Regrettable and forgettable, starting with the misleading name…read more
"ClambakeS of Massachusetts"? Clearly the name should just be "Clambake", because this had to be their first event. Ever. (I should also note that some people in our group thought a better name was "Clambaked".)
Anyway, this was all very unfortunate given the special occasion of my Mom's big number birthday. We actually had high hopes for our lobster-bake, and in fact, their communication was relatively decent leading up to the event.
On the morning of the event, however, the set-up crew showed up late (30-minutes?) and blamed it on the traffic. The thing about that is, our house is only 5.3 miles from their location.....and none of our 30 guests complained of traffic.
When they did show up, they forgot the table clothes, but otherwise set things up reasonably well.
When it came time to show up with the food an hour or so later, it was the same deal. They showed up about 30-minutes late and again blamed it on the traffic.
I mean, if it really was the traffic the first time you have a bunch of options for the second time including leaving earlier or just taking an alternate route, right? For that matter, they could have just about walked to our house in little over an hour, so we were not buying their story in the slightest. Especially twice in as many hours.
After that, things devolved. Their first miscue was to to have us serve ourselves on fairly flimsy plastic plates. As the lobsters were bigger than the plates, it was actually a bit awkward to get the plate back to one's seat without it folding in half and spilling everything.
Then, finally ready to dive in, we looked around for the usual lobster-attack gear, only to find metal claw crackers (ok that's standard-fare).....and plastic utensils! No metal picks (essential), let alone lobster-scissors (optional, but highly desired, especially for an elderly crowd). Just a plastic fork and knife! Hello? Have you ever even had lobster before?
Anyway, unlike the more elderly people in the room, I am in decent shape and so I wasn't going to let anything stand between me and a good lobster. I cracked open my first claw. Ok, cool. Second claw.....SNAP.....the claw-cracker actually broke in two in my hands! (A science guy at the table said the claw-crackers were made from cheap metal.) Sigh.....really?
When we finally got to the point of having something in our hands that we could eat, we noticed that the butter they wanted us to use was (literally) sitting in slightly over-sized plastic thimble into which you could barely fit your thumb, let alone a lobster tail.
There were plenty of other "details" missed: No bowl for your shells (so until one of the guests brought a plastic tin over you had to leave the watery shell mess on your plate while you tried to eat the rest of your food). No lobster bibs. It just seemed like every way we turned we were dealing with amateur hour.
We also had comments across the board about the chicken being substantially over-cooked (however most people seemed to like the steak, and there were very good comments on the mushrooms).
At the end of the day, the only reason I am not giving them a 1-star instead of a 2-star is that the staff were genuinely nice and the lobster (once you finally got to it) and steak were actually reasonably tasty.
Still, we will never use these people again and we recommend you look elsewhere as well. Let them learn on someone else's dime.
