I’m a bit behind on blogging right now, and after my recent trip to Hong Kong, I have since taken and finished another entirely separate trip (which I will blog about soon). However, in between those two trips, I returned to home base in the Las Vegas Valley to take care of some errands, and while in town, I met up with one of my friends who wanted to check out a new restaurant called Hayworth in Henderson, Nevada.

I am often fairly selective with restaurants that I blog about. I understand that online reviews can have significant influence on the success of a business, and even though I maintain that I am just a casual blogger who likes to write about my life, the reality of the situation is that my blog posts end up on the front page of search engine results for restaurants with surprising frequency. Thus, when I write reviews, I usually only write about chef’s tasting menus or omakase experiences such that someone else can go to that same restaurant and replicate my same experience. I avoid writing about à la carte restaurants because a bad experience could be attributed to myself doing a poor job at assembling a meal from the menu options, so for those kinds of restaurants, I usually do “food photo dumps” where I just share pictures but don’t go into too much detail.

With that being said, I do really want to stick with the idea that this is just the personal website of some random Asian guy from America. I don’t want to hold myself to too high of a standard for my blog, because I want this to be a fun and enjoyable way to leave a record of my life online, and I don’t want to fall into the trap of not releasing content because I don’t think it meets an arbitrary, meaningless standard.

The fact that I had to give that introduction probably foreshadows how I feel about this restaurant. However, I do think it is important to note that just because I did not have the best experience does not mean that you also will not have a good experience. As of today, Hayworth has stellar reviews online, and when I went in-person, I did not see any signs or receive any requests from staff that may have prompted those skewed reviews (i.e., nobody asked me to leave a positive review). Surely, that many people can’t be wrong, so make sure you’re only taking my opinion as one data point, rather than just trusting me entirely.

So with that out of the way, this was our meal.

 
For our starter, we ordered some warm challah knot bread topped with poppy and smoked sea salt.

At first glance, the texture seemed nice and it looked very flaky, but upon biting into it, I realized it was very dry. It was not flaky at all; instead, it was quite crumbly. It reminded me of when I was younger and my mom would tell me to buy dinner rolls at the grocery store, but I forgot to look at the expiration date on the packaging so I ended up accidentally grabbing a pack that expires tomorrow, and my mom would try and make up for my mistake by microwaving the bread, but that would only just make it worse.

The bread came with a side of whipped chicken schmaltz. My heart isn’t healthy enough for me to be eating globs of saturated fat, but I still gave it a taste—not only because I wanted to see what it was like, but also because I was curious if the fat would help soften the bread.

No, I did not like it. And no, it did not help the dryness of the bread.

For my beverage, I asked my waitress to ask the bartender to surprise me with their best non-alcoholic drink. She asked me to narrow it down a bit, so I let her know that I like fruity flavors. She came back with a mixed berry mocktail.

This was extremely intense in flavor and extremely sweet, as if it was overloaded with syrup. That wasn’t functionally a problem for me, though; I thought the flavor itself was good, and I had no problem sipping some of the drink and then following it up with a sip of water to help dilute it and make the taste less overwhelming.

For our second appetizer, we got steak tartare made from hand-chopped filet. This was prepared tableside as cart service.

As you can probably tell from the photographs, there were a lot of ingredients added to the steak and egg yolk. The server was at it for a while.

You might have noticed a strange blue ingredient mixed in with the beef. We asked what it was, and the server revealed that it was… Takis Blue Heat Rolls. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love when restaurants make innovative, experimental dishes and add new twists to their menu. But I feel like there is still some kind of threshold somewhere that should not be crossed. I’m wondering whether putting blue Takis in beef tartare exceeds that line.

I’m someone who loves beef tartare for the flavor of the beef. Unfortunately, this beef tartare had way too much going on for my preference. It had too many additions that masked the flavor of the beef, and then to top it all off, the blue Takis were so strong that they masked the flavor of the additions. Ultimately, it sort of just tasted like a mess.

My friend consigned this dish after trying only a little bit, so I ended up eating an overwhelming majority of it. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t dislike it so much that I would let it go to waste, so I finished it all. Throughout the process, I was secretly hoping that some magical culinary miracle would happen where my tastebuds would suddenly become taste-blind to the Takis and then a completely new flavor profile would emerge, but alas, the entire thing just kept on tasting like Takis.

I don’t regret having this, because now I can say that I went to a restaurant and they crushed some Takis into my beef tartare, and that just sounds absolutely hilarious. However, I definitely would not have this again.

For my main entrée, I ordered two pasta dishes. The first was cavatelli with brown butter whey, Grana Padano, soft herbs, and black pepper.

