Madison’s Cafe

MY FAVORITE! !!! absolutely love madisons, the family that works here and the music they play

Called and placed my order they asked me to repeat it twice.
Showed up to pick up my order brought it back to my office and all I see and taste is a flat dry breaded piece of chicken with no flavor, looked like it may have been deep-​fried twice because of the amount of grease oozing out on to the plastic to– go container. I hope the salad I ordered for later in the day will make up for this deep fried failure. Okay so I went ahead and started in my salad. — gross. It is soupy and over drenched with dressing.

Overpriced. A small salad is almost $ 6 and it’s literally 1 cup of dressing soaked iceberg lettuce and is served on a small bread plate. Main entrée was $ 15 and about 1.5 cups of pasta.
Service ok, but slow. Asked for more bread, took 10 mins and didn’t come with more butter. Asked for more butter and that took an additional 10 mins. Otherwise pleasant service. They weren’t busy at all.
Over cooked. My seafood and veggies were chewy and lacked flavor. The pasta was cooked fine, but the sauce smelled like something was rotten.
Used to come here a lot, but they have since lost quality of food, shrunk the amount you get, but raised the prices.
I even thought I would pay these prices at a nice Italian restaurant that had ambiance, but this place has a cafeteria look with carpet.

I used to be a regular here at the local Madison’s Café until the quality of food and customer service took a steady drop. I did not want to give Madison’s Café another try since my last occurrence, but my sister insisted. Tonight, we stopped in for dinner and ordered our favorites, the combination salad and pasta con broccoli. I was displeased when my sister pulled out a piece of grey hair from her salad while the owner continued her conversation with another table. Instead of addressing the issue, she decided to make a joke out of the situation. «The waiter must have thought you ordered the Saharra salad». After the awkward silence, she agreed to take the half-​eaten salad off of our tab. When the owner personally delivered our food, I was surprised to learn that the noodles were under cooked and the burger that my father had ordered did not have cheese. Sadly, this is not the first time Madison’s Café has put a bad taste in my mouth. We will not be back anytime soon.

Been going here since I was a toddler and they were located off of Harvester. The owner is a jerk. He can be found behind the bar on Wednesday nights drinking beer from the bar taps while everyone else… including his wife… are working. All of his best bartenders quit or got canned. The food quality has gone downhill, but the prices are skyrocketing.

AMAZING. Best food ever. The dressing is so good! One of the best Italian restaurants in the area next to T’Arcobassos.

Lunch was disappointing to say the least. First of all, none of their lunch items come with a side, but you can pay for one for $ 4.49. That would be fries, salads, soups., etc. Then we ordered the Chicken Marsala lunch special, for $ 9.99 because at least it came with a side. They served us a grilled piece of chicken with mushroom gravy poured over it. When I asked the waitress why the chicken was not coated first she told me it was on the dinner portion! Will not be back. Do not waste your money.

Ordered fettuccine with shrimp & scallops. There was absolutely no taste. Zero, like they forgot to add any seasoning. I never use salt and pepper, but that wasn’t even helping. Had to resort to eating it with my bread & butter to finish it.
The plus was the extra jugs of soda they brought to the table for ‘do it yourself refills’, but maybe that was just a convenience to check in less often. Don’t think I’ll be back to find out.

Madison’s is an A-​OK stop in O’Fallon!
My parents live right down the street so we went there for dinner one evening out of convenience… it wasn’t terrible, just not that great. The place is pretty dated, as some Unilocalers have noted, but I actually find that kind of charming. It was cool to see so many happy diners, and many appeared to be regulars.
Our server was pretty darn awesome. He was so attentive and hard working, and he made our dinner even better. We had drinks right away; they have a decent sized wine list but I had bourbon (it was a long day, don’t judge.)
The menu has so many things to choose from, and I loved that they had a «lighter fare» section since it’s kinder on the waistline. Next time I’ll order a regular menu item and just eat a little of it, because neither one of the two lighter fare items I tried were that great. The Pasta Sydney was actually okay, and that one is made with linguine noodles, fresh asparagus, and chicken breast tossed with virgin olive oil, white wine, parmigiano, and a touch of garlic butter. The dish I ordered, Julie’s Zesty Pasta, was kind of the opposite of zesty. It was a colorful bowl of yellow squash, zucchini, asparagus, red onions, mushrooms, and chicken sautéed in olive oil and fresh garlic, tossed with bowtie noodles and topped with parmigiano. It was so bland that I had to use quite a bit of salt. Maybe that’s what I get for not just ordering the biggest plate of manicotti I could find on the menu.
I wouldn’t mind going back to Madison’s at all, and I’ll try something new next time.

