive.

I can't speak to the food at all, as we had already eaten when we got there. It looks like it's all overpriced bar snacks and prepackaged ramen. The drinks were also insanely overpriced.

The real problem with this place, however, is the song selection. We were initially going to take two hours, but our group of 6 struggled to find enough songs that we wanted to sing for even one hour, so we decided not to. To be fair, it seemed like they had a lot of recent hits, but we're a group who normally sing a bit more classic rock, and we were pretty much out of luck. We kept inputting artists and either finding nothing or finding one or two songs, and sometimes incredibly obscure ones.

Everyone's mileage may vary, but this was not a great experience for us. We just came back from doing karaoke multiple times in Japan, and I know it's not a fair comparison, but when I can find ten times the selection of English songs in Japan as I can in a karaoke spot in the U.S.,...

Overall a good experience and had fun. You get what you pay for.

Pros: Cheaper than other private room karaoke in the area, especially if you go in the early evening. Alcohol prices are cheaper than other karaoke places, and service was fast. You order food/drinks via QR code, which is pretty convenient. Location. Plenty of parking nearby and plenty of restaurants to eat at before karaoke. Staff leaves you alone. They weren't rushing us out of our rooms and pretty much just let us be.

Cons: Rooms get very warm, even with the AC turned on. Multiple rooms were opening their doors periodically to let some air in. Song catalogue leaves something to be desired. Has the big hits from 90/00's and has some recent-ish hits. Plenty to sing, but don't expect to be able to find any song you can think of. No free water/pitchers of water. I'm always kinda skeptical when a place doesn't automatically give you a copy of the itemized receipt. They let me look at it to confirm all charges were valid but didn't let me take it, and only gave me a receipt with the final total on it. Took a photo of the itemized receipt...

The way things are run needs major improvements. NO WATER IS PROVIDED. You will be charged for bringing outside food/drinks. You are also automatically charged an 18% service fee, even if you don't order anything.

Additionally, my group was also overcharged for an extra 30mins even though we left our room 5 mins after our hour was up. We were not checked out immediately due to a larger group in front of us trying to split a bill 12 ways, so we had to wait 10mins before we could actually pay. The clerk blamed it on a computer/timestamp issue.

It would have been nice if there was someone to let you know when time is up, and at least given us access to tap water with a pitcher and cups. I'd be fine with the service charge if it was that way, but nobody even came to check in.

Searching for songs is also very difficult, even if you have multilingual people (KR/CN/JP/etc) in your group.

I actually got so thirsty and my throat was so dry that I resorted to drinking water from the...