The Montien Resort Hotel Restaurant Review

Tonight, with the girls out of town, Stan and I were left to dine alone. We usually take these stag opportunities to go to the more expensive restaurants or the all-you-can-eat high-end buffets... like we did tonight at The Montien.

The Montien is one of Pattaya's finer hotels (rooms in the 3,000 baht to 5,500 baht ($80-$150) per night range and up), overlooking Pattaya Bay. The entrance is on second road just after the intersection with Pattaya Central Road, just before The Hard Rock Hotel.

There are 2 restaurants off of the beautiful open-air lobby. There is a Chinese restaurant called Marco Polo, and then there is the restaurant we went to, called "La Mer", which is an all-you-can-eat buffet. The price is 695 baht, plus 10% service charge, plus drinks... and the drinks are comparatively expensive, as per usual: Heineken is 140 baht per bottle, and a glass of house wine is 250 baht. I settled on the 260-baht caraffe of hot sake... actually I settled on 4 of them, one after the other.

While the sake was quite nice, the buffet was only so-so. There wasn't very much choice on the cold side of the buffet (although the shrimp with cocktail sauce was my favorite), the choice of salads was meager as well (although the Waldorf salad was very, very good), and the grill only had 5 meat selections (and only 1 fish selection). I also noted that there was no sushi at all... surprising for a seafood-focused restaurant.

On the hot buffet, there was a slightly better selection of food set out in chafing dishes, but unfortunately the food had set too long by the time we got to it, and the selections weren't that appealing. However, they did have a carvery that had an excellent ham.

The desert table was above average, and my one happy discovery of the evening was that one of the desserts was set upon a wedge of acorn squash... which is something that I did not think could be found in Thailand.

Anyway, The Montien's all-you-can-eat buffet compares in many ways to The Marriott's similar buffet (service, price, ambience), but as far as the food and selection goes, it falls a fair bit short of the mark.