Juliet — Restaurant in Somerville

Appallingly amateur food quality, extremely limited and lackluster menu selection, and unfortunately poor service. (Details below). I recommend that you PLEASE AVOID especially for any special occasions. I had reserved a table for my graduation dinner with family, and we all left shocked at how terrible our experience was. I was especially disappointed because I have actually dined here before in the fall when they were serving their Maverick set menu and was very impressed at the time with their execution, high quality ingredients, and knowledgeable servers. It had truly felt like “fine dining” and I recommended friends to come here. I regret recommending them now. I have no idea what changed… Tonight’s restaurant was unrecognizable to what I visited in the fall, and I was embarrassed to have taken my family here on such a special occasion. To describe this restaurant as “fine dining” is to make a mockery of the phrase. Fine dining requires technique and top-notch service, both of which are lacking.

First let’s discuss the menu. For entrees, there are 5 pastas and one Niçoise salad to choose from. That’s it. And tonight they ran out of 2 of the 5 pastas. The pastas did not require skill to make— I can assure you that you could make penne, fettuccine Alfredo, or risotto at home, and with fresher ingredients. After I asked the server if there was anything else, she told us this was a temporary menu. We were given no further context. My grandma found the menu so unappetizing she didn’t even order.

The prices are also INSANE for what you are getting. $23 (plus mandatory 20 percent surcharge) for penne pasta with tomato sauce and anchovies that takes 40 minutes to arrive? Plus $7 for overcooked and under seasoned chicken? The cocktail prices were also insane given the lack of complexity of presentation in the drinks. To be fair, the entree portions were large enough for leftovers. But if I were looking for volume of quality food, I would not look here.

As for taste, both the drinks and foods were so bad that when the server asked how we liked it, my mom couldn’t even bring herself to answer out of politeness. My boyfriend could not take more than 2 sips of his martini because it reeked of gin, and my mezcal drink tasted watery and flat. The focaccia bread was cold, its corresponding butter lacking flavor. The mussels were a saving grace, tender and paired with crispy fries. The pastas were laughably bad. I’ve never been to a higher end restaurant that had such mushy risotto, overcooked protein, and bland sauce. It tasted like a home cooked meal in a bad way. My grandparents said they preferred Olive Garden and my boyfriend left his fish virtually untouched after one bite.

The most positive thing I could say about service is that our server was not actively rude to us. But she was not warm either, did not acknowledge that it was my graduation, did not offer to explain the menu to us, and overall just seemed overworked. She recommended a dish that was not on the menu or available. We had to ask for her to bring water over, ask for her to clear the dirty dishes, and ask multiple times for new utensils once she took our old ones away and left us with food that we had no way of eating. I fully support having an obligatory 20 percent tip for staff, but in that case, service staff should still be trained to be as friendly, helpful, knowledgeable, and attentive as they would be under a tipping system. We were uncomfortable with our service experience because we felt like we were having to direct her through the meal just so we could eat, and we ultimately just felt bad that she seemed apathetic and tired, while feeling disappointed in our treatment.

My closing thoughts are to go elsewhere until management is able to return to the Maverick meal quality I observed in the fall. Go to Giulia for a comparable price splurge, to Gran Gusto for budget quality pastas. Do not come here unless you want to spend a lot of money on a very subpar if not unappetizing meal from a restaurant that is clearly...

