Frommer's Las Vegas 2004

MID-STRIP 145
title of Best Southwestern Restaurant in Vegas, but it might just be the Best
American Restaurant. Not the place for intimate romantic encounters, this is
decidedly the fun high-end restaurant in town, lively and playful, with a menu
to match. If you thought Texas cuisine was limited to just barbecue, you’re
wrong. Here’s a menu that mixes the haute and nouvelle with the down home,
and the results should leave you pleased.
For this reason, we urge you to take some chances with appetizers—we’d go a
bit more plain, though with equal satisfaction, with the main courses. All dishes
use classic Southwestern flavors, and more importantly, spices, and combine
them with just the right nouvelle cuisine influences. A tamale pie’s spicy crust is
cooled by its filling of roast-garlic custard topped with crabmeat, while that gourmand’s
delight, seared foie gras, is most happily paired with a more humble corn
cake, itself dressed up with pineapple salsa. Molasses-coated quail is dainty and
sweet tasting atop arugula, poached pear, and a bit of cambazola cheese. Be sure
to try the hearty, serious, chewy breads, which can come in such flavors as pesto
and chipotle. While you may justly feel tempted to make a meal of appetizers,
don’t. For then you would miss the signature dish, a bone-in rib-eye, served cowboy-style
(think Western spices), an utterly tender, flavorful dish (topped with a
mile-high tower of crispy onions) that makes it hard to imagine a better piece of
meat. Desserts are perhaps not quite as joy producing. The noted Heaven and Hell
cake (alternating layers of devil’s food, angel food, and peanut-butter mousse
covered in chocolate ganache) reads better than it tastes, though the chocolate
bread pudding is more like a heavy soufflé than a boring basic bread pudding.
In The Venetian, 3355 Las Vegas Blvd. S. & 702/414-3772. Reservations recommended for dinner. Main
courses $10–$17 at lunch, $21–$30 at dinner. AE, MC, V. Daily 8am–10pm.
MODERATE
See also the listing for Spago (p. 141), an expensive restaurant fronted by a more
moderately priced cafe.
Cypress Street Marketplace Kids FOOD COURT Often when we go
to a Vegas buffet (and we are not alone in this), we sigh over all the choices, all
those different kinds of pretty good, if not better, cuisines, there for the taking, but
of course, we can’t possibly try everything. And yet, in some of the higher priced
venues, we are charged as if we can. Here, in this modern version of the classic
food court, it’s sort of like being at a well-stocked buffet; there’s darn fine BBQ
(including North Carolina influenced pulled pork), wrap sandwiches (grilled
shrimp for one example), Asian (including pot stickers and Vietnamese noodles),
decent NY pizza, plump Chicago hot dogs, peel-and-eat shrimp and lobster chowder,
a bargain-priced build your own salad bar, plus pastries and even wine. You
get a card when you enter, and it’s swiped whenever you choose something, and
then you pay the one price after you eat (on real plates with real napkins and
forks). It’s slightly more convenient than the traditional pay-as-you-go food court,
certainly more efficient than a cafeteria, and a better value (especially given how
large the portions are) than many a buffet. And with the range of food, an entire
family with very different tastes will all find something satisfactory.
3570 Las Vegas Blvd. S. (in Caesars Palace). & 702/731-7110. Everything under $10. AE, MC, V. Mon–Thurs
11am–11pm; Fri–Sat 11am–midnight.
Mon Ami Gabi BISTRO This charming bistro is our new favorite local
restaurant. It has it all: a delightful setting, better-than-average food, and affordable
prices. Sure, it goes overboard in trying to replicate a classic Parisian bistro,
but the results are less cheesy than most Vegas attempts at atmosphere, and the