For several months now, one of my friends in Las Vegas has told (and reminded) me that he wanted to go get dinner at his favorite restaurant together with me someday so he could hear my thoughts and find out what I think about it within the context of my having become quite a tasting menu enthusiast lately. This restaurant has an important symbolic meaning to him—he has made it a tradition to dine here every time he gets another million subscribers on YouTube. He was curious to see if I would like it as well.

The aforementioned restaurant is STRIPSTEAK by Michael Mina, located inside MGM Resorts’ Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on the southern side of the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada. The fact that it had the Michael Mina name attached to it was good news to me, as I had recently gone to Michael Mina at the Bellagio and had a great experience trying their High Summer 2026 tasting menu. I’ve generally been avoiding steakhouses lately because I’m minimizing my consumption of red meat due to having high cholesterol and needing to cut down on saturated fat intake. However, I figured that if I’m going to go to a steakhouse again, this would be a good candidate.

… I was wrong.

A lot of restaurants serve complimentary bread, but STRIPSTEAK does something special—they serve French fries cooked in duck fat. They also come with an assortment of three dipping sauces: ketchup, truffle aioli, and what I believe is their house take on a spicy mayo.

I would go as far as to say that these were probably the most delicious French fries I have ever had in my life. I would also quite confidently say that this truffle aioli is the best truffle aioli I have ever had in my life. I was sitting there eating the fries, trying different combinations of differently-seasoned fries with different sauces, and just being straight-up confused as to how they were so good.

After we finished the fries, I set aside the leftover truffle aioli and spicy mayo so that when the waiter cleared away the wooden plank, I’d get to keep the sauces. I had a feeling that there would be something coming up during the meal that would go well with these sauces, so I wanted to save them for later.

Prior to coming to STRIPSTEAK, I checked out their website and saw that there was a special tasting menu called The STRIPSTEAK Experience. If you’ve read some of my past food blog posts, you might have picked up on the fact that my favorite kind of food is when I go to a restaurant and a good chef decides for me what I should eat. Thus, opting for The STRIPSTEAK Experience was a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, when we were seated, the waiter brought out a few menus, but none of them had The STRIPSTEAK Experience as an option. I asked the waiter about the tasting menu by name, and he originally said that such a thing did not exist. After I was more specific about it and described it some more, he seemed to get a vague idea of what I was talking about, and he said that he would go and check to see if it was available. He came back several minutes later saying that they were not offering The STRIPSTEAK Experience that day because they ran out of the beef entrée that is supposed to be included in the tasting menu.

In disappointment, I started going through the à la carte menu with my friends and discussed what we would order. After we had come to an agreement, the waiter came back to us with copies of The STRIPSTEAK Experience menus and said that the tasting menu was actually, in fact, available that day, for US$150 per person. It would’ve been awfully convenient if he had shown up with those several minutes earlier, but that was fine. I confirmed to him that I would like The STRIPSTEAK Experience. One of my friends decided she would get the tasting menu too, while the third member of our party stuck with a more abridged version of the à la carte dishes that we had previously compiled for our meal.

After putting in our orders, my friends and I had a very lengthy conversation before I noticed that it was taking an unusually long time for the food to come out. The tasting menu started with four small plates, the first two of which were seafood dishes that shouldn’t take too long to prepare, so I was confused as to what was going on. For context, our reservation was at 5:15 PM; at 6:08 PM, 53 minutes after being seated, we finally got our first plate (if you exclude the fries that everyone gets before ordering).

When this came out, it was made very clear why it took so long. Most high-end restaurants will serve small plates on actual individual small plates. However, for some reason, STRIPSTEAK brought out all four of my appetizers all at once, side-by-side, on a single, long plate.

The first item was a shrimp served atop gin-spiked cocktail sauce. It tasted like a generic jumbo shrimp that you’d find in a grocery store. To be clear, that’s not universally bad; you can find some good shrimp at grocery stores. However, there was nothing special about it either.

The second item was hamachi crudo with cucumber, shishito, and truffle ponzu. Again, there wasn’t really anything particularly special about this, but it was still a refreshing bite.

Third up was wagyu steak tartare with traditional garnishes and crispy potato. I could barely tell that this was steak tartare because the potato’s flavor was so intense. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, and it would especially not be a problem for me because I like the flavor of potato. However, when paired together with the wagyu tartare, the deep-fried potato flavor was the only thing I could taste, and the tartare could’ve probably been replaced with cheap ground beef patty meat and I wouldn’t have even noticed.

