Following the recommendations of some overwhelmingly good reviews, a friend and I decided to give the chef’s tasting menu at Sparrow + Wolf a try. Located in the Chinatown neighborhood of the unincorporated town of Spring Valley in the Las Vegas Valley in Nevada, Sparrow + Wolf is an American restaurant with some menu items inspired by and integrating elements of Vietnamese cuisine.
If you’re familiar with my blog and have read past posts where I share my experiences dining at restaurants, you may be expecting some thoughtful insight about my opinions of each dish. However, today, you will notice that I won’t have that kind of depth about every plate. There is an intriguing reason for that, which I will describe at the end.
The meal started with bread service, but with a twist—we received oxtail hummus with crispy chickpeas and curry oil, to go along with some warm naan.
Visually, I thought that the oxtail would be a bit dry due to how thin it was cut and how dark it was, but somehow, it still had a high level of tenderness. Preliminary bread service at restaurants usually just comes with an assortment (or sometimes even just a single type) of bread accompanied with butter, so it was a nice change to have bread service here be comparable to an actual dish.
After bread service was a trio of dishes forming the first of three courses. First up was bánh cuốn with ground duck, wood ear mushroom, habanero, and coconut.
Next was a duo of oysters. The raw one had cold-pressed rhubarb, strawberry, and opal basil flower; the cooked one had red yuzu kosho butter, kaffir lime, and rock miso.
I really like the flavor of oysters, up to the point where I will still like extremely pungent oysters that other people would otherwise call too fishy or oceanic. Knowing that, I’m wondering whether this raw oyster might have been too strong for the average person, but I personally thought it was amazing.
To conclude course one came Peruvian steelhead trout topped with ikura roe, Koji mango, and ninja radish.
The sauce was my favorite part of this dish and I ended up drinking all of it like soup after I was done with my trout.
Before transitioning to the next course, we opted to add on a supplement of Hudson Valley foie gras with milk bread, pineapple, onion chili compote, and mole blanco.
Foie gras is one of the favorite foods of my friend who joined me for this dinner, so of course, we had to get it as a supplement. Foie gras is very calorically dense and high in saturated fat, so we opted to only get one to share between us.
This was high-quality foie gras that we both liked. The pineapple worked great to cut through the fattiness and balance out the flavor, while the milk bread and sauce added a multi-faceted element of umami to the dish.
Course two started with Spanish octopus atop squid ink risotto adorned with garlic chili crunch and Thai basil.
Next was robiola agnolotti with pickled ramps, morels, and shiitake mushroom powder.
Lumina Farms lamb loin with artichoke, saffron, matbucha, almond, and vadouvan marked the start of course three.
Our final entrée of the night was black pepper and honey pork flank with sweet potato banana puree and peanut nước chấm.
To close the tasting menu, we were served a dessert made from Maracaibo crémeux, Vietnamese coffee ice cream, Okinawa black sugar, and condensed milk espuma.
This is the waiting area at the entrance of the restaurant. I had a reservation and was brought inside right away so I didn’t get to take a seat in the miniature lounge, but I snapped a photo on the way in.
We were fortunate enough to be seated at what I thought were the best seats in the restaurant. The bar had a little two-person section nestled on the edge where the perpendicular cut-off was from the main bar. Being seated here allowed us to get a nice partial view of the kitchen while dining, while also being able to see the rest of the bar and half of the restaurant’s dining area. This area was also isolated away from the main areas of foot traffic, which made for a much more private experience.
This was a small art installation outside near the front entrance of the restaurant.
| Chef’s tasting menu ×2 | $ 284.00 | Foie gras supplement | $ 29.00 |
| Sales tax (8.375%) | $ 26.20 |
| Automatic gratuity (20%) | $ 62.60 |
| Total | $ 401.80 |
The table to the right shows how much we paid.
So by this point, surely you are wondering what the intriguing reason is that made it difficult for me to give in-depth feedback or analysis about each dish.
To put it as simply as possible, every bite of the same dish tasted different. No, I do not know how or why. I did take care to ensure that each bite had a little portion of all the ingredients, but even then, each bite was very diverse in flavor.
To be clear, this is not a situation where the ingredients were not mixed properly during preparation or anything. It wasn’t that there was a skew or imbalance of flavors at all. Each bite tasted like it had its own whole and complete flavor profile, yet still different than it was mere seconds ago.
As a result, for most of the main entrées, it literally felt like each dish had four or five miniature dishes in it at the same time. I’m sure that now you can imagine how difficult it is to not only describe, but even just remember, my thoughts on every dish when it tastes like I actually had about 25 main entrées.
Overall, this is one of the most eye-opening and captivating dining experiences I remember having for a long time based purely on the quality of the food. Because I go to a lot of chef’s tasting menus, even a lot of the really good ones sort of just blend in with each other when I look back on them after several months. I really appreciate restaurants like Sparrow + Wolf that experiment with their dishes in a way that makes them stand out as memorable.
Sparrow + Wolf has both a chef’s tasting menu and an à la carte menu, so if you don’t want to commit to a dinner that’s US$200.00+ per person, you can order individual items for a smaller meal instead. If this pricepoint is within your budget, I highly recommend the food here. I especially encourage trying it to people who have at least exceeded an intermediate level of past dining experience, because I think that additional degree of culinary understanding will help you truly realize how impressive the food is here.