Excellent Italian food with amazing service. Pasta is made to order and beers are serviced ice cold. Highly recommend!

I have been here for lunch and dinner on several occassions and have never had a bad experience. I was there on 7÷18÷14 for a rehearsal dinner. The staff did a fantastic job. They were very attentive never letting water glasses empty. They had a great presentation when the food was ready. I had the Lasagna with the combination salad. Both were phenomenal. Kudos to Julie and the team working our event. Everything was top notch!

As a frequent diner, I always have great service & find it very clean. The combination salad is a MUST. The Madison Stir Fry is my favorite dish.

The name of this restaurant leads you to think of a café, when if fact the menu is Italian. Very misleading! Madison is not an Italian name. The dining facility was smelly, & tables sticky. I felt like I was visiting a retirement home… Would never recommend this place to others.

As a child I often visited a Madison’s Café on old highway 94 in Saint Charles, with that location having long since been out of business I was told that another Madison’s was operating nearby in O’Fallon.
This Madison’s has a clean interior, there’s a bar and two separate sections for seating one for smoking and one for non-​smoking. The employees were very friendly and service was great. The seating inside is a little tight and the décor is fairly simple.
I decided to try the Lasagna when visiting and was pleased to receive a boat shaped pasta dish with lasagna in it. The noodles were fresh, the sauce was a little watery but well flavored, and several different kinds of cheese were used. This was excellent lasagna. I also tried a few appetizers, the barts (breaded artichoke hearts) were very tasty as well, and the toasted ravioli’s had a great meaty taste and texture.
Overall, I was very pleased with my experience with Madison’s Café and would definitely visit again.

Good food but too expensive when compared to their local competition for value and quality. Pastas dont come with a salad and avg well over 12.00 per smaller portion. Bar patrons and staff at Madisons are very friendly and the primary reason we go.

Love their combination salad and cavatelli!!!

Madison’s Café kind of reminds me of a buffet restaurant WITHOUT the buffet… It has that wallpaper décor that you would see at a Ponderosa Steak House or Old Country Buffet…
My sister suggested I get the Burnt Sandwich (beef tenderloin) and since I did not want to spend $ 18.95 on the veal, I went with that… The sandwich was really good, and very filling. I only ate about half. The fresh French bread it came on was perfectly delicious…
I found it odd that none of the sandwiches or entrée’s come with a side, but the portions are generous, so you are not going to go hungry if you don’t order a side. I did appreciate that most of the entrée’s were also offered and priced in «half orders».
Our service was not so great, especially after we received our food; it took about 15 minutes for her to return with our check.

Well we went here thinking that this might be a place for a Sunday brunch after church… Wrong. No brunch. Figured oh well its almost lunch time anyways. We were seated in an extremely wobbly booth with food slopped all over the wallpaper from 1982. This place actually looked like an old catering reception hall.
The host sat us and took our drink orders. The bread was brought out and as Jon T. mentioned it was just bread. Nothing warm or even worth having 2 pieces of (but we were starving so food was food). I would not buy the bread at the grocery store and maybe a little head would do it some good… And that is only some.
Our waitress came over and asked us what we wanted to order… No introduction no greetings… NOTHING! Told her we weren’t ready and then walked away. 15 minutes later she came and said «are you ready yet”— Mind you we were already a bit annoyed at the selection and the fact that there was no brunch and I was sitting next to someones ketchup all over the wall so the attitude just made everything 10 times worse.
We ordered our food off of the lunch menu. Sandwich came with nothing… not even cheese. My fiancé couldn’t even get his order out before she was asking what kind of cheese he wanted. When he asked if cheese came on it the answer was «NO» and he continued to say that he wanted sour dough bread… apparently she still was not listening as he got white.
The Host came back around a got us our refills as she passed our table a number of times and never checked on our drinks. —We never got refills. The pasta I ordered was the pasta with broccoli — tasted like shrimp and the roast beef sandwich was all fat.
We will never be back with the combination of bad service and not so great food. She got a tip… but that’s only because we didn’t feel like waiting for the change.

