Beefbar Monaco is so much more than an Instagrammable dessert

Right, this one was special. €350 for two including wine, not a single steak ordered between us, and I’ve been thinking about the king crab taquitos ever since.

The seafood being a highlight at a place called Beefbar is not something I saw coming, and that set the tone for the whole meal. Kobe beef gyozas that have clearly been got at by a butcher. Croquettes that were honestly the best we’ve ever had. Mini Wagyu shawarma kebabs, charred at the edges, on a wheat galette with tahini. And then a chocolate bar painted to look like a raw joint of marbled beef, blowtorched and carved at the table while everyone nearby pretends not to watch.

All of that, and the actual steak list never got a look in.

We’d had this one on the list for ages. It’s the original, it’s been sat in Fontvieille since 2005, and the whole Beefbar group grew out of this room. The name puts a picture in your head straight away, and that picture is wrong.

Ok so what actually is it?

Not a steak house. Or, not only a steak house.

There is a very serious beef list in here, and they do not mess about with it. Black Angus from Double R Ranch and Creekstone Farms in the States, Black Onyx from Australia, Wagyu from Snake River Farms and, of all places, Namibia, French Continental Heritage from the Giraudi selection, and proper Japanese Kobe. Filet mignon, center cut filet, a chateaubriand for two, a double ribeye for two. All present, all correct.

But the front half of the menu is street food, and that’s the bit that makes this fun. Tacos, gyozas, quesadillas, ceviche, tiny burgers. Luxury versions of things you’d normally eat standing up at 1am, made with the same beef that’s going on the grill for the €200 steaks. That’s the whole concept, and it works really well.

The room helps. Green marble, brass, the sea just there through the glass. It’s fancy without being stiff, which is a hard balance and plenty of places in Monaco get it wrong in both directions.

The street food was the main event for us

Look at those. The Wagyu Kebabs, €28. Mini Wagyu beef shawarma on a wheat galette, red onion, tomato, and tahini underneath doing a lot of quiet work.

They are soo good. The beef has actual char on it, which sounds like a low bar until you’ve had the version where it’s been warmed through and given up. This had crust on it. It tasted like the beef mattered, because at this place the beef is the entire point and they clearly aren’t sending the offcuts to the street food section.

Then the King Crab Taquitos, €39.

Crispy king crab tacos, cashew nuts, satay sauce. Completely different job to the beef. Cold, sharp, crunchy, the shell shatters properly, and the cashews give you a second texture on top of the crab.

These are the ones I keep going on about. They come up again in our Fenix in Manchester review, where a £27 truffle crab salad turned up and just could not compete with a crab taco we’d eaten weeks earlier for less money. That’s how much they stuck with me.

That branded balsamic bottle in the background, by the way. They do their own. Of course they do.

Gyozas, croquettes and the one dish that didn’t earn its spot

The House Gyozas, €29, are the ones to order. Kobe beef, ribeye ham and beef chorizo in the filling, so it’s a gyoza that has been got at by a butcher, and the bases were properly crisped rather than sadly steamed. The dipping sauce is dark and sharp with chilli through it and there is not enough of it, which I say as a compliment and also as a complaint.

Now, the fried chicken. It was great fried chicken. Genuinely, no complaints about it as a thing to eat.

But it was probably a waste of a dish choice here, and I regret not swapping it for something more specific to this place. You can get very good fried chicken in a lot of restaurants. You cannot get a Kobe beef gyoza or a king crab taquito in a lot of restaurants. We had a finite number of plates in us and I spent one of them on the least Beefbar thing on the table. Learn from me.

And the croquettes. Two of them, the size of your fist, mayo and pea shoots and a hit of lemon zest over the top. Molten in the middle. If you only get one fried thing, get these, they were so deliciously rich, easily the best croquettes we’ve ever had.

Obviously the wine was fantastic, and more reasonably priced than I expected. We paid €58 for a bottle of red, and there were plenty of bottles below €70. They also do a €105 champagne which I’m not saying is cheap by any stretch, but not bad at all for Monaco.

Right, the chocolate

So this is the famous one.

It arrives on a wooden board with brass handles looking exactly like a raw joint of marbled beef, Beefbar signed across the top of it. Then a waiter appears with a blowtorch, warms the whole thing through, and carves it into slices at the table.

