Deca Restaurant and Bar

Walk into the revolving doors spun by suited men in gloves on Pearson and take the elevators to the 12th floor into the beautiful lobby of the Ritz-Carlton. deca is divided into a restaurant to the left of where you enter and a lounge/bar in the back. In the center of the 12th floor is a beautiful indoor fountain. Considering it is in the Ritz, the decor is hard to beat.

Restaurant:
I came here for lunch during Restaurant Week for their $22 prix fixe menu. For drinks, I ordered the Health and Happiness ($14; awesome name, right?) - I can't recall what's in it, but it was delicious and left me surprisingly buzzed after one drink.

For starters, I had the Lobster and Chestnut Bisque - pretty standard for lobster bisque. For entree, I had the Wild Salmon with Artichokes - which was delicious and perfectly cooked.  I had the Lemon for dessert - a giant piece of moist lemon tart accented with fresh raspberries berries. I know a lot of restaurants cut their portion sizes for Restaurant Week, but I was perfectly stuffed and content from my meal at deca. Service was very attentive. At one point, a server accidentally dropped a fork on my chair. He apologized and I came out of it with a complimentary drink.

Bar:
A good friend of mine and I decided to catch up on a random Saturday evening here. I arrived early (for once) and ordered a drink while waiting at the lounge and surveyed my surroundings. The bar area is super small - there were literally 7-8 seats. All the rest are tables and lounge chairs. And the clientele? About 15 men ranging from their low 30s-60s (throughout the entire night, the male-female ratio probably average 10:1). There was also live music on and off through the night.

I ended up ordering 3 drinks, including the Pear Necessity (yummy, refreshing pear drink served in a martini glass with grapes). My friend also had 3, including one called the Hot Toddy - this warm cocktail that came with an entire jug on the side that tasted like delicious warm tea. All cocktails are $14 and divided into "Old School" and "New School." While the menu wasn't all that extensive, I really liked all the drinks.

Half a point off for service - our waiter was nice, but not very attentive. He kept disappearing and we had to flag him down a couple of times to get water/drinks.

To be honest, all you need to impress me is to have excellent scrambled eggs.  That's pretty much an automatic 4 stars.  

Service was great.  Coffee was good.  Atmosphere is awesome as you're eating in the lobby of the freaking Ritz.  

Usually I would want to talk about at least a couple dishes but this one dish won me over quite easily:  the smoked salmon tart on their brunch menu.  Overwhelming is frequently the word that comes to mind when one thinks cold smoked salmon and salmon roe, but this was far from it.  Neither overpowered the relatively delicate scrambled eggs and tart crust and I'm gonna say that this was worth the usually inflated hotel restaurant price.  

If you're a fan of smoked salmon in the least, you're going to need to give this dish a try.

Went during the restaurant week for the prix fixe, the food was alright but the service was horribly slow. There were very few serving a lot of tables the food took forever to come out as well.