Mare Oyster Bar — Restaurant in Boston

I literally never write reviews on Yelp or Google maps as I have worked in fine dining restaurants for a few years now.

I just at at Mare and had the worst/weirdest/most uncomfortable service I have ever recieved in my life at an upscale restaurant. We arrived at around 9:40 on a Sunday night. We were seated and given some water. 8 full minutes went by without anyone greeting us or offering us a cocktail. I approached the host to see if possibly we needed to order from the bar. She seemed surprised that no one had helped us yet and we watched her go to two separate servers to ask to take care of us. I waited another 3 full minutes and went to order a drink from the bar myself. As I was ordering, a server had finally come to our table to take my companions drink order(no greeting or introduction.)

When we were placing our food order, I asked our server between 2 dishes which one was his favorite. He responded by reading the descriptions of both dishes off the menu.

Our food arrived in a timely manner and service seemed to be picking up in a more positive manner. That was until another server who was not helping our table decided to stand literally 5 feet away from our table and just stand there.(Please realize we were only 1 of 2 tables in the entire restaurant at that point.) I could understand someone watching over the dining room as a FOH manager or something of the sort, but he was lazily leaning on the chairs of two separate empty tables. He proceeded to just stand there for 10 straight minutes. It was seriously weird and uncomfortable.

At the end of the meal we were ordering dessert and I noticed it was about 10 minutes before they closed. I mentioned it to our server and apologized but he reassured me we were fine to stay. As we were eating our dessert, the entire staff proceeded to stand in a crowd and constantly look over at our table while some of them stared. They then started blowing out the candles on the tables directly surrounding us and somewhat aggressively closing doors the sectioned of parts of the restaurant. At that point I felt so uncomfortable and unwanted I rushed my companion to chug her wine simply because I felt so damn uncomfortable.

The food was good, but the service completely ruined anything positive I could take away from such a place. I could see treating customers like that if we were at a McDonald's and the servers were still in high school, but not a white tablecloth establishment where we dropped $300 on dinner.

Mindboggling, uninformative, unfriendly service. We are both absolutely shocked in the worst way possible. Even if the food was 6 stars out of 5, I would never go back there strictly because of...

My first impression of Mare was fantastic, unfortunately- the service and food quality was not consistent. I was at Mare last week and our server was Adolfo. He was awesome, brought great energy and recommended wonderful dishes. Today, our server ignored our table for a good 20 minutes after we were seated, drinks were given to us half way though our meal and food was trying to be taken away as we were still working on it. They didn’t ask if we were done or still working on it. We had to physically show them that we were still eating our food. I think icing on the cake was when they charged us for things we didn’t even order, and mixing up our order when our meal was being served.

Service and atmosphere are a HUGE importance to the vibe and experience. If you don’t care too much about that, let talk about the food (combined food from both visits).

We got the Surf & Turf, dozen oysters, some clams, truffle arancini and the sautéed mussels & clams. The surf & turf and oysters were great, would recommend getting these! The others- I’d pass.

For entrees , we got the linguine & clams vongole, salmon, and filet mignon. All were ok.. The linguine was dry and wasn’t well seasoned, pasta was chewy. For the filet mignon- Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect coming from a predominately seafood restaurant. It was presented well on a cutting board, the sides were — lighter dipping sauce, sautéed spinach and creamy mashed potatoes. The server didn’t even ask how we wanted it cooked (Ended up being medium rare). The salmon was mediocre - honestly could’ve air fried salmon and laid it on a bed of caramelized onions.

For dessert, I got the chocolate soufflé - which tasted more like a half cooked cake or brownie. Souffle are supposed to be light and airy. This dessert tasted dense and very sweet.

Overall my rating is average of both my experiences. But at the end of the day, I probably...

Our hotel concierge recommended this place for seafood. He even called and made the reservation for us so I guess he took a fee from them. He gave us sloppy walking instructions but, thank you google, we got there anyway. We were seated next to a dirty patio window, at the back of the restaurant and overlooked traffic. Our waiter seemed to be in training because he was tentative and very soft-spoken. After that initial hearing struggle, we each ordered our preferred drink - one still and one sparkling water, but the waiter brought only sparkling. We didn’t see him for quite a while until we hailed him. In another hearing struggle, we ordered oysters with a main order of risotto and fish of the day; haddock, I think. Oysters- small but fabulous. Risotto was hot and HOT. Too hot to eat and too spicy to swallow. We couldn’t really taste anything (for a few hours!).The haddock was surrounded with fresh looking seasonal vegetables. The fish was surprisingly overcooked, chewy, and lukewarm. So were the vegetables. There was a group of waitstaff who oversaw the patrons in our seating area One of them came over, asked us in halting English about water. Eventually he brought a pitcher of tap water. It was another odd exchange…I think we were getting used to it because we didn’t really get that his question was about water. Our bill for this weird dinner was well over $100. We were shocked - no alcohol, no dessert. Our new lesson: never ask the concierge for a referral and don’t visit the restaurant after getting one. As we were leaving, a floor manager asked how our meal was and seemed shocked to learn about the excessive spice and...