Harvest — Restaurant in Cambridge

Please do not get the french onion soup ($18) or the short rib tortellini ($38) This restaurant was extremely disappointing for me. I had high hopes for it. It is in a great location near Harvard square and it has a nice outdoor seating option. However, there was much to be desired. The french onion soup looks amazing. However, I should have taken another photo without the melted cheese. There is hardly any actual soup. The color is grey and cloudy. It tastes faint and muddy. There are far too many mushrooms and too much cheese. I have never, ever not finished a dish in a restaurant and this was one I did not finish. It was taken away half finished and nobody asked if there were any issues with it. The french fries were good. However, the two dipping options were some aioli and just regular Heinz ketchup. I wish the other one was something unique as well. The real disappointment was the main dish. The short rib tortellini was a small dish with exactly 7 tortellinis. The tortellini itself was not al dente, as another review mentioned. It was slightly under that and needed 1-2 minutes more. As a result, it had quite a bit of a bite to it, and the taste was not pleasant. The short rib filling was tasteless and texturally unforgiving combined with the underdone pasta. The sauce it was in was rooted in Asian flavors, which did not round out the dish. The carrots and potatoes were an afterthought, adding nothing. They were both underdone and some pieces were legitimately hard. Again, no one asked how my dish was. I am sure Harvest has some great dishes. These two were not those. I came here for an anniversary dinner and was excited. My girlfriend had a great dish, so that is a highlight. However, I am writing my review on my own experience. The service was subpar. I was not asked how my food was and everyone just seemed a little cold and distant. For $150 I expect something pheneomenal. And I was left wishing I went...

My experience this Valentines day was terrible, I arrived at 9:25 10 minutes late to my res. There's a 20 min grace period but when I arrived though they didn't have seats for my girlfriend and I. Their excuse for this was the people that had earlier res's were taking too long at their tables and weren't leaving promptly, Usually any restaurant worthy of their name have policies for things such as that. like a 60-90 min period you can dine, but nope, too afraid to ask people to leave to get NEW business. They were seating people who had 9:30 reservations before us, they said it'd be a small wait it ended up being a 25-30 min wait and when we were finally sat, we couldn't keep the attention of our server for more than a minute. We got water and then waited about 6-8 mins for our server to come ask if we wanted drinks we put in our drink order and she once again disappeared for 6-8 mins, to the point we had to stand up and get a front of the house manager. when the server returned we asked to put in our food order. I asked for the drinks and she said the bar is backed up and we'll get them as soon as they can. Feeling frustrated, and terribly hungry i cancelled everything we had ordered and we left. I don't know if they overbooked on reservations or if the managers need to grow a backbone and let tables know they cant dine for 2+ hours as there are other people who need to also dine. There's no reason people need to still be sitting there when their meals are over. But regardless this needs to be fixed and people need to be trained better in that place. Management needs to sit down and draw up new policies and train their staff to be able to follow it. The Management, The servers, Front of the house staff all should be ashamed...

If I could give a zero star for service for our waiter, Peter, I would. For the rest of the staff, five stars. They were great at clearing the dishes and bringing water.

Peter was very attentive when we first got there, but once he realized we were only ordering drinks and appetizers, he quickly moved on to being more attentive someplace else since his tip wouldn’t be as high.

Our appetizers came and our drinks didn’t. One of the staff who brought the appetizers was kind enough to make sure to check on our drinks and get them for us. Thank you.

Peter was nowhere to be found.

We ate and Peter finally showed up. He didn’t apologize for our drinks being late. I’m not even sure he even noticed.

He was very prompt to get our dessert order and bring us the check. It seems like getting the check (and his tip) as high as possible is priority, good service not so much.

The rest of the staff did all the work. Do yourselves a favor, get a tablet so people can send their order directly to the kitchen. Our waiter added no value to the experience and all he did was get our order and bring the check. We only left a tip because the rest of the staff was wonderful.

Food: Food was delicious, but ridiculously expensive. The strawberry salad had a few strawberries and three lettuce leaves for $18. All their entrees were also so expensive, that we just decided to stick with appetizers and drinks.

Look at the menu before you go. I made the mistake of not doing that before making the reservation.

I won’t be returning to Harvest even though it has a beautiful patio and...