Fish & Slips Marina Raw Bar & Grill — Restaurant in Portsmouth

We are new to Portsmouth and people raved about Fish and Slips, so we tried it right away. Maybe we had an unusual experience, but it wasn’t good. The space has a nice view, it’s cool to eat on the water and close to the boats. That’s the saving grace for this review. The place itself feels a bit old and sticky. The service was beyond slow and not very friendly, and we’ve found pretty consistently that people from Portsmouth and surrounding areas are generally kind and friendly, so this was an unpleasant surprise. It felt like our server either couldn’t care less we were there or like she was doing us a favor by us being there, actually, both. We asked her if we could come over in our boat and tie up and eat there and if so, where should we tie up on our next visit? She said she’d check and let us know. She never did, even 30 minutes later when we followed up. It wasn’t busy in there at all, maybe 2 other tables in the bar area where we were, so not sure what was capturing all her attention.

It took 50 minutes to order and get our food, no exaggeration, after we mentioned we only had an hour before we had to leave. Super thoughtless of them. The food was good but not exceptional, a six or seven on a 10 point scale. But the prices were high PLUS, are you ready for this??…. our server explained they were charging us an additional “service fee” on top of their already high prices. Are you wondering what a “service fee” is? We were. Literally have never heard of this in the US, only in Europe where there’s a service fee for eating in a restaurant, but in exchange for paying a service fee you don’t tip, so it’s a wash, and the service in Europe is generally excellent and friendly. Not here. Our server at Fish and Slips in the bar area said they charge a service fee just to eat there, but she couldn’t explain why, then she requested we still tip her. What? Are you serious? For what? We are generous tippers, but her and this place were a train wreck.

So, let’s figure out if this will be a 2 or 3 star review. All ratings below are on a 5 point standard scale:

** Atmosphere = 2 stars only because of the view, the rest of the place is chopped up, old feeling and sticky. ** Food = 4, pretty good ** Service = 1, not good, not friendly, no follow up, slow as molasses uphill in the winter ** Prices = 1, not great, high, plus the addition of some random “service fee” that nobody else charges and could not be justified. Uhh, no!

So that’s a total of 8 stars, divided by 4 categories, for a total of 2 stars. Not good. This is a solid and well justified 2 star review.

The whole experience was not a great and I hesitate to give them another shot. I was offended by the service fee that couldn’t be explained plus a request for additional t.i.p.s. (To, Insure “ensure”, Prompt, Service) which was not, her lack of follow up to our boat docking question after a second prompt, the unfriendliness, and the extraordinarily slow service after we shared we only had an hour. I would absolutely not rush back to Fish and Slips and would not...

I have to revise the below review from our visit 3 years ago. This has become one of our favorite and regular places. They have really turned things around since they first opened as Fish N Slips.

The only reason this place deserves 1 star is because the food was pretty good. We arrived last night at 6pm with 4 adults and 3 kids all ages 4 and under. We were told the wait would be 45 minutes so we grabbed a drink from the bar and waited out on the patio. We also asked a waitress for two kids cup of milk and she said she would check but wasn't sure if they have milk. We saw several empty tables all throughout the restaurant and visited the hostess stand several times to inquire why we hadn't been seated yet. We were told the kitchen was behind so they couldn't seat more tables. It was almost 7:30, an hour and a half later, before we had a table. At that point, the same waitress we talked to outside was our waitress for dinner and took quite a while to get to us. I asked again what the status of the milk was and she said she honestly never checked. So in an hour and a half, she never once checked to see if our kids who are over it and tired and hungry could get some milk???? So then she wastes another trip (and time) coming back to us WITHOUT the milk but instead asks to have their sippy cups to go fill them up so that they don't have to waste a plastic cup. What else...it was difficult to get the Coronas we were drinking to have a lime accompany them...then they ran out of Corona. Any dipping sauces we asked for were not brought. We never saw a manager because we surely would have complained. We had other friends we ran into there who were brought their meals but never saw their waitress again and didn't have silverware so they had to go into the kitchen area themselves. We asked the waitress for some extra napkins and she said she didn't have any so we had to go find a stack of napkins. Again, food was very good and came out fairly quickly once we finally had a table after an hour and a half wait and then after sitting for 20 mins waiting on the waitress to...

Immediately upon entering you have gorgeous views but that was about all this place had. We were a party of 4 people and first were seated on a broken table outside so we had to wait for the waitress to find us another table, was very surprised that a "new" restaurant would have a table like that, it looked like it had been used for years. When we finally sat down on our table after about 5 minutes we placed an order of drinks and cocktails and an appetizer. It took about 10-15 minutes minutes for 3 of us to had our cocktails and it wasn't even that busy. One of us had to wait 20 minutes on their cocktail. The calamari we had as an appetizer took about 15-20 minutes to be served. While it was good it wasn't memorable, sauce portion for it was not enough and not plated too attractive, seemed to be just thrown in the basket. Some tables around us were seated after us and receive their food while we were still waiting to be served 50 minutes after we placed our order. After finally finding the manager he seemed to have nothing better to do than make excuses as to why we had not been served yet and tried to assure is that he made sure that our tickets were next up. He seemed to have a huge lack of restaurant management skills and instead of trying to own the situation and turning around an ugly situation he gave us nothing but excuses and didn't even offer anything other than a sorry to try and rectify this horrible experience. I cannot make any comments on the food as we left immediately after we noticed how little the manager seemed to care, but from the waitress up to the manager this place needs serious improvement or it will probably not survive long. Unacceptable ...the only thing that makes me even consider giving this place another chance is the sister restaurant we went to afterwards had absolutely exceptional...