Maria’s Restaurant — Restaurant in Portland

Was really looking forward to a classic Italian dinner last night with my wife and another couple. Pretty much skipped lunch so that I’d have guilt free intake of pasta and bread. Sadly, Maria’s got three strikes long before we even placed our order! Firstly, after hearing from my wife that while making the reservation she was met with some severe attitude by a gentlemen on the phone, we arrived for our five o’clock reservation at around 4:48. Seeing the whole staff circled up and chatting through the window as we approached the door only to find it locked. Hmmm ok. So we sit in the parked car for ten minutes until someone comes out and unlocks the door. Ok... no problem, we can get past this. Apparently the food is great. It’s like we’re at a midnight door buster sale at on Black Friday. Elatedly we enter the restaurant ready to kick off our Italian binge fest. First through the door! Totally empty place. Can’t help but feel we’ve surprised the hostess by entering the building though... Yes we have a reservation. No we don’t want to wait for the rest of our party. We’ll have some wine while we wait thanks. Enter the waitress: we’ll call her surly Sue since she didn’t introduce herself while dropping a stack of menus on the table. You ever feel like you’re bothering someone but you’re not sure why? That pretty much sums up the vibe here. Sorry for bothering you Sue but we do need to speak to complete this transaction tonight. Can we be on two checks? We tend to drink more then our friends so it’ll be easier to just split it before we get going... nope. Sue doesn’t do that, but we can pay separately at the end! Ok Sue, if you say so... good thing we all have calculators on our iPhones these days... Flash forward to dinner service where our party of four was served three slices of room temperature bread and a generous eight packets of ice cold butter. Good one Sue. Is this your way of telling us you hate us? Well we cut those slices of bread in half! Now we have six. Take that sassy pants. The complementary salads came inside bowls better described as thimbles. Probably could’ve taken it all in one bite if only we had a soup spoon. Lucky for us though we finally got some oil and vinegar in the bottom of the bowls to dip our last two half slices of bread in. That’s an Italian thing right? Nice! Main course arrives!!! Yasss what we’ve all been waiting for. I ordered the jumbo shrimp scampi and can only say that it definitely came with six jumbo shrimp. Honestly the rest of the dish was plain spaghetti and five warm cherry tomatoes. I’m not Italian, but isn’t scampi supposed to taste like garlic and butter and wine and cheese or something? After dumping the pizza cheese shaker and half the pepper shaker onto the plate it still seemed flavorless. Shoot. Maybe I’m having a stroke? My wife ordered cavatelli maria described as creamy pancetta with peas and pasta. When placed on the table it sloshed. Maybe it should be listed with the soups? Sadly, no peas were present, and the only way to fish out any pasta was to submerge the fork and hope for the best. The flavor was almost as bland as my plain spaghetti. Did surly Sue check in on us to see how everything was? No. My wife flagged her down to ask about the missing peas though... Sue said she’d check the menu. To see if we were lying I guess? Ten minutes later she came back to let us know they were all out of peas for the day. Umm it’s five o’clock and this is the first service of the night but thanks for the info Sue. After neglecting our mostly full plates for about fifteen minutes we settled the bill. No comments or inquiries to our satisfaction with the uneaten entrees. That’s ok Sue, you’re probably used to taking full plates back to the kitchen? Next time skip the table and just dump them directly into the garbage. I think our group might try Olive Garden next time. I hear they treat you...

*Updated Review---scroll to the end for latest review. At first approach the exterior is not all that inviting but the parking was good enough. Gives off a bit of an inner city appeal. We had reservations and got quick seating. The interior is old school Italian; dark wood with a mix of small and larger tables and even some church pew seating. We were close together but not uncomfortably close. Nice what they have done with the available space and the overall atmosphere was festive with a lot of back ground buzz, (I hate a quiet room). The service was quick and attentive, never ran out of water. The waitress was informative and helpful and after a review of the menu I would say that Maria's is very reasonably priced.

