The Enormous Room (Restaurant Peeves)

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

What are your pet peeves when it comes to dining out in Boston?

My friends and I went out Friday night to this place we'd always wanted to try, The Enormous Room in Cambridge, right near Central Square.

The idea was cool - findable only by the elephant on the door (there's no name) you go upstairs to find lots of low glass tables surrounded by low couches and chairs. We ordered the Enormous Plate, which was Middle Eastern/African food - hummous, olive, skewered meats and such. The food was delicious - but the 7 of us paid $14 a pop and left hungry (only 6 skewers of meat total!). I think the problem was that I was under the impression we were going to a restaurant, while instead it was more of a bar and club.

The lighting was so dim that we literally could barely see what we were eating. The background music (before the DJ kicked it up another notch) was so loud that it was near impossible to hold a conversation without raising your voice - and in a huge single room with everyone else doing the same thing? Pain. I felt really bad for the hearing-impaired friend with us - he basically couldn't hear anything. After about half an hour, neither could we.

Even when I was in college, I was never one for the bar scene - just too soft-spoken to be easily heard, and not patient enough to lipread others in dark rooms.

Comments

[kochansky.livejournal.com]

I second your complaint about the volume level at The Enormous Room and want to extend it to many other bars. When I go out with friends I want to actually hear them and talk to them... is this such a novel concept?! By turning up the music, you force the patrons of the establishment to speak louder, which frequently results in the music being turned up yet again.

I like going out, but the way volume levels can be makes staying home and having friends over seem like a much more pleasant prospect.

Are there lounges around that aren't noisy? (Lounge to me implies relaxation... not shouting)

*exhale* end rant...

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

So exactly what would it take for management to actually listen to their own staff? A boot to the head? Do they think everybody wants to be deaf? I am curious as to their rationale for uber-dim lights and overloud music.

[bds.livejournal.com]

Besides offering a cozier atmosphere than cafeteria-style fluorescent lighting, the management doesn't want you seeing potentially wilted salads. :-)

absolutely agreed.

[hyperliminal.livejournal.com]

I went to the Enormous Room once and UTTERLY HATED IT. We had a large-ish group and so sat in three separate areas with three separate checks. These checks proceeded to be messed up and mixed up by the staff all evening, resulting in our being overcharged, yelled at for "using more than one server," and told that we could not be refunded. During the meal, the servers took *forever* to get us anything, kept mixing things up, and then had to be *begged* for almost an hour before bringing us the first set of checks, which were wrong, and which it took three go-backs to fix to a point we decided we could deal with the mixup financially and just wanted to get out of there. Throughout the night (die to the check issues we were there for about three hours!) the volume kept creeping higher and the lighting cept creeping lower. No wonder we couldn't tell the identically tiny-blonde-girl-in-ponytail servers apart. I'd say the entire experience was a miserable waste of money. If they hadn't had a bouncer at the door, we'd have simply plonked down what we felt we owed and left.

[memerath.livejournal.com]

Yep, main gripes are places that are too loud, too expensive, bar staff that doesn't listen (!) to customers. My biggest gripe currently is about Bukowski's in Inman Square--love the food, love the murals, love the music even--but it's WAY TOO LOUD. I've been there with a small group and a large group, and each time we had to shout to make ourselves heard, and we were sitting right next to each other, and it wasn't even crowded! We complained to the waitress about the volume, and she said that sometimes one of the staff will turn it down, but then someone else will just turn it back up again. Wtf? If it's not a dance club (which Bukowksi's definitely isn't) there's NO reason to be KILLING people's eardrums.

Another gripe (man, this feels good): Cuchi Cuchi in Central Square. We were told that there was a $12 minimum per person--NOT including drinks--if we were to sit at one of the special sofa-tables. The fuck? The drinks, by the way, were all over $7. I guess that's just my suburban astonishment at overpriced fare, and I should just go to cheaper places...

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

I really wonder what is up with the massively loud music. Enough people seem to like it that management continues to think it's a good idea, but I just have never for the life of me figured out why.

[cheerjess.livejournal.com]

Orleans-during the day : )