My Engagement day was ruined because of Juliet. 6 months before the party, I reached out to the restaurant asking about possibly having an engagement party there. The manager - Katie (I think that was her name), responed with some info, including a minimum of $1,500 and 20% service charge. Few more emails back and forth, we were provided a menu with 3 different tiers of Brunch menu, we choose the $40 per person menu and had a proposed guest list of 25. 2 weeks before the event, I reached out because I haven't heard anything from her. I confirmed with her we are only going to have 15 people. She then ask me to finalize the drink menu. The day of the party: The party starts at 12 and our table was not ready until close to 12? We had no time to set up the space and had to hung out by the "waiting area" along with few other guests that arrived early. I lost track with the time we eventually got our table but all of our guests had arrived at that point. AC was not working and it was 90 degrees that day. We got 1 tiny fan that didn't do anything. No one ever refilled our water bottle, we were given water once at the beginning of the party. Drinks took forever to arrived and some guests didn't get to order 2nd drink because no server. Food portion was unevenly distributed. They set us on 2 separate table, one for 6 and the other for 9 but we got the same amount of food? (Family style). My partner's name was misspelled on their menu. No one from the restaurant greeted us or congratulated us, whatever. Here's the real issue: Katie handed the bill to us and left. We were shocked to see a "room fee" charge is close to $700. Few issues with this: My fault for not remembering the "minimum" charge from an email 6 months ago and was mentioned once and never again in our numerous email exchanges, nor was it confirmed again in the last email or mentioned once again at the party. If this "minimum" is real, WHY did she make us limit the menu?? If I am only allowing guests to order mimosa and coffee drinks, how the hell do we meet the remaining $900 minimum?? The food portion is $40/pp x15= $600. She then told us we had to limit the drink option because they only have 1 bartender, they couldn't possibly make drinks for our party. NOT OUR PROBLEM. When we told her we went from 25 people to 15 people, she didn't think to ask how we plan to spend the minimum?? No one was keeping track of this "minimum" for us and was not mentioned once during the entire time. Am I supposed to be doing that as a customer?? We were forced to order more drinks and eventually missed our next reservation because of it. We even paid for another table's bill to meet the "minimum". At this point the restaurant was cleaning up and like the party, no service at all after we ordered 2 most expensive bottles of champagne. They cleared our table and we had no water glasses and were given water?? Finally?? - Katie disappeared and refused to talk to us. AGAIN, it's not about the money but the principle. We have NO issue paying for the $1500. IF it was confirmed in the email just one more time or mentioned to us one more time, we wouldn't have limited the drink options and would have planned something like a champagne toast at the beginning. Eventually Katie showed up and settled our bill, a little too late. If she would have done that at the very beginning, she wouldn't have lost money by serving us more drinks or we wouldn't have missed our reservation. The funny thing is that they generally don't accept tips but they charge us 20% service fee when the service wasn't even half good as usual? Not the server's fault but they are just not equipped to serve a large party. If they didn't plan for us to actually meet the "minimum", were they going to just charge us $900 of nothing?? My fiancee was so nice and thanked Katie on our way out for meeting us halfway. I am getting over the fact that the...

My girlfriend and I have been walking past this place for over a year since it made it onto our list. Tonight was the night and we were not let down!

We split everything. focaccia - very good! The butter with a hint of lemon was amazing! The texture and subtle flavor were excellent cheese plate - the goat cheese was the best by far! The cow and sheep cheeses were good but they didn’t compare. That said, the cow (I think) had a very exciting and unique aftertaste jamon - skip it. Textures and flavors were all wrong. This made my night when we set it aside and the waitress asked for feedback, thanked me for the constructive criticism, and immediately without asking said she’d take it off the bill. mushrooms and ricotta - our waitress brought this out since it’s her favorite item after the jamon was bad. My girlfriend loved it (not surprising based on her love for both ricotta and mushrooms). I think it was probably good but cold mushrooms and vinegar are both hard for me, so I didn’t like it :) burger - totally fantastic. fries were the perfect texture, though would have been better without dill. aioli - very good, good aftertaste too chocolate cake - excellent. We were both stuffed but wanted to bring it home with us.

Our waitress, Shannon, was very good. She had good recommendations, good explanations of things, and excellent timing in general.

We’ll absolutely be back.

Oh, and 4/5 for atmosphere because it was too loud. Too many hard surfaces and too few soft ones, it was difficult to hear my partner at times, though I have some trouble audio processing in loud environments. Not a problem given how good...