The Restaurant at The Charmant Hotel — Restaurant in La Crosse

I wanted to like this restaurant, I really did.

I loved the hotel, enjoyed my stay thoroughly, will come back. I loved the bar, well tended and well curated. I hated most everything about this restaurant.

I had two meals here first a dinner on our arrival night, second breakfast the morning after, and after my stay I wouldn't eat either meal again even if the hotel gave me the meals for free with my room.

Dinner actually started off really well the Bone Marrow had a great char on it, Nice smoky flavor - plenty of salt. The only good thing my wife and I ate.

Second course for us was French Onion soup. We both took two bites and looked at each other in pure disappointment. Wildly undersrasoned and completely lacking any flavor of burgundy or herbaceous aroma. Beef water with onions and a nicer cheese on top.

We ended dinner there, before ordering our entrees.

We shouldn't have eaten breakfast, but we were lazy and hotel breakfast is usually a highlight.

My wife ordered the farm scramble which was 'fine but needs salt'

I ordered the Salmon Benedict which came with to me ice cold. Nothing was hot on my plate and my poached egg had sat so long it hardened up into a slightly gooey mass. I ate the very nicely fried potatoes.

Here's the deal with this place....

Kitchen staff were working really hard, they are just being asked to do a menu that is outside of their skill set.

The fault of this lays squarely on the executive chef who was nowhere to be seen during our meal. Nobody checked any of the plates that went off the line at dinner, and the person checking food in the morning stepped away several times, missing our food entirely.

2-stars for not making me sick and for the server at breakfast for being the best thing about this restaurant and never letting my...

Was throwing a surprise birthday party for my mom, thought the Charmant would’ve been a good place. 1st red flag, minimum spending of 300 dollars? From 10 people? Working as a server myself, most table tops that are 10 do not hit 300 dollars during a dine in experienc, unless you make good money to not care. Due to this rule, I decided to book with the Waterfront, Charmant called back saying they would remove the 300 minimum, so we decided to stay at Charmant. Then I received two texts from Waterfront and Charmant if I wanted to cancel my reservation, press 9.I pressed 9 thinking i cancelled Waterfront, no apparently it canceled the Charmant. So the morning of my mom’s surprise party became stressful and they weren’t very understanding of the mishap let alone didn’t call at all to confirm or ask about the cancellation of the reservation even though I was adamant of coming to Charmant. I cannot express this enough, I was fed up with Charmant at this point because A) I called Charmant Restaurant, always went to voicemail. B) Literally blew up my phone with calls 4-6 times in a row when I was at work, not professional. C) Felt like a cat and mouse to talk to someone who knew what they were talking about. D) most of the FOH workers had an attitude and was not very friendly or professional. E) This business apparently mistreated my family before. I’m extremely grateful for the Waterfront for making my moms birthday party great, but also thank you Charmant for wasting my time while being completely rude to my family. It was such a great experience! Please chose to respect your time and not come here and go to a place...

We stopped in and had drinks on the roof top. I must say I was disappointed in the view. The seating and lounge area all face down town with the roof structures blocking the view of the river. But the drinks were strong and tasty and we enjoyed them. After our drinks we went down for dinner. The service was ok. I'm not sure our server ever introduced himself. He seemed busy and it took him a while to come back to our table for different reasons. Although there were only a few other people dining around us. But he did give good drink recommendations. Our drinks again were good. The cheese curd appetizer was delicious. The dill sauce served with it was really good. It seemed like we waited a long time for our food to be served. My fiance ordered the steak. He requested bluecheese crumble on top and extra on the side. We're not sure if the server was confused but what we were served was questionable. The steak itself was so dry, for a medium rare it had absolutely no juice in it. The sauce drizzled ontop was good, but not enough moisture to make up for the completely dry steak. My fiance stated that it seemed as though the chef literally rung all the blood out of the meat before cooking it. Plus there was the condiment dish with a chunk of blue cheese we had no idea what to do with at our table. The chicken I ordered was fairly dry itself, not nearly as dry as the steak though. The flavor was good and the veggies were tasty. I crumbled up the blue cheese block and added it to my dish! All in all though we were not impressed and my fiancee stated we would not be...