Here’s the important bit that the photos don’t tell you: that red and white marbling is not packaging. It’s the dessert. The marbling is painted straight onto the chocolate and up close it’s incredible. Watch the caramel come out of it as the knife goes through.

Is it the best thing on the menu? Probably not but it was delicious. It’s a very good chocolate dessert doing a very good impression of a steak. We were pretty full after all of our street food and we were worried it would be too heavy but it wasn’t. It combines really rich caramel & chocolate with a light mousse & biscuit so it’s really not too much after a full meal. Order it, absolutely, it’s part of the experience and the table next to you will be watching. Just don’t build the whole visit around it, because you’ll have already eaten the better food by the time it lands.

Top tip: skip the steak entirely on a first visit. Order four or five street food plates between two and treat it like tapas. You’ll taste far more of what this kitchen can actually do, and you’ll spend less doing it.

What you’ll actually pay

€350 for the two of us, including wine. So €175 each.

There’s no dressing that up, it’s a lot of money for lunch. But I’d pay it again tomorrow, and that’s the honest answer, it really was that good and there’s still so much of the menu left that I want to try.

For context, on Beefbar’s lunch menu the street food and starters run roughly €23 to €59 a plate, and the beef itself goes from about €79 up to €250 depending on which cut and which farm you’re pointing at. Which is exactly why the street food is the order. We ate across a good chunk of that menu, had wine with it, and still came in under what two steaks on their own would have cost us.

Here’s the one nobody seems to mention though. There is a set lunch menu, and it comes with a glass of red, rosé or white included. Chicken suprême and frites is €28, veal fillet and frites €39, beef filet mignon and frites €49, and there’s a tagliata or a beef tartare with a starter or soup of the day at €29. So if you want to see this room and eat properly without spending €175 a head, that is how you do it.

You can check the whole thing before you go, Beefbar publish their menus as PDFs and the lunch and dinner lists are both on there. Prices above were still on Beefbar’s published menu when we checked again in August 2026, so give it a check before you commit.

Beefbar Monte-Carlo, 42 Quai Jean-Charles Rey, Monaco. Lunch runs 12:00 to 14:30 daily, dinner from 20:00, and you’ll want to book.

Quick answers

Is Beefbar Monaco worth it? Yes. We paid €350 for two including wine and I’d do it again. Order the street food rather than the steaks and you get the same quality of beef for a fraction of the outlay, in a much more fun format. It is still a special occasion price, there’s no getting around that.

What is the Beefbar marble chocolate bar? The signature dessert. A chocolate bar made to look like a joint of marbled beef, brought to the table on a wooden board, blowtorched and then carved into slices in front of you. The marbling is painted straight onto the chocolate rather than being packaging, and there’s caramel and mousse inside. It’s the thing you’ve seen on Instagram, and it’s good, it’s just not the best thing you’ll eat there.

How much does lunch at Beefbar Monte-Carlo cost? We paid €350 for two including wine, so €175 each, sharing street food rather than ordering steaks. On Beefbar’s lunch menu street food and starters were around €23 to €59 a plate, with beef from about €79 to €250. There’s also a set lunch from €28 with a glass of wine included.

Do you need to book Beefbar Monaco? Yes. It’s the original Beefbar, it’s in Fontvieille, and it’s busy. Lunch is 12:00 to 14:30, dinner from 20:00.

What should I order at Beefbar Monaco? The King Crab Taquitos at €39, the House Gyozas at €29, the Wagyu Kebabs at €28 and the croquettes. Don’t spend a course on the fried chicken, however good it is, order something you can only get here.

Final verdict

Worth it. 5 out of 5.

I came in expecting an expensive steak house with a gimmick dessert and got something far more interesting: a kitchen that takes proper Kobe and Wagyu and puts it in a taco, and does it well enough that the €200 steaks start to look like the boring order.

€350 for two is a lot and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But everything that came out of that kitchen was excellent, the room is lovely, the chocolate bar is a great bit of fun at the end of it, and it’s the rare expensive lunch I didn’t spend the walk home doing sums about.

So yes, go. Just go for the street food, not for the dessert you’ve already seen on your phone.

Prices are what we paid in August 2026. Things move, so check before you book.