Finally, the last bite was braised pork belly served atop some shredded cabbage and glazed with black pepper soy sauce. Flavor-wise, this was actually pretty good, but it wasn’t prepared very well. Too much of the edge was burned, and overall, it was way too dry. I have a bit of a gap between my back molars on the right side of my mouth, and shreds of meat get stuck back there if the meat is particularly tough or not tender. I feel like half of this entire braised pork belly got stuck between my teeth.

The second course also came with both dishes on a single plate. On the left was sea bass glazed with white miso marinade. It wasn’t terrible, but it sort of had a bit of a rubbery texture to it that I often notice in fish that is overcooked.

On the right of the plate was American wagyu New York strip steak with red wine reduction. This was decent taste-wise. However, the lack of preparation consistency was easily noticeable here, as my steak barely had any sauce, while my friend’s steak had so much sauce that it spread and covered her entire plate and even soaked her fish.

The tasting menu had one option for a supplement—we could opt to add some foie gras to the New York strip steak for an additional charge of US$26.

I asked the waiter if I could have the foie gras added to the sea bass instead, as I’ve already had plenty of foie gras with beef before, and having it comboed with seafood is a bit more rare. I also specifically asked this because I noticed that the menu had listed the fish as sea bass, which, to my limited culinary knowledge, is one of the types of fish that is actually compatible with foie gras, if prepared properly. He seemed doubtful about my request and said that he would ask the chef.

When the foie gras came out, it was served on the side on a separate plate. Considering that they seemed to like combining as much stuff as possible into single plates, this was actually very ironic. There were smudges on the plate, as if they were left behind by greasy fingerprints. The foie gras was firm and dense, and even when I cut a piece off and let it sit in my mouth for a while, it still didn’t soften up. This was the strangest, and probably the worst, foie gras I’ve ever had.

For the first side, we were served “seasonal vegetables.” In reality, it was just a bowl of green beans. They were actually quite good, and they were even better when I dipped them in the leftover French fry sauce from earlier. However, this just simply doesn’t match a reasonable expectation of what you’d get if you are offered seasonal vegetables.

Also pictured in this photograph are mashed potatoes and mac-and-cheese ordered by my à la carte friend. I sampled a small portion of both, and they were just as I thought—way too heavy on the butter, and extremely cloying.

The second side dish was spicy pork belly fried rice.

Sadly, this was my favorite dish of the dinner. The reason this is sad is because I usually don’t like pork belly, bacon, or basically any kind of “cheap” pork that derives most of its flavor from pork fat. Almost any well-made dish is better to my taste buds than pork belly or bacon, so the fact that I enjoyed this dish the most out of the entire tasting menu is an indication of how much I disliked the tasting menu.

The tasting menu concluded with warm beignets for dessert. One contained Macallan butterscotch pudding, one contained chocolate pot de crème, and one contained vanilla crème brûlée. Unfortunately, the only one I could distinguish flavor-wise was the chocolate. The other two had so little of the sauce in them that it tasted like I was eating plain sugar beignets.

The disappointing part about this is that there was no reason for them to stuff a microscopic amount of the sauce into the beignets. My friend ordered a full portion of beignets, and for his plate, the sauces were served in a generous portion on the side. If they had just done this same thing with the tasting menu beignets too, I would’ve been satisfied. The vanilla crème brûlée was actually quite delicious.

My friend ordered three desserts, with the first one being the beignets pictured above. If I remember correctly, his second dessert was some kind of creamy chocolate cake dish. He didn’t want the cookie on the top, so I had it instead. The cookie was actually quite good; it had a nice vanilla flavor to it, and it had a fun texture to it with a good balance of chewiness and stickiness.

This is what the interior dining area looks like.

We were seated in vague proximity of the kitchen. It was in eyeshot, but we were too far away for me to be able to actually watch them cook.

Out of curiosity, I walked right up to the window to see what the kitchen operations were like. Unfortunately, the glass was so smudged and dirty that it was difficult to actually see through it.

Remember how I said earlier that my friend ordered three desserts? Well, I saved the best for last.

