Consistently good menu from top to bottom (not just a couple of "best" dishes - very consistently good). They also do some creative things with some of the soups and sauces using local and seasonal ingredients, and they are always a great add - not weird creative, just improvement creative.
Very spotty service.
A bit overpriced, but not too bad.
Noise creates the big variable for Monsoon. There's an unusually simple, open format with tables very close together. It's less an issue of being generally too loud than the fact that you overhear what your neighbor table is discussing. In some cases it has felt more like family style dining than not. So we often will start talking with the people sitting next to us, or they start talking with us (and we rarely, if ever, do that anywhere else) and talk about the food or something equivalently not-personal. Sometimes we are not so lucky, though and that's when even the great food isn't enough to overcome that hassle.
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