Max's Oyster Fest

Max Restaurant Group hosts events they call Chef to Farm at various farms, vineyards and breweries. Today they held the Oyster Fest at Rosedale Farm and Vineyards in Simsbury. Dining events like this seem to becoming more prevalent with several places in the area offering some form of Wine/Beer pairing, Farm to Table or Chefs special menu that take diners beyond the typical restaurant experience. The Oyster Fest cost $59.00. The event was from 1 PM to 5 PM and although you could come whenever you wanted, if you didn’t get there early or at least right at 1 you would have regretted it. I am not sure if they were short on chairs and tables or just short on chairs and tables under the tent. Which on a hot sunny day like today was almost the same thing. We got our seats early and we spent a good part of our time defending the seats of the people opposite us who seemed to like the longer lines and was gone waiting in them quite often. This brings us to the three problems with the Fest. As I said there was a shortage of chairs and my heart went out to the people wandering around looking for chairs as if they were the Ghosts from Dickens A Christmas Carol that Marley showed to Scrooge, constantly reaching out to others trying to make contact with them or in this case with their chairs. Forced to roam the tent because they failed to get their early enough. Which brings us to the second problem. Lines for food were long. This was exacerbated by the cooked foods not being ready at 1 so that all the hungry diners lined up at the raw oyster stations, that only needed to be shucked so were done earlier. As other stations came online they never completely recovered as they were always playing catch-up. So once the long lines started they didn’t slow down until half way through the event. Apparently this was a result of them having a lot of walk up ticket buyers on the day of the event. Somewhere, it seems advisable that a company with the reputation of Max Restaurant Group would think to either not sell same day tickets or put a limit on the numbers in order to maintain lines.

Great Event

Despite these aggravations this was still a great event. You can’t beat being out in a beautiful farm field, under a white tent, with nice live music and good food. And once you got to the front of the line the food was good. They had three stations with various types of raw oysters, all tasty with plenty of lemon, horseradish and cocktail sauce. There was ribs and shrimp skewers and an excellent cucumber salad, that as a meat and seafood eater I was shocked to enjoy as much as I did. There was a long line for the oyster buns, po boy, street corn and heirloom tomatoes station that didn’t slow down until I was too full to crawl over to try them. There was a wide variety of pizzas from cheese, pepperoni, Margherita, clam, shrimp and my new favorite corn. That’s right corn. It was amazing, I want a whole one please.I ‘m not done yet, oyster stew, fried green tomatoes, oyster Rockefeller, wood fired oysters, blueberry pie and strawberry shortcake. I didn’t find the littleneck and cherrystone clams they mentioned. This brings us to the third problem as the menu lists craft beers, seltzer and cocktails, yet they left out a little detail. Even though the beer, seltzer and cocktails is listed on the menu list right under the shortcake with no spacing, no asterisk or anything to indicate otherwise it was not included but was part of a cash bar. When I got there and saw this I figured I had read it wrong, but in writing this review I have gone back three times and reread their page. No where does it mention a fee for the beer, seltzer or cocktails. Since many of these events include drinks and there is no mention of a fee for the drinks or even a break in the menu before the drinks are listed, I feel this is a bit of false advertising.

Conclusion

However, if you can get by the short comings and the misrepresentation, the food, atmosphere, music and location all made the event very enjoyable. To be honest, since I thought I had screwed up about the charges for drinks and didn’t know until I got home about the deception, I was happy throughout and there really isn’t any reason to let that sink a thoroughly enjoyable time. However, Max Group if you ever read, this you can invite me back for free cocktails to make it up to me. lol.