I have to hand it to the Monaco for being one of the few hotels that still puts forward an effort to have a nice restaurant that is intended to brong people in off the street, and not just be something mediocre for the guests. I still haven't forgiven the current operators of The Olympic for abandoning dinner service in The Georgian Room.
Oh dear. I meant to say "bring people in off the street", not "brong people in off the streets". I don't even know what it would mean to "brong" someone. It sounds sort of dirty.
It's not that tech people don't care about good food, it's that they just want something simple and quick for lunch. SLU isn't really a neighborhood, it's a corporate campus, and those tech workers go back to their actual neighborhood (Cap Hill, Ballard, Fremont, etc) to eat for real. How this obvious fact has escaped so many restauranteurs is beyond me.
@4 yeah, there's not much of a tradition of a leisurely lunch hour. No reason restaurants couldn't make it as destination dinner places, I guess, but then the software people are irrelevant.