One of my friends just flew in to visit for a while, so once I picked her up from the airport this evening, we wanted to get a relatively quick and light dinner afterwards. We both like sushi, so we decided on trying out Kase Sake and Sushi at the Spanish Palms Plaza in Spring Valley, Las Vegas, Nevada.
They had five different kinds of tasting menus of varying different price points—the four-course Hanban for US$32, six-course vegan Yasai for US$29, six-course Nami for US$48, seven-course Oomori for US$56, and premium nine-course Kase for US$120. As you might have guessed, we went for the premium tasting option that was named on their menu after Chef Toyonishi.
First was some salmon tartare with a side of chips. The chips were very good, but the tartare was a bit oversauced for my preference.
Next was yellowtail carpaccio topped with kimchi. This was a little bit of a mess of flavors because it felt like there was way too much going on in this dish, but if you consider it without trying to analyze the flavors too much, it was still pretty decent.
Next up was nigiri service, which came out three pieces at a time.
The scallop and sweet shrimp were good, but the portion of the fish was way too small relative to how much rice they gave—so much so that the flavor of the rice sort of just overwhelmed the taste of the fish.
The crab was… interesting, to say the least. It was a bit rubbery and wasn’t exactly the best in quality. My friend said that she would’ve rather just preferred to eat a stick of imitation crab, and that probably would’ve been better than this crab.
As an intermission from nigiri service, we got a spicy tuna hand roll. I’m usually not a fan of spicy tuna at sushi restaurants because I feel like it’s probably one of the cheapest items you can get, but this one was actually done pretty well—something crunchier was mixed in with the spicy tuna to give it an extra flavor and texture enhancement. My friend and I both commented that we liked this.
We went right back to nigiri service afterwards, with our next plate being tuna done in three ways—akami, chutoro, and otoro.
This had the same problem as the previous pieces of nigiri, in that the portion size of the tuna was so small that it just tasted like we were taking bites of rice with a sprinkling of fish. You can actually sort of tell that the akami is so ridiculously thin that it’s almost see-through on the edges.
The next set was seared wagyu beef, salmon roe, and what was supposed to be uni topped with caviar and gold leaf… but they ran out of uni. Instead, they substituted it with more of that spicy tuna mixture because the waiter had overheard us talking about how much we liked it, though I guess he missed the context about how I liked it only in comparison to other sushi restaurants’ spicy tuna, and not that I would prefer it over any other premium fish.
The salmon roe was interesting here, because it almost tasted like it had been diluted. Usually when popping the eggs in your mouth, you get a burst of thick liquid that coats the inside of your mouth with ikura flavor, but this tasted much milder and thinner, as if it had somehow been watered down.
Our last piece of nigiri was eel under a square of foie gras and topped with toasted coconut flakes. This was the one and only truly satisfying and deeply delicious item of the entire tasting menu. The amount of fish and foie gras was reasonable compared to the amount of rice, and the toasted coconut added a nice supplement to both the texture and the flavor.
Our final course of the meal was… a little lunch tin of side dishes.
This would have been fine as an appetizer or something, but this is probably one of the most confusing final courses of an omakase-inspired tasting menu that I’ve ever had. The quality of this was very underwhelming and did not even exceed regular side dishes you’d receive for free while, for example, dining in at any Korean restaurant (i.e., their “banchan”).
When I said that little lunch box was the final course, I meant it—they included no dessert in the nine-course tasting menu. They gave us some peach and watermelon gummy candy along with our check instead.
Here are some photographs I took of the interior of the restaurant.
Except for one single other group, it remained empty throughout the dining room during our entire meal, even though we went at a reasonable time for dinner. Based on my experience with this “premium” tasting menu, I guess it makes sense why they’re not doing too well.
Upon our arrival, I requested to be seated at the bar area so that we could see into the kitchen and watch the chef prepare our food while dining, but apparently that is not something that they offered, and we were seated at a booth instead.
The bar also remained empty throughout our entire meal.
| Kase premium tasting menu ×2 | $ 240.00 |
| Sales tax (8.375%) | $ 20.10 |
| Gratuity | $ 35.00 |
| Total | $ 295.10 |
This was absolutely not worth it. Especially for an off-Strip restaurant, I would expect much, much more from a meal that costs almost $150 per person after sales tax and gratuity.
In the waiter’s defense, he did recommend the smaller seven-course tasting menu for $56 per person instead. The fact that he took initiative to point that out to us as the most popular option indicates to me that I probably would’ve had a better experience with the $56 option, but if it’s the case that the $120 version is so poor in value that the waiter wants to draw attention away from it, then they should probably just remove it from the menu.
I think there are two ways that they can rework the premium nine-course tasting menu to make it work. First, they can either reduce the price down to somewhere in the $70-80 range, which would keep it as a strange tasting menu, but at least it wouldn’t be egregiously overpriced. Alternatively, they can double the portion size of fish on each piece of nigiri, get rid of the weird trio of side dishes at the end of the meal, replace it with a different warm specialty dish, expand the tasting menu to ten courses, and add in a dessert at the end.
Oh, and they should never, ever let themselves run out of sea urchin, but in the outerworldly chance that they do, they should replace it with a different premium item, not spicy tuna.
They have sake in their name, so I’m guessing maybe they’re better at serving alcohol than they are at crafting premium tasting menus? Regardless, in the state that this restaurant is in now, and on the basis of my experience today, I cannot recommend Kase Sake and Sushi.