User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.4 (PPC Mac OS X) Message-ID: Lines: 45 Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 17:40:41 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.74.144.214 X-Complaints-To: [email removed] X-Trace: bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net 1099849241 12.74.144.214 (Sun, 07 Nov 2004 17:40:41 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 17:40:41 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet Xref: usenet.INS.cwru.edu stl.dining:1980 Brian B. wrote: > I was given a recommendation for a restaurant named Monarch. It was near > th end of a wine tasting and I didn't think to write down any details > about the recommendation or even where the place is located. Can anyone > tell me about Monarch? What type of food, service, atmosphere does it > offer? Monarch is a three-star restaurant shooting to ascend to four-star rating. Service is the most attentive I have experienced in quite some time. The person who serves as lead server is more the service coordinator, with a bank of servers attending to your every need. Water, coffee and tea are kept continuously topped. My wife has a tendency to use half a packet of sweet and low and then finish it when the tea is refilled. Every time she set the packet down, the lead server would sweep by, collect the half used packet and place an unopened packet in its place. The food was incredible. It starts with three point canapes served before the menus are presented. I don't know what each item in the three corners of the plate were, but they tasted wonderful. My wife had a Caesar salad, which was the only disappointment of the evening (nothing spectacular and the croutons were bland, small and too few), while I had a spinach salad with a fresh strawberry vinaigrette. She had a duck platter that was spectacular and I had an open lobster ravioli that was unlike anything I had tasted before. My only other complaint is regarding the prices in regard to salads. At the mid twenties prices for entrees, to then charge $8.95 for the Caesar salad (that was so disappointing) and $9.99 for the spinach salad struck me as bogus. I work in a restaurant as a part time second job, so I know what wholesale produce prices are. Salads are gravy money as it is for a $3.95 salad, which is why most restaurants include them as part of a dinner package. Monarch's prices are very high to start with, and I didn't thing it proper to charge more for a very small dinner salad than many restaurants charge for large meal-type salads. As for deserts, I couldn't tell you. We were quite full after the full meal, so we didn't even consider a desert. For the two of us, the tab was $87.xx plus tip, and we had no alcohol in our meal. jt
St. Louis, MO