The Latest Food Goss!

Las Vegas, USA

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A Touch of Class

What:     The Dorsey

Website: Click here

Where:  3355 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Rating:  

Why:

Adjacent to some gaming areas in the Venetian casino complex sits a gem of a lounge bar called The Dorsey. The Venetian is a little more upmarket than the casinos further down the strip and this lovely bar is not the place to wear your trackies and Nikes.

It is swanky without being ostentatious and is where the young and hip, middle-aged and wealthy and all of those in between come to start, finish or continue their casino-hop. A visit to The Venetian is probably incomplete without a visit to The Dorsey.

Like many lounge bars on the Strip, this lounge is intimately lit, partly by the small lamps on or near your low table in front of the lounge you’ll be sitting on, partly by the lights of the bar and the gaming machines outside, and partly by the almost too white smiles of the mainly female wait-staff all rocking their LBD’s. It is an unashamedly smooth and sexy vibe inside but equally high-class, and each of the wait-staff who will serve you are not only obviously visually attractive but also eloquently well-spoken.

Post-9pm you will enjoy the beats of a talented line-up of DJs. At other times, music is otherwise smooth modern house blending into the background so you can take a breath and have a conversation at low volume.

Their lengthy list of in-house cocktails is impressive and they will also happily serve up decent versions of your favourite cocktails that are not on their list if you ask nicely. However, you will likely be quite content with what is on their list and you will likely be quite happy to tip well if the service we received was anything to go by (and we suspect it is).

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Great Bar at the Grand

What:     Lobby Bar

Website: Click here

Where:  3799 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Rating:  

Why:

Just past the lobby of the MGM Grand is a delicious little wine lounge and bar called (perhaps unsurprisingly) “Lobby Bar”. The dress code is technically “casual”, but even though you can get away with wearing your Nikes and Lorna Janes, when you walk in you’ll probably convince yourself to at least up the ante to smart casual, because this wine lounge is lovely and at least a little swanky.

The lounge is dimly lit, mainly by the lights of the bar on the convex curved inside wall and by the gaming machines in the large gaming section outside, and that gives it a smooth clubby feel, which is matched by the dulcet tones and demeanour of the nightclub-attired wait staff ready to help you start or finish your night – or day – as the case may be … this is after all Las Vegas, which never sleeps.

There is an already impressive cocktail list but they will happily make you cocktails off list if you prefer. That said, the menu cocktails we tried were very tasty and the service we found to be excellent. It helps if you tip well – but we were served very well despite paying our bill and tip just before leaving.

There does seem to be a raft of negative comments on Yelp! about the service at this place. Our experience and those of others we know was quite the opposite.

Being a wine lounge and bar, no food is offered. Our waitress told us that apparently in Nevada you can either serve food and drink with no smoking allowed, or allow people to smoke and only serve drinks. Because it’s apparently less offensive to drink around smoke than eat around smoke right? Let’s save that discussion for another day.

So, again like many places in Las Vegas, smoking in the venue is fine, but the ventilation is excellent so the smoke (to whiny non-smokers like us) was never an issue.

Smooth up to date music plays non-stop which gives the lounge an active and exciting ambience when coupled with the dazzling display of lights at the bar and outside. Later in the night, a DJ amps it up a bit and plays music choices seemingly attuned to the crowd at the time, and it is well appreciated.

This fine lounge and bar is a must-visit venue when in Vegas.

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Yep, It’s a Buffet

What:     MGM Grand Buffet

Website: Click here

Where:  3799 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Rating:  

Why:

The first dining venue to the left if you enter the MGM Grand from Las Vegas Boulevard, after the Centrifuge and just past the Sports Book, is the rather unimaginatively named “The Buffet” – which is fitting really because the buffet really was quite unimaginative.

Its presentation is clean and well-lit and space does seem to be used well. The seats at the tables and in the booths are reasonably comfortable so it’s an easy place to rest for a quick bite before moving on.

Otherwise, the buffet is a little forgettable. Not bad, not great, definitely a buffet – but that’s pretty much it.

A kind description might be passable food at a passable price with barely passable service. Another description might be a low-rent dining experience with underwhelming service at a second class price in a second class venue in a first class casino.

All whining aside, the service was efficient and mildly sociable – not cold, not warm, but still there. Great friendly service would probably be wasted on a plain buffet like this one, although the guy tending the bar was quick with a smile and a joke – he was straight out of a Billy Joel song, although we didn’t hang around long enough to find out if there was “some place he’d rather be” … and there probably is.

It is a fixed cost to dine here and you are required to pay upon entry. In a tipping country, this places you into an interesting position because you are asked whether you want to pay the tip up front or pay it afterwards. Call me picky, but a tip is to indicate the level of service you got, not the level of service you hope to get – so we opted to pay that later. This was lucky because we’d feel pretty miffed to have paid a 20% tip for the absence of service we received in full. Granted, there’s not too much they need to do given that it’s a buffet and you are technically paying for all you can eat and it’s all ready to go, and perhaps the staff are quite used to being ignored or mistreated by drunken people who just lost their money at the craps tables – and we’re certainly not needy patrons, but surely it’s not that difficult to sustain at least a fake smile for more than a fleeting second and make eye contact at least once while regurgitating the usual spiel you probably said a thousand times today.

Perhaps if you pay the tip up front to the person on reception (who is not the person who shows you to your table and/or “serves” you), the service might be a little more professional like in every other venue in this casino, but that seems unlikely.