We started with a appetizer special called "Baked Buratta Cheese with Roasted Tomatoes served with Crostini". My only issue was the Buratta. It was good when it first hit the table in the hot cast iron pot where we could take the spoon and grab a bit of cheese, sauce and tomato to put on the toasted bread, but it cooled very quickly, so fast that the Buratta solidified into a glob that we had to cut apart with a knife in order to get a little taste. Seems like a much hotter pot or a different type of cheese would work better in this dish. Great if served hot and quick, not so much if it sits on the shelf for even a minute before being served. We both got Italian Mai-Tai's as warm up drinks and they were good, a little sweet for my taste but overall a decent drink, not very strong. For dinner we got a bottle of red wine for $24 which was a reasonable price to pay for a screw top Cabernet, ($19 would have been better). edit My partner got another special called "Our Lobster Ravioli with a Lobster Sauce" $32. We both thought that this dish would be better with a lighter white sauce. The ravioli's were tasty and we really liked the filling. It was crowned with two lobster tails, (shells removed), but they left the digestive tract in. Aside from a whole lobster, why would a restaurant ever serve a lobster tail with the digestive tracked intact? It was the same in my casserole but the track was empty so it wasn't that noticeable, but in this dish it was noticeable and that kind of ruined the mood of the dish. Would anybody serve a un-deveined shrimp? Of course not, so why is it OK to serve a un-deveined lobster tail? Somebody in the kitchen isn't thinking clearly on this issue. Simple fix that just needs to be corrected. We also ordered a side of garlic bread, (bread should have come with the table), but it was hard as a rock and difficult to eat. I think it was microwaved as it was tough on the inside. Overall, Maria's has good service and good food that is reasonably priced. 3.5 Stars is appropriate in my view. A Maine restaurant should know how to serve a lazy lobster.

Stopped in to Maria's again yesterday. Maybe my timing is bad, but we got there early just after they opened. They served up bread that was a couple of slices of Italian bread you can buy at Shaw's. We ordered the appetizer "special" Veal Alfredo. This should have been a nice dish of ground veal, wrapped in pasta, and drowning in alfredo sauce, and it was...except that when they ground up the veal they also ground up the bones with it...I mean WTF? I attached pictures. I don't understand how a restaurant could let this happen. It was gross and it completely ruined the rest of our meal. We should have complained and walked out but for some reason we stayed, but we couldn't get passed it. Maria's was great when it was downtown, but those days appear to be gone. Very disappointing. I know the son of the original owner has been running things for a while but they are...

Worst meal of my life! No exaggeration. And, just when I thought it couldn’t be worse I read the reviews after we ate here and any negative review gets a nasty reply from the owner. That almost stopped me from posting but I feel people should know the kind of person that owns this place. Read his/her replies, they show no desire to improve. I didn’t send my dinner back and now I’m glad I didn’t, I probably would have been ridiculed right there in the restaurant. My husband, daughter and I went in on a Friday night for an early dinner. It starts out nice enough, the staff is pleasant and the place is clean, despite being out of date. The three of us sat at a tiny table for two, despite the fact that we had a reservation for three people. We started with the Caesar salad for two and the garlic bread. The salad was just fine, an odd flavor, but fine. The garlic bread was just sliced sandwich bread with butter (it was greasy, so maybe margarine?) and cheese melted under a broiler. It had no flavor, the bread was soggy but the edges were burned. Not great, but not the worst I guess. Then came the soup of the day, beef and vegetable. This might as well have been dirty sink water. It was awful. It had one piece of beef that was so strange it was nearly jelly and felt odd to the touch. It had two carrots and the broth was nasty. It wasn’t even broth from a can. It was greasy with very little flavor. It had no seasoning and the flavor that was there can only be described as “dirty”. Not edible at all. But it was a small cup and it included with the entree so we just pushed it aside. But at this point we started to worry about what the entrees would be like. And we were right to worry! The sausage lasagna that my husband and daughter shared had ONE small piece of sausage which my husband described as “dog food”. Aside from that it was mostly just flavorless sauce and ricotta. I ordered spaghetti carbonara, my favorite Italian dish! I was really looking forward to it. It arrived and I immediately knew someone was strange. It was sitting in a puddle of…pasta water? No creamy yolk, no rich flavor, no salt, no pepper, just pasta and old/cold pancetta sitting in a yellowish flavorless puddle. It tasted awful. After a few bites I thought “how can you ruin the taste of cooked pasta?!”. We paid $100 for this meal, thank goodness we shared the salad and the lasagna. I can’t imagine how pricey it would have been if we’d all ordered our own meal. I urge you NOT to go here. Take my word for it, this is not about low supplies or low staffing. This is about bad food and a terrible attitude (the owner not the staff! Staff was nice). There are so many other wonderful restaurants in Portland with owners who genuinely care about the quality of the food, your experience and their customers. Go...