I would give this 5 stars if your goal is to get rid of your money as soon as possible and if you also don't know any songs.
4 people were in my party. Maru staff coerced us into bottle service, and I mean *coerced*....This was $250 for a single bottle of tequila. The room itself was $60 per hour. We sang for 2 hours. Yet by magic math, the bill came to over $500 before tip. With tip, this came to $150 per person. For one bottle. Don't bother, people. For $150 a head, you can get quite a nice dinner at one of NYC's fine restaurants. I do not doubt Maru management will reply to this review, explaining 1) that we were not coerced and 2) there is a perfectly good reason why the bill added up to $150 per head 3) that $250 bottle service is standard. I seriously don't care. People deserve to decide for themselves whether they want to pay that much money for karaoke in a city with countless options within feet of each other. And again, no one wanted bottle service and it was very literally forced on us.
And oh God, the song list. Fully 70% of the songs we chose were unavailable, including entire multi-platinum selling bands. Out of hopelessess, I chose a Korean song, Damdadi, which was one of the most popular Korean songs of the 80s and is as recognizable as Michael Jackson's "Thriller" if you're Korean. I was *certain* they would have it. They did not. I know for a fact that other karaoke bars in K-town have every single song we were looking for. Hit me up if you want a list of songs/artists we searched for but could not find. Trying to list them here would be like listing every restaurant I ate at in my life.
Also they have no catalog or list of songs. You have to guess by trial and error but inputting the individual songs. Our control pad was in Korean. I asked for an English one and was told, "we had English stickers on there but they fell off." Ok, that really fixes the problem, thanks.
I am wracking my brain for one positive thing to say about Maru, because this review is so negative that I feel some readers will think I'm exaggerating. But I honestly cannot think of a single favorable aspect. They only have one men's and one women's toilet, for example, which is strange for a venue this expensive, of this size. If I'm paying $150 a head, I expect nice white fluffy individual hand towels and a toilet that doesn't look like the one from Trainspotting.More