Charles Square – in Harvard Square, Cambridge
Open basically 11am to 10 or 11pm depending upon the day of the week
Sunday Brunch is served from 11am-2:30pm.
Telephone for reservations 617-491-9400
During a recent tour around Harvard Square we stopped in at Legal Seafood in Charles Square. At one time it was exciting to eat at Legal Seafood. I remember my first trip to the restaurant when they just opened in the Park Plaza Hotel in downtown Boston. No reservations allowed. You arrived and waited quite a while to get in. Once seated you ordered and paid the waitress – cash – for your food before she placed the order with the kitchen. That was fine with us because the reputation was high and the food was fantastic. A group of us from Harvard Business School got together for a night on the town. We passed plates around, tasted a little of everything on the menu and had a great time.
So this day we had high expectations for our meal at Legal Seafood. It turned out to be just ho-hum. You can still get a decent meal there, and some dishes are excellent, but the quality is spotty and the draw backs are many.
Our first problem – our coats. It was a cold day, we were dressed for the weather and when we arrived there was no place to put them. Since it was a busy time of day, we couldn’t draw up extra chairs because there were none close by so we shifted in our seats with our coats thrown over the backs of our chairs and the lumpiness of that very uncomfortable. The waitresses apologized for having no place to put our coats, but looking around the room they must have spent a lot of time apologizing to a lot of people that day.
We started with the Lobster Bisque with mouths watering from the description and were very disappointed when it was served. With great fanfare, the small bowls arrived and the wait staff put the lobster meat into the bowls and then the hot liquid. There was a need for these theatrics because if you hadn’t seen the little teaspoons of lobster going into the bottom of the empty bowls, once the liquid was poured you wouldn’t have known there was lobster meat in your Bisque.
When we tasted the Bisque it was thin, sort of adequate, but not great. It tasted as though it was made of the equivalent of dry powdered milk, lots of water and a little lobster stock thrown in with food coloring to fool the eye. Having been raised on really great Crawfish and Crab Bisque, I was looking forward to giving my taste buds the advantage of another great dish, especially on this cold day. Instead of the wonderfully thick and tasty Bisques on which I was raised, this one brought an abrupt end to great expectations.
We moved on to Ceasar Salad and that was barely adequate. I look for anchovies in my salad since that is what makes a great Ceasar Salad – otherwise it is lettuce with a sort of adequate salad dressing, but please don’t call it a Ceasar Salad. The rest of the meal was quite nice, but averaging things out I would say this meal was adequate to disappointing.
We enjoyed the restaurant environment and the large picture windows where we looked out over the cleaning crew washing the middle of lovely, large, desolately empty Charles Square with all of the clanging and loud chattering that this entailed. Thankfully, we met several friends coming and going from the restaurant so the social side was quite nurturing, its just too bad the dishes we were served didn’t make the grade – cut the mustard – leave us feeling well fed and beautifully cared for on this cold day.
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on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Restaurant Review.
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