Center Cafe

We visited in early April had were pleasantly surprised with our meal.

We would return without hesitation.

The salad was excellent, "one of the best "she's ever had, declared my wife. Even I will admit it was a very good salad.

The Rib Eye and Herbed French Fries was very good, as was the free range chicken.

It's probably a bit pricey for most, but good value for the quality of food.

Open in winter! Exceptional decor and ambiance (fireplace very nice). AMAZING snow peas in the pasta with mushrooms - really flavorful!! Really good warm bread and olive oil/vinegar. You have to be in the mood for salad and pasta or pizza because that's all they had. Very good pasta and salad - not sure about the pizza. Very good service.

We had an excellent dinner here. The food and service were outstanding. It was a cold & rainy night in Nov and the place filled up. Being from Northern California, we can be a bit spolied, but this meal was as good as something we would have in the Bay Area.

Be sure to visit if you are in the Moab area.

We chose this restaurant because of its Zagat rating and reviews from this and other publications. We all enjoyed our salads. From there is was downhill. My wife had crabcakes as the main course. They were spongy with very little crabmeat. We should have sent them back. My shrimp and polenta dish was below average in taste and portion. It was presented well. Our guest was not impressed with her pasta and vegetable dish. Overall this restaurant was extrememly disappointing and would never consider returning.

The 10/14/05 NY Times had recommended this restaurant, and we decided to splurge on our last night in Moab (in 10/06) by eating there. The prices were what I'd call moderate luxury and the food was nouvelle cuisine. There's no denying the positives: the interior of the restaurant was lovely & romantic and the food was excellent. If we hadn't had a problem there, we would simply have ignored the incredibly pretentious service. But: we quickly became aware of the fact that a (professional) photographer was stationed at one of the tables taking myriad photos of something. The extremely frequent flashes from her camera were incredibly annoying and distracting. When we asked our server what was going on, she said it was someone from "Salt Lake" Magazine and she (our server) seemed very dismissive of our situation. Later she offered to move us to another table, but there were very few empty tables and the one being proferred would not have improved our situation. By that time our appetizers had arrived and our server assured us that the photo shoot would end "in about two minutes". Well; one of us apparently had a problem telling time, because the photography didn't end until literally moments before we'd finished our entire meal. It was wrecking our evening - and when I'm paying a somewhat significant amount of money for dinner at a romantic restaurant, I don't expect to contend with camera flashes going off near my table at very frequent intervals throughout the whole evening. After we again complained to our server (since the "two-minute" situation was obviously totally erroneous) and we asked if the owner was there, she returned quite awhile later and told us she'd spoken to him and he was the chef that night and he would give us free desserts. We told her (politely) that we'd much rather have no flashes going off in our line of sight and she just walked away. By the time we'd finished eating, we were too full to have dessert and I told our server that I wanted to speak to the owner. She said he was very busy in the kitchen. Certainly we understood his time constraints, but there didn't seem to be another way to rectify the problem. We waited for twenty minutes and didn't begrudge the owner the delay, although near the end I joked to my husband that perhaps he intended to keep us sitting out there until we finally gave up. Ultimately he appeared at our table and we'd decided to begin with accentuating the positives. However, it was obvious from the get-go that he was incredibly annoyed and incredibly impatient. He said "You're the only ones who have complained all evening!" I was tempted to say "I don't really *care* what other people do (or don't do) - and maybe they were just reluctant to say anything". Then he said - very testily - "I don't know if it was your intention to get a free meal, but apparently it's your lucky night and that's what you'll get!" I attempted to tell him that we were going to suggest he just take the appetizers off the bill (they were 1/3 of the cost), but he just cut me off and strode away. Then he returned a minute later and said "I want you to know that it's not your server's fault!" We said we were very aware of that (even though we actually had a negative opinion of her attitude). So, we left a bigger tip for the server than what we'd intended to....

What I liked most about this place is that the waiter was totally candid with us about what was best on the menu. I really appreciated that. He actually steered us away from a dish I almost ordered. And I was really happy with my ultimate choice. Lovely interior, charming atmosphere.