It was about 12:30 on a Tuesday when I pulled into the lot off South Broadway and walked into the Redwood Room for the first time. The lunch crowd was thin — a couple of Mayo staff in scrubs at one table, a pair of retirees sharing a bottle of something red at another. The room itself stopped me for a second: dark wood paneling, low lighting even at midday, a long bar running the left wall with bottles stacked two rows deep. It felt like a place that had been here a while, which it has.
The Redwood Room sits inside the Kahler Grand Hotel, which opened in 1921 and has been feeding Rochester’s medical visitors, their families, and the occasional local ever since. That last group — the locals — tends to be overlooked when people talk about this place. It gets written off as a hotel restaurant, which is fair in the sense that it is literally inside a hotel, but unfair in almost every other sense.
I ordered the French onion soup and a half sandwich. The soup came in a proper crock, the gruyère browned well on top without being scorched, the broth underneath rich and dark. The bread held up. These are not complicated things to get right, but plenty of kitchens don’t. The turkey and swiss half-sandwich on sourdough was straightforward and exactly what it needed to be — good bread, not skimpy on the filling, nothing fancy.
The bar is worth noting on its own. They pour generously, the bartenders know what they’re doing, and the selection of whiskeys in particular is solid without being showy about it. A Manhattan here is a proper Manhattan. The pricing is reasonable for downtown Rochester — you’re not paying a hotel premium in the way you might expect. Cocktails run around $10–$13, which is in line with most of the other options along that stretch of Broadway.
What the Redwood Room does that not many Rochester spots can match is atmosphere — specifically, that old-bar-in-a-grand-hotel atmosphere that takes decades to develop and can’t be replicated. The wood is real, the booths are wide, and there’s something about the proportions of the room that makes conversation easy. It’s quiet enough to talk, which is underrated.
Dinner is where it stretches a bit more: steaks, walleye, pasta dishes, a rotating nightly special. I’ve had the prime rib on a Friday evening and it was genuinely good — properly seasoned, served with horseradish that had some heat to it, and accompanied by a baked potato that was actually cooked through. Nothing about it felt like banquet food, which given the scale of the Kahler, is a real achievement.
The place is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Breakfast is fine — eggs cooked right, decent coffee — but lunch and dinner are where it earns its keep. Parking is either in the attached ramp or street parking on Broadway. You can walk in without a reservation most days at lunch; dinner on weekends you’d want to call ahead.
If you live in Rochester and you’ve never eaten here because you assumed it was for out-of-towners, that’s worth reconsidering. The Redwood Room is the kind of place that rewards actually showing up.