My friend’s third dessert was pineapple rum flambé upside-down cake. For those who are not familiar, the flambé technique in this context involves igniting a rum and sugar combination so the alcohol can burn off and the sugar can caramelize. For this particular menu item, the flambé process was done tableside.

… Except it wasn’t. The waiter came out with some rum and syrup, mixed them together, did not light anything on fire, then dumped it directly on my friend’s dessert. The waiter then left behind the mixture on the table and walked away. Consequently, there was zero flambéing that happened, and my friend was left with a pineapple cake sitting in a puddle of rum.

My friend called the waiter back over and asked what happened to the actual flambé process for his pineapple rum flambé. The waiter apologized and said that he would look into it. Several minutes later, a different person came out with some more rum and syrup, except this guy actually had a lighter.

His rum and syrup clearly were not prepared for ignition. For proper tableside flambé presentation, these need to be pre-heated to a certain temperature so that they can actually be lit on fire. However, it seems like they came out with either cold or warm rum, as the guy was just standing there shooting his flame directly into the liquid for a good half minute or so, and nothing was happening. This is extra funny because I’m pretty sure a better way to heat up the mixture is by putting the flame under the steel serving scoop, not by torching the liquid directly.

To be clear, nothing had caught on fire by this point. I don’t know if this guy thought I was blind and didn’t notice, but he literally just gave up in the middle of the process. He then took his rum solution and poured it onto my friend’s cake again.

In utter confusion, I spoke up and told him that the solution he just poured onto my friend’s cake was functionally raw rum, and that it was not flambéed. He had no comment, presumably in disappointment that I had caught his sleight of hand, so he went back to the solution and started heating it up again.

If you hold a flame up to alcohol for long enough, I guess it will eventually reach vaporization temperature. The solution finally caught on fire in the scoop, and we were about to get somewhere. Now, all he needed to do was add it to the cake, and hopefully, the temperature had reached a point where the flame would transfer to the rest of the rum and successfully burn off the alcohol, if that’s even a thing that was possible anymore. This would also hypothetically leave a nice caramelization on the cake as well.

All this guy needed to do was reach over and pour. But instead, for some INEXPLICABLE REASON, he CARRIED THE FLAMING SCOOP and WALKED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE OF MY FRIEND’S BODY.

By the time he finished his walk, the flame went out. He then proceeded to dump the liquid directly on the pineapple cake, looked proud of himself, gathered his scoops, and walked back to the kitchen.

Here is my friend’s cake training to be an Olympic swimmer.

Here is what the bathroom looked like. I thought ordering this here would serve as a great sequential flow of pictures following the pineapple rum flambé photographs.

This is a picture of the bar, near the hostess’ podium.

If it wasn’t obvious, I did not like STRIPSTEAK. Considering my positive experience at Michael Mina, I don’t think this restaurant deserves the Michael Mina name. Its tasting menu was disappointing and underwhelming, the food quality was lacking, the service was subpar, and the overall experience did not even remotely meet what I would anticipate from a restaurant serving food at this price point.

To elaborate more on my dissatisfaction with the tasting menu, I think The STRIPSTEAK Experience is very poor value. They left out the “experience” part, none of it was memorable to me (at least, not in a positive way), and the portion sizes were way too small. Tasting menus are often a way to commit to getting a full, multi-course dinner in exchange for getting a good deal and being able to try out a bunch of the restaurant’s best creations. I cannot say that The STRIPSTEAK Experience met any of those expectations.

My friend, who had previously raved about this restaurant, was also quite shocked at how badly it went this time. With that being said, he had a great point to rationalize the discrepancy between his past experiences compared to the disaster that unfolded during our dinner. When he dines at STRIPSTEAK, he has the same thing every time—the complimentary French fries, a steak, the pork belly fried rice, and the (full order of) warm beignets. Funny enough, if someone orders only those items every single time, then they are actually curating a meal for themselves that consists of what I think are the best items at the restaurant. It just happens to be that it seems like every other item on the menu isn’t that great… but someone who isn’t adventurous in ordering new things would never figure that out.

If a high-end restaurant is only good at making five dishes, then their menu should only have five items on it. On that basis, I cannot recommend STRIPSTEAK to anyone, even those who might just be looking to get those aforementioned good items, because, as a matter of principle, I cannot encourage someone to go to a restaurant where they have to disregard a majority of the menu.