Restaurant Review - Cyprus Grille

Yesterday was our first wedding anniversary and we went to St. Louis and stayed at Embassy Suites for the occasion. As I am not a huge fan of St. Louis, we opted to eat at the hotel restaurant, Cyprus Grille, rather than try to find a nice restaurant elsewhere. We both dressed up and I was under the impression that it was going to be pretty fancy.

First off, the menu was small. The appetizer selection was acceptable but the entree list was tiny. They only had two steak options, one of which was KC strip (as part of a surf-and-turf with jumbo shrimp scampi), and the other was flat iron. No ribeye, no sirloin even. There was a "sandwiches and pasta" section of the menu, with exactly one pasta dish in it, which was inexplicably not available after 5 PM.

Alex ended up getting the surf-and-turf (come to think of it, isn't surf-and-turf generally steak and lobster?), which came with seasonal vegetables and garlic mashed potatoes, and I got grilled chicken in a sage cream sauce, with garlic mashed potatoes and asparagus. I also ordered a glass of Chateau Ste. Michelle riesling (my favorite white wine), and a bowl of French onion soup, because I had actually never had it before.

Service was SLOW. It was a Saturday night at like 7 PM, and we were one of maybe 5 couples there (there were 20-25 tables it looked like). There is no reason it should have been that slow. It took nearly 30 minutes for my soup to even arrive. The first thing I noticed about the soup was that the green onion garnish had been chopped unevenly. This is not something I would previously have noticed, but I seem to have turned into a bit of a food snob. The soup itself was decent-tasting (though all the onions had sunk to the bottom, and the crouton was soggy... not sure if that's normal for French onion soup or not).

The rest of the meal arrived approximately 10 minutes after the soup. The chicken tasted okay but there were TWO breasts, pounded flat. I've never ordered anything in my life that came with two chicken breasts before (outside of like KFC). Also the asparagus, while cooked to an acceptable level of tenderness, had no seasoning at all on it. It could have at least done with some salt. It tasted boiled or steamed; roasting it would have helped tremendously. Also the stalks were very very thick, almost too thick.

Alex said his steak was overcooked (he ordered medium rare and it looked closer to medium or medium well to me) and chewy (owing to the cut of the steak). Also the scampi came lying on top of the steak, as opposed to in a saucer of garlic butter like all previous shrimp scampi I've seen. (He said they were good though.) Also his entire dish inexplicably had mint sprinkled all over everything. I have never seen that before, and I tried it for myself, it WAS mint. The only thing I can guess is that it was supposed to be parsley or cilantro and somebody in the kitchen got confused.

Final tab was $75. I threw in a 10% tip, because while the service wasn't HOSTILE, it was very very slow and unprofessional. (Also I was a bit perturbed coming into dinner because we had gone to the free alcohol reception, and I ordered a vodka-and-Sprite which tasted like a vodka-and-club-soda. Yuck.)

The next morning/noon we went to Denny's; I got a Super Bird and Alex got a BLT with extra bacon, and I must say, it was far more satisfying than Cyprus Grille. I was almost inclined to go back and tell them so, but we had already checked out by that point and I'm not really that evil.