In fairness, there was actually some quality food available if you include the decent sized prawns/shrimp and crab legs, and the lamb and beef cut from the bone while you wait are also good quality. Otherwise, though, the food was regularly refreshed and passable – not bad, not incredibly tasty, but paled into insignificance when compared with the better offerings.

For the USD$39 price, you would probably expect slightly better, and we also had a discount of USD$25 thanks to some freebies offered to us elsewhere in Vegas. So, we really only paid a net of USD$14 each, which was pretty much value-commensurate. However, the food filled us up and was satisfying at least to that extent. That should be at least the minimum provided, but then again, that is what this venue provided.

There were some tasty things available, but it’s probably a “visit once only, and only then if you get a discount” place.

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Casual Asian Glam

What:     The Grand Wok and Sushi Bar

Website: Click here

Where:  3799 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Rating:  

Why:

Among the better casual but quality dining restaurants on offer in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, The Grand Wok and Sushi Bar exhorts the talents of its Executive Chef, Bill Chan.

Open from 11 ’til 11 on most days and 11am until 1am on Fridays and Saturdays, this glossy well-lit restaurant looks part cafe and part classy restaurant thanks to the glass enclosed private dining room in the centre, surrounded by booths and tables (like Happy Days but Asian). The restaurant offers, and provides, tasty and high quality Pan-Asian cuisine at a reasonable price.

The service is casual but friendly and the food is swift. You can choose from the larger a la carte menu or from the shorter appetizer and half-serve menu if you want to move on quickly to your next gaming table or get quickly to your show.

The kitchen is open to be viewed by all at the back of the restaurant and it is a well-oiled machine, whose staff will happily beam smiles back at you if you happen to be looking in their direction when they look out at the customers, as they do frequently just to see what’s going on.

While the cuisine is a Pan-Asian mix of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean and Vietnamese, the interior of the restaurant seems Japanese inspired and provides welcome viewing relief from the flashing lights of the gaming machines section in the casino right outside. Not that those lights don’t also make for a stimulation of the senses, but the interior of the restaurant provides a serenity that is otherwise somewhat lacking in the hustle and bustle of the casino.

What casual Asian dining experience is complete without fortune cookies? These are of course freely available upon your exit, and if you expect the customary crisp cookie that immediately crumbles and half falls to the floor when you extract the small typed fortune, you won’t be disappointed – although the parts of the cookie that you manage to catch in your mouth are tasty too.

Incidentally, my fortune advised me to be more real – which for a moment made the venue seem more rap than ramen – but otherwise the experience was quintessentially Pan-Asian and the food was excellent.

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A Safe Bet

What:     Citizens Kitchen and Bar

Website: Click here

Where:  3950 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Rating:  

Why:

The casino resorts in Las Vegas can be quite confusing, even (or perhaps especially) when you’re sober and not gambling. Everything is designed to ensure you are forced to walk through noisy flashing light gaming areas before you can find whatever non-gambling thing you are looking for.

But even die-hard gamblers and revellers out to “tear up the town” have to eat – and so these resorts usually do restaurants well. Sometimes you want fine dining, sometimes you want buffet, sometimes you want swift and cheap take away – and sometimes you want comfort food. Tucked away in the middle of the “Restaurants” section of the Mandalay Bay Casino and Resort, Citizens Kitchen and Bar is all about the comfort food.

The venue’s website accurately portrays it as “Serving up breakfast, lunch and dinner 7 days a week, 24 hours a day” and having “Carefully crafted menus featuring American comfort food”. It’s a pretty basic promise, and that’s what it delivers on. It’s certainly not health food – don’t come here if you’ve just come from the gym and want a skinny half-strength decaffeinated soy latte with a side of quinoa oats and half a cranberry. However, it’s comfort food and it certainly won’t kill you – you might even really enjoy it.

We attended the restaurant when we had just arrived off the plane in Vegas, tired and a little hungry. That doesn’t normally make for the best setting if you are going to review a place, and we hadn’t deliberately set out to review this venue – but we were hungry, and the service was really good, so we decided “Why not?”.

The restaurant is brightly lit inside with tiled deep green walls adorned with numerous framed pictures. Outside the lighting is slightly dimmer, in line with the lighting of the general casino walkways.

We were greeted at the door and cheerfully ushered to our table outside (it’s all indoors of course, being in a casino, but with many of the casino restaurants, you have outside inside and inside inside – this was outside inside). We had barely sat before being greeted by our waiter for the evening, who was very helpful while at the same time very laid back and casual. If the restaurant served comfort food, he was the comfort waiter – a good combination.

There are separate menus for “Breakfast & Cocktails” (that’s when you know you’re in Vegas), “Lunch, Dinner & Cocktails”, “Late Night” and “Kids menu”, and all offerings are reasonably priced (with the average main dish costing pre-tips around USD$18, or USD$12 on the Kids Menu). Soft drinks are also bottomless.

The Breakfast menu offers all the usuals as well as a selection of “signature” breakfasts. The Lunch & Dinner menu offers a range of appetizers, soups, salads, sandwiches, burgers plus larger “signature” dishes including steaks, fish and chips, meatloaf and a number of other American favourites, supported by a good variety of sides.

A selection of USD$9 desserts is also available plus the day’s selection of cakes and pastries. There is also an impressive selection of cocktails, beers and other assorted beverages.

Whatever your state of mind, wealth, gaming success or sobriety, if you’re in search of tasty comfort food delivered with good service, this is a good place to come.