Roxanne's — Restaurant in Boston

I am a big restaurant industry supporter. I’ve worked in restaurants but also in customer service my entire professional career. Especially during this pandemic I’ve tried to support take out and tip extra and am always a good tipper in general. It takes a lot for me to get upset at any sort of place especially a restaurant and this is the first place I don’t really have a desire to give a chance due to how incredibly rude they were.

On Sunday March 15th I was in Boston from New Hampshire for an Anniversary dinner. Boston is over an hour from my house. We had reservations at 8:00 - we were at another establishment getting drinks and appetizers. We had heard about the governor putting some mandates that day for serving food and alcohol that weren’t supposed to go into affect for a few days. Roxanne’s was to open at 5 and we walked over early seeing if we could get in earlier for dinner. We did our due diligence and tried to call Roxanne’s with no answer, we checked all social media outlets which had no update so assumed they were still open. Additionally we had received no cancellation from them.

I politely reached out on Instagram as when we walked up they were closed with no notification of our reservation being cancelled and no updated to any of their sites.

“ We had a reservation for 8 tonight - tried to show up early and you guys are closed 🤷🏻‍♀️ you should contact your patrons or update social media. Last update was 2 day’s ago saying you would be open like normal this weekend ...”

They responded so rudely and unprofessionally I was shocked

“ Hi, I’m sorry if you haven’t heard, there’s a pandemic affecting the planet at the minute. We’re very sorry that your plans were affected but the governor of the state just put a mandate on serving food and alcohol and we’re making every effort to comply. I hope you can try to be considerate during this unsure time”

To which I responded:

“Yes absolutely - I completely understand. However we had another establishment that had the same circumstance and notified via social media ! Trying to help the restaurant business while we can. And I have been following the updates and it appears that takes into effect as of Tuesday. Just please be considerate to your patrons ! We want to try and support restaurants during this time but I don’t appreciate the rude response as I work in customer service as well- good luck“

Rudest response I have ever received from any restaurant. Pandemic or not you are a business. Plenty of other restaurants and establishments immediately updated their platforms or at least called those with reservations. I have friends who have wanted to go there since and that interaction has left me with zero desire to...

This place treated me and my friends like we were garbage! I recently went to Boston on a girls trip (we are all from FL), and we made a reservation weeks in advance since we were a large group. All of us are 22-23 years old (aka legal), but when we sat down at the table the waitress suddenly said that if we had out of state ID’s we had to show another form of ID that had our picture, name, and date of birth. HELLO? Thats not the law last time I checked for drinking…. but anyway we were traveling within the US so none of us had our Passports (I don’t even have a passport). The manager was called over and we talked to him and he was very condescending and rude. We pointed out that if this is the “policy”, how come it isn’t on the website? Boston is a very touristy place, so you are telling me they ask all out of state visitors this??? No, they just saw a large group of girls who were younger (most people there dining looked 30+ anyway), and made assumptions and did whatever they could to make us leave. The manager “assured” us that most places we would go to that weekend would have the same policy…. wrong. We walked across the street to a restaurant that also had a bar, and the hostess was so confused when we told her what had happened at this place. Word of advice, if you are young and trying to have fun… don’t go here unless you want to be treated like a child! May I also add, we were only a group of 6 and always tip generously/act poised at establishments. They treated us like we were “girls gone wild” or something. AND its worth noting that beside me, all the other girls in my group are women of color, I wont make assumptions about that but just putting...

A few comments as to why I gave it 3 stars:

My friend and I arrived around 11pm on a Friday night:

Atmosphere - It was loud, poppin’ w/pump up music, the kind you can ALMOST dance to. Lots of people were gathered around the bar but also all the tables were completely full and booked. Think just classy enough that reservations are required kind of vibe. People were friendly, open and the vibe was GREAT. This is the main reason I would go again.

Staff - Not the friendliest, and actually actively annoyed at some customers from what I witnessed. Yes understandable as they’re probably busy af, annoyed at all the drunk customers and tired of it all. However, it’s still customer service and there’s a fine line when working in these types of atmospheres. The staff matched the just classy enough but not quite to be classified as a classy bar kind of vibe.

Drinks - Ok, unfortunately this was the worst part. I would definitely not get another cocktail from this place. The cocktails my friend and I ordered looked pretty but were honestly one of the worst I’ve tried in my life. Considering they’re a cocktail bar you would think they’d mix it better. There was no flavor or dynamic to them, but tasted like layers of different ingredients/alcohols in every sip, it was nasty I could barely finish it.

If they had slightly friendlier staff and 10x better cocktails then this would be a game changer, 5 stars only. The atmosphere would be EVEN better AND I would stay longer and order x more cocktails and highly...