Sonoma County Restaurants: Monti’s Revisited
Monti’s Rotisserie Restaurant and Bar is located in the Montgomery Village Shopping Center in southeast Santa Rosa. The people who own Monti’s also own Willi’s Wine Bar, long a favorite restaurant in Santa Rosa, and Willi’s Seafood in Healdsburg, which is the newest addition to the group. A new restaurant, Stark’s Steakhouse, located in the Railroad Square area of Santa Rosa is just being added to the group. Of the existing restaurants, each is a bit different, but there are also a lot of similarities.
We’ve been visiting Monti’s on and off since it opened in 2003. It’s been a good neighborhood restaurant , but the portions have always been way too large. Their small plates are just not small. On one visit , two of us chose to share two small plates and their Butcher’s Board (selection of house-made charcuterie) and there was no way that we could finish the dinner. We brought at least half of it home. The food has been consistently good, but the noise level can get pretty high inside, especially in the bar area, which also has tables. It’s a lot better to go to in the summertime, when you can eat outside. Anyway, it’s a local place that we go to occasionally.
Last week, a group of five of us went to Monti’s for dinner to celebrate a birthday. I hadn’t been there in well over a year, maybe longer. The food is as good as ever, but the portions, except for one glaring exception, are still too large. We had the Calamari Fritto Misto as an appetizer, and it was plenty for all five of us. Monti’s calls that a small plate, but any plate that feeds five as an appetizer is hard to call a small plate. However, the batter was light and not the least bit oily and the calamari was just tender, not the least bit rubbery. Two of us had the Wednesday rotisserie special, CK Leg of Lamb. It was done beautifully and the cauliflower gratin was really wonderful, but, again, there were really too many slices of lamb. One of us had the hanger steak, which also had great flavor, but which came with enough French fries (they took up more than half of the serving plate) to serve all five of us. Another had the rigatoni dish, which was so massive that he took at least half home in a doggie bag. Oddly enough, a daily seafood special – day boat scallops, was almost meager in comparison to all of the other dishes. There were four scallops served in a long skinny dish with almost no additional vegetables.
Needless to say, we did not have dessert.
We also had two bottles of pinot noir, both of them excellent. We had a bottle of the Acacia Carneros and a bottle of the La Crema.
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