This was my favorite dish of the dinner. It was a bit too salty for my preference, but it was still delicious. The texture of the cavatelli was perfect. The overall flavor profile had a great combination of traditional savoriness with an unexpected kick of light earthiness. I think a lot of what made this dish great was the sauce, so the shape of the cavatelli was ideal for absorbing and retaining the sauce.

The second pasta dish was a disaster. It was beef tongue agnolotti with crème fraîche (which was comically written as “créme fraiché” on the menu), chicken jus, chili crisp, and duck fat crumble.

I’m someone who has tried the most expensive cuts of A5 Japanese wagyu, but even then, believe it or not, my favorite cut of beef is… tongue. There is just something about beef tongue that is very delicious to me. Maybe it’s because I’m tasting my food, my food is tasting me, and thus, great balance emerges into the world. However, there is a caveat to that.

I like to categorize beef tongue into two broad groups: Korean-style 혀 and Mexican-style lengua. Of course, there are many more ways to cook tongue than just those two variants, but basically, the key difference for me is whether it is sliced and seared or diced and braised. I still like the diced and braised style of cooking tongue, but I really like the sliced and seared way. Sliced-and-seared tongue is usually lightly or minimally seasoned, and because of the method of preparation, the flavor of the tongue gets to speak (or lick) for itself. And the best part of it all? The texture is chewy, bouncy, and snappy, and when seared perfectly, sometimes even comes with a light crisp—this all makes for a very fun eating experience.

Unfortunately, this agnolotti was prepared the braised way. Doubly unfortunately, whatever marinade they used was repulsively salty to the point that the shredded beef tongue in each piece of agnolotti tasted bitter. To top it all off, the sauce was also way too salty, and it was just covered in grease and fat.

My friend ordered a 20-ounce prime New York strip steak. When I asked him for a review of it so I could include it in my blog post, he shrugged. I sampled a small portion of it, and my assessment was, “this steak is steak.” He agreed with my analysis. There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about it… which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it also isn’t preferred over being notably high quality.

The strangest thing about the steak, though, is the fact that it came with a side of kettle-cooked potato chips. I think it might have been better if it came with a well-balanced set of thick-cut fries and mixed vegetables as the sides, but I guess these potato chips definitely added to the memorability of the steak.

For dessert, we got a sticky plum pudding to share. The portion size was satisfyingly larger than expected, and the flavor profile seemed good, but this was way too sweet for my preference.

Here are some photos I took of the interior of the restaurant. This first picture is of the bar area; my friend ran into some unexpected delays and was about 15 minutes late for our reservation, so I waited in this bar area for our table to be assigned and prepared after he arrived.

This is what the dining area looks like. It is empty in these photographs because I took this right before departing and we were some of the last people there finishing our meals, but even just an hour before this, the restaurant was absolutely packed and bustling.

This is the exterior of the restaurant. The sign says they were established in 1976, but this particular location took over the spot and celebrated their grand opening only a couple months ago, in February.

Warm bread and schmaltz	$   9.00
Steak tartare	$  27.00
Cavatelli	$  25.00
Beef tongue agnolotti	$  27.00
Prime New York strip steak	$  69.00
Sticky plum pudding	$  14.00
Berry mocktail	$  12.00
Diet Coke	$   5.00
Gratuity (18%)	$  33.84
Sales tax (8.375%)	$  15.72
Total	$ 237.56

This table to the right shows how much we paid. My friend and I split the bill half-and-half and processed each of our respective halves separately on the mobile payment device, so he might have tipped more than I did; I used my own numbers and scaled it up accordingly just for the purposes of this breakdown.

It’s probably needless to say at this point, but I do not think Hayworth is worth the money. If I had shown up for a quick lunch and ordered only the cavatelli with the berry mocktail, then I guess I would’ve given this restaurant a glowing review, but overall, the dishes were hit-or-miss (with way too many misses).

The service was remarkable. All the staff seemed not only well-trained, but also just socially savvy and intuitive people who genuinely enjoyed working at Hayworth and interacting with customers. Another funny element related to that is, throughout our meal, I think we ended up speaking with and getting checked on by four or five different people. Near the end, my friend started joking about how it seemed like management was basically just throwing the entire kitchen personnel roster at us. If this restaurant was rated on service alone, it would be top-tier.

However, unfortunately, I think their style of cooking is a bit too crude and primitive. The way the dishes were far too salty, fatty, and/or sweet made me think that this kind of preparation would be satisfying for hunter-gatherers who are chasing after those biologically carnal dopamine hits that signal high-calorie survival foods. If you’re looking for more refined dishes where the individual ingredients are left to speak for themselves, then I don’t think Hayworth is an optimal choice for a multi-course dinner.