Ah, Vegas, land of celebrity chefs and restaurants so ultramodern they look like something out of a Kubrick production. We’re just back from a three-day jaunt to Sin City, where we sought reasonably priced meals that would please our foodie palates. We met with mixed success, but, at one of Vegas’s chicest resorts, discovered an unexpected bargain.
There’s a reason buffets are so popular in Vegas. Everything about them—the variety and quantity of food, the temptation to gorge yourself—speaks of excess. We tried two: Le Village at Paris and Wicked Spoon at the Cosmopolitan. Le Village is set in a Disneyesque replica of a French town, complete with streetlamps and cobblestone floors. It’s cute in a cheesy way. I find it best not to be too cynical about the themed casinos: sure, everything’s fake, corny as all get out, and designed to separate you from your money, but it’s more fun to roll your eyes a couple times and just go with it (or, if you’re a nerd, to read it all as postmodern. The city’s a semiotician’s delight).
The food at Le Village was solid, but the restaurant disappointingly featured only a few French dishes scattered amongst such buffet clichés as sushi, crab legs, a salad bar, and a carvery. There was even, for some reason, a Greek station featuring gyros and grape leaves. Oddly enough, the pastas and the cioppino (?!) were tastier than the good-but-not-great French fare (which included choucroute garni, ratatouille, cassoulet, and an overly-sweet duck a l’orange—no steak frites, coq au vin, or boeuf bourguignon). Desserts were nice, especially the creamy miniature crème brulees.
If Le Village was solid, however, Wicked Spoon was excellent. This innovative take on a buffet features small tapas-style plates rather than large trays of food. Its dishes are creative (barramundi with ‘drunken’ grapes, goat cheese ravioli in sage-sweet corn sauce), attractively and even wittily presented, and, most of the time, delicious. And at $22 for brunch, it’s one of the Strip’s best bargains. Wicked Spoon is worthy of a review all on its own, so I’ll cover it in a separate post.
We also tried Canaletto, an Italian restaurant located on the faux St. Mark’s Square in the Venetian. The hostess asked us if we wanted to sit inside or “outside, on the patio,” under the painted sky: cheesy, but fun, and it allowed us to listen to the trio playing classical music. Whenever a Chinese tour group happened by, they launched into the Chinese national anthem—which happened three times in a row! John ordered risotto with seafood and cuttlefish ink. The risotto was cooked well but not perfectly—it lacked the ‘bite’ of ideal risotto—and the seafood was abundant. But the flavor of the cuttlefish ink seemed muted and so the dish lacked the mysterious oceanic quality it can take on when perfected. I had the bigoli alla padovana: thick spaghetti-like pasta strands in a tomato sauce with mushrooms and house-made sausage. This dish was hearty and satisfying. The pasta was toothsome and the mushrooms (I’m guessing dried porcini) gave the sauce little bursts of umami.
Our other dinner, at the Café Bellagio, was uniformly disappointing. The service was so slow that it took two and a half hours for our party of eight to be served and finish, and our waiter seemed dumbfounded when we asked him to split the check, as though this were some outlandish request. He claimed he’d have to get his manager’s approval. The menu was uninspired and overpriced, offering the likes of $11 chicken tenders and $17 cheeseburgers, and the Thai chicken salad we split was soggy and mediocre. Maybe that’s why the restaurant was half-full despite its prime location alongside the Bellagio conservatory. It’s a pity: the café has beautiful décor, marked by salmon-colored walls, ornate fabrics, and deeply coffered ceilings, which is totally incongruous with its pedestrian food. It serves the function of a diner—it’s open 24 hours to accommodate hungry gamblers—in a casino that considers itself too posh for one.
And speaking of pedestrian food in plush settings, Vegas is home to many “upscale” Chinese restaurants where you can eat General Tso’s chicken off a white tablecloth for $27 a pop. That doesn’t sit right with me. I’ve got no problem with General Tso’s; I have it for takeout all the time. But there’s nothing you can do to fried chicken in sweet sauce that can make it worth $27. If you’re going to charge that much for Asian (or “Asian” food), do something exquisite with your recipes, like Andrea Reusing does at Lantern. Or be up front about the fact that you’re serving Chinese-American standards, and price accordingly.
Rant aside, we were pleased with at least one pricey place in the Bellagio: the Jean-Philippe Patisserie, which serves tasty crepes and an array of tempting pastries. There are now many places in Vegas to get your crepe on, which is a great development for when your flight gets in between meals or you’re weary of gambling and need a little pick-me-up.
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