Monalisia — Restaurant in Monroe Township

Mona Lisa was not worth the very long drive our party of 6 had lunch and dinner on Wednesday 7/24/24. Three people ordered off of the lunch menu and 3 others ordered of of the dinner menu. Well 1st of all if you don’t like chunky red gravy (sauce) this is definitely not your Italian place to eat. The chunky red sauce was on a $35 dollar dinner entree consisting of shrimp and lobster Fra Diablo that also had a bowel full of liquid red juice sitting under the pasta. The entree had no taste & was not good at all. I even told our excellent waitress that I didn’t like it and the chef doesn’t know how to make gravy (sauce). Two other dishes at our table that had a red sauce that was consistent of a orange looking tomato soup in color, taste and texture. It ruined the homemade gnocchi and a chicken dish that was served. We had three appetizers that we split and they were the bruschetta, stuffed eggplant, and the crab cake! Well The crabcake was totally filled with everything, but good crab meat and you know good crab cakes if you ever had a Bobby Chez crabcake. The eggplant was OK and how can you go wrong on the bruschetta. The Sweet eats cake on the dessert menu was very good. So it’s sad to say that 5 of us did not enjoy our meals at this Italian restaurant who definitely needs much more work on all of the red gravy (sauce) entrées. The restaurant may also take into consideration the plates they are using for their lunch entrées. The plates are way too small and your food is spilling over onto the table no matter what entree you order. The prices were in line with other restaurants if only the food was good. There is one exception, I asked what the market price of the crab grave over linguine and I was told it was $52 in the middle of crab season. So needless to say our $50 apiece meals we’re not worth the 40-60 minute trip...

My review is based solely on customer service and not the food as we did not get a chance to eat here. When we arrived there was about 10 empty tables. The hostess asked if we had a reservation for which we did not. If at this point she would have stated that they only accept reservations I would have totally understood. She did not. Instead she asked us to have a seat. She proceeded to walk around the restaurant and the empty tables for about ten minutes. She then came back and said she would have no idea when they could seat us as they were holding all of their tables for reservations and if someone got up she could possibly seat us but it might not be for hours. Of course we are not going to wait for hours do I politely said no thank you we will go somewhere else. At this point she said good luck finding a restaurant without reservations. I did find another very good Italian restaurant for which we were able to be seated. I feel the customer service was lacking at Mona Lisa. If you only accept reservations that is understandable but we were treated like unwelcome guests who if they could they would try to fit us in but expected us to wait with no idea how long. This is an unreasonable expectation for dinner. Either you only accept reservations or you try to give an estimate of the wait . I could not wait to try this restaurant but sadly will...

Friday night at 6 we called to see if we could order a family style dinner. I wasn't expecting to be able to, since you are supposed to order ahead, but they allowed it. We ordered chicken Parm with light sauce. Since my husband likes it light and I like heavy sauce, I asked for sauce on the side. They told me it would be an additional five dollars, but since I had sauce in the fridge from dinner the previous night, I decided to not pay extra. The dinner came with bread and salad. The dinner for four fed three adult women, two children, and a man. I still have about a third left. It was delicious, the salad dressing was phenomenal. The only thing I was not happy with was the fee we were charged for not using cash. My sister gifted us a gift card for Christmas. She paid with a card and was charged the non cash fee then. When we used the gift card, we paid another non cash fee. It was only a couple dollars, but we are trying to save every cent we can right now. We didn't dine in, but I peeked around the restaurant. I was surprised to see how cute it was. I worked in mostly Italian restaurants when I was younger and for some reason they are always a bit outdated. This restaurant was...