I had visited Madison’s with friends about 15 years ago, when they were in their old location on Hwy 94. Then Ms T and I were there 2 – 3 years ago in their new location on Hwy K. We planned this event to meet the same friends with whom I had dined 15 years previously.
It did not start out well. The smoke from the bar was so heavy in the lobby area where you check in that we could not wait to be seated. How hard would it be to put in a ventilator that pulled air through the bar from the lobby area? We were seated near the front window before our friends arrived and it was still so smoky we asked to be relocated. We ended up in the back room as far from the bar as possible. We thought we could still smell smoke, but our noses were probably just saturated.
A large basket of complimentary bread was supplied but it was very ordinary white bread in Italian loaf shape, very commercial. It was something you could buy at Schnuck’s, but probably would not and it was not served hot. Being hot would have helped. We did not eat a lot of it. For appetizers we ordered fried calamari and portabella mushroom fries. We had tried and liked the calamari on our previous visit. They were still pretty good, served with roasted sweet red peppers and flash fried spinach and a remoulade. The calamari was tender, perhaps slightly under fried, since the coating was a little pasty. All in all, I would order these again. The portabella mushrooms are just OK. The coating is heavy and the flavors of the shrooms are lost. They are served with a mild creamy horseradish sauce. The portions for both orders were generous.
We each had a small house salad with their sweet creamy Italian dressing and a lot of shredded provel cheese, which I tolerated in this application. I found the dressing too heavy and sweet.
Around the table our friends ordered; chicken tetrazini and linguini with chicken livers. Both were served with a lot of white sauce and looked pretty good. I have had the livers before and did like them. Ms T ordered seafood ravioli and liked it a lot. It also had a very heavy dose of the white sauce but had pretty good seafood flavor. Ms T did comment (complain actually) that it was not hot. All three of these were half orders which are still pretty large. I ordered lasagna. It was a very good sized serving. Madison’s is very heavy handed on the sauce on all dishes that I observed. It is heavy to a fault. My lasagna had a thick layer of béchamel which I would ask them to leave off next time. If there were a next time. There won’t be, however, because I did not anticipate the use of provel in the lasagna. I simply did not think to ask. I just assumed it would be mozzarella or provolone or some combination of actual cheeses. Provel is an abomination. With the combination of the heavy dose of béchamel, red sauce and provel the lasagna was a big gooey mass. The lasagna noodles were lost.
This is probably a three star place. But I am the one handing out the stars in this review and I had a two star experience at best. The combination of heavy cigarette smoke, the use of provel and excessive use of overly sweet sauce on the pasta tempts me to make it make it even lower. We will go back only if our friends want to. Our clothes reeked of cig smoke when we got home.

Madison’s is more of a family place than an edgy, hip sort of restaurant. It’s a good place to take your parents/​grandparents. I’ve never had bad service or a bad dining experience. The food is not extravagant — a few pasta selections, nightly dinner specials, salads, sandwiches and burgers, etc. If you don’t mind a salad that’s pretty much not at all healthy, their «combination» salad is pretty good.
The bar is functional but again, not really hip or trendy. Basic but decent drinks.
I’d recommend it for family dinners, maybe business lunches with more conservative clients, etc. It’s not a challenging place but it is not really supposed to be, either.