Whiskey and Wine Saloon

I never came here with the previous owners but the lady who currently owns it is nice and friendly. She lives an hour and a half away so she usually only comes in on the weekends. The food here is some of the best food in town. They have a good variety of stuff and they do not skimp on the cheese and toppings with their pizza. There’s a good amount of seating at the bar and at regular tables too so its easy for groups to sit together. There’s two pool tables and a pull tab machine and I have yet to see the place very packed. I think they have a DJ on the weekends too. I would definitely recommend eating here if you’re in town! The food quality here is definitely a step above places like USA and Harvest Time. They also have two women’s and two men’s bathrooms which is pretty awesome in my opinion.

We decided to try the Whiskey and Wine Saloon after reading the wonderful exchange between the owners and the community on the Monticello News, Neighborhood Watch, Info Page. They seem to care about the neighbors surrounding the restaurant and the well being of the town in general. We also love to support our local businesses.
Our waitress, who is also the owner of the establishment, was very perky and bubbly when we sat down at 1:30 p.m. and gave us menus and our drinks right away. We ordered pizza fries, chicken wings and hamburgers, and she put in our order. After that, everything proceeded to go downhill. She refilled our drinks a couple times more with a smile on her face and asked if we were doing OK, but after half an hour and our food still hadn’t come, she started avoiding us and stopped refilling our drinks. Finally after 42 minutes, she came to inform us that a huge take-​out order had been put in and thus, pushed our order down the priority line, but she reassured us our food would be out in 3 more minutes. I find it disingenuous that she knew about the huge order a long time ago and just choose not to inform us until they started cooking our food 45 minutes after we sat down so we had no choice but to sit there and wonder how much longer our food was going to be.
My understanding is that an appetizer comes before the main meal to whet your appetite but not at the Whiskey and Wine Saloon. You get it simultaneously with your meal, but I guess that was good for us or else, it would be another half hour of more waiting. The pizza fries tasted like a concoction teenagers came up with — sounds like a good idea but tastes pretty bad, i.e. soggy french fries under chewy, tasteless cheese and sweet tomato sauce. The chicken wings were surprisingly good but the presentation was not. The pool of oil and juice the wings sat in did not look appetizing and oozed out of the basket making a mess on the table. The hamburger and fries were just OK, nothing special.
Since the owner surmised by then from our silent treatment of her how angry we were waiting for our food, she never came by to check on us after we got our meals. In fact, she sat 5 feet away at the bar chatting with her friends and other patrons. We had to go over to her and insist on our check so that we could leave. She decided to hand that task over to another waitress who promptly forgot to get us our check. We had to remind them again we wanted to leave, and after almost 2 hours, we did so. This was not a dining experience but an ordeal not to be repeated again.

This place is now the Whiskey and Wine Saloon, and has taken on an entirely new life of its own.
They actually stayed open after 2 last night — shocking for this sleepy little town.

There comes a time once a summer season where a group of 6 – 10 F**kin’ Illinois People (FIPS, as I hear we are referred to) migrate from the bustling city of Chicago to the small beach town known as Monticello, IN. You see, a large group of us college friends living in the city, and some new friends we’ve picked up along the way, enjoy visiting our friend from college working her dream job in the dreamy Hoosier State.
Our plan is simple: travel by car to the land of «two-​bedrooms with parking, a yard, in-​unit washer/​dryer, and a dishwasher for $ 400 a month», load up on sustenance, cruise on the boat in Lake Shafer all day, get silly, take over a bar, and make decisions that should only be made by freshman college girls. Our usual poor decision spot closed a few months ago and, this time around, Sayler’s became our latest watering hole debacle.
And so begins my open letter to Sayler’s.
Dear Sayler’s,
Thanks for gracefully dealing with the presence of by 6 FIPS and our 4 local friends this past weekend.
From the moment we hit the boat at 11AM Saturday morning we knew that any establishment in the Monticello area would be «happy» to have us as patrons. Your close proximity to our home base made you an easy target for our debauchery and fun that we surely brought.
Your $ 12 beer buckets and less than $ 3 shots insured that we would be even more fun than we already were by giving us crazy amounts of liquid courage. This helped us negotiate with the DJ when choosing songs for the bar (we were sad to find out he did not have «Midnight Train to Georgia»), populate what was a vacant dance floor, and demonstrate to the rest of the bar patrons how to do planking exercises in multiple places throughout the bar. I can only hope that we were not only a fun presence to be around, but that we also taught your customers important fitness techniques.
Although we felt we may have overstayed our welcome by the end of the night (thanks to the girl who tried to «start something» in the bathroom with a friend), thankfully we had one friend who was able to keep us in check, offer a shield or protection, and help us get on our merry way. We still hope you welcome us back the next time you are in town.
Signed, Me
PS Terri, I hope you had a great 50^th birthday party. We sure had fun!