While going down my rabbit hole of researching afternoon tea, I came across the Petrossian at the Bellagio Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. The photographs on the restaurant’s website made it look classy and elegant, and reservations for the afternoon tea experience were booked out weeks in advance, so I reasonably assumed it would be a great experience. After having such a pleasant time with afternoon tea at Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria Las Vegas, I was looking forward to trying afternoon tea at Petrossian as well.

… It was horrible.

Do not go to afternoon tea at Petrossian.

The pictures on the restaurant’s website are conveniently cropped and color-graded to look far better than what the restaurant is in reality. I found out that I have actually walked past Petrossian tens of times before without even realizing what it is, because it’s not actually a special restaurant—it’s just the little bar by the hotel registration desk at the Bellagio at the intersection of the entrance to the casino.

My friend and I were seated deeper into the restaurant, but all of it was basically right alongside the casino. As you’d expect, it reeked pungently and repulsively of cigarette smoke. I’m pretty sure we inhaled enough second-hand smoke during our afternoon tea to be the equivalent of smoking a few actual cigarettes. I can usually tolerate cigarette smoke in casinos short-term while walking through to the hotel elevator or something, but it was borderline unbearable when sitting down stationary. I got a pretty bad headache within several minutes of entering the restaurant.

It was dark and gloomy inside. I had to increase the exposure and enhance the shadows in my photographs by quite a bit for the interior of the restaurant to actually show through in my pictures. The interior looked like my great-grandmother was contracted to handle the design and decor.

This was how our table was set upon our arrival. We never at any point were given or even offered any water.

The sauces we were given were clotted cream, Bordier butter, and seasonal jam. I did not use any of the clotted cream or Bordier butter because I found that most of the food already tasted very fatty, greasy, and/or heavy. I thought the seasonal jam was unremarkable and was comparable to generic, unbranded jam you’d find as the cheapest option available at your local chain grocery store.

For my tea, I selected the organic vanilla rooibos, described by their menu as “Madagascar vanilla bean naturally sweetened with caramel fragrance and creamy on the palette.” I’m not sure if I received the wrong tea or something, because this just tasted to me like generic earthiness without any distinct flavors.

For our sandwiches, we got a farm egg salad on pumpernickel bread with tarragon and cornichon, English cucumber on pea flower bread with boursin and lemon, jamón ibérico with Spanish ham and honey butter, and a truffle gourgère pâte à choux with black truffles and Parmesan.

My farm egg salad sandwich was dry and had a very flat flavor. It reminded me of a pre-made sandwich you’d find in a grocery store in their open-top refrigeration section. The greens on top of the sandwich were shriveled and rubbery.

My English cucumber sandwich was just a bunch of regular, plain cucumbers on top of very dry bread. I would’ve preferred to just take a bite out of a fresh cucumber and then call it a day.

My jamón ibérico was passable, but it was put on top of what looked like a regular roll you’d find packaged bulk in plastic bags in the shelves next to your grocery store’s deli… but somehow worse, because these rolls were insanely dense and dry in my mouth. To clarify, the roll itself was literally just a roll. None of the ham, honey butter, or toppings were inside the roll. The roll itself was just a completely plain roll with nothing in it.

My truffle gourgère was a big glob of unstimulating greasiness that I found to be unpalatable. It was similar to what I imagine it would taste like after you cooked some bacon in a frying pan, let the rendered fat slightly coagulate as the pan naturally cools, then poured the leftover fat and grease into your mouth.

Next, we were served Daurenki caviar bites—a caviar timbale with hazelnut crème fraîche, caviar taco with hamachi and gold leaf, caviar tuna cone with feuille de brick and calamansi dressing, and caviar potato Darphin with herbed crème fraîche.

The timbale, taco, and cone were so fatty and greasy that they masked the flavor of the caviar. I also suspect that they might have added even more salt to each of these bites, because they were overwhelmingly salty to the point where it felt like the inside of my mouth was getting pickled, and not in a naturally-salty caviar kind of way.

The potato Darphin was the closest thing that I ate to a satisfactory caviar bite, but even then, it was still far too fried for my preference. I think using high-quality potatoes and relying on the natural flavor of the potato to complement the caviar would’ve worked nicely, but this tasted like someone put a chunk of potato in the deep fryer, went to go do their laundry, and forgot about the potato until they finished folding two entire loads of underwear and socks.

On the side, we had Bellagio’s signature scones.

This reminded me of grocery store corn bread. It was so thick, dense, and heavy that I am pretty sure this singular plate of four scones could potentially be enough calories to cover the entirety of my day’s basal metabolic rate and non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

For dessert, we got three French pastries: a raspberry macaron, an old-fashioned chocolate cake, and a spiked lemon tartelette.

The raspberry macaron was delicious and was probably one of the best macarons I’ve ever had. The texture was perfect, and the outside of the macaron had a very satisfying consistency where it had an amazing balance of resistance and crumble with each bite. Each raspberry was light and refreshing. It had a reasonable amount of sweetness comparable to what you’d expect from natural raspberries, but slightly toned up.

The chocolate cake and lemon tartelette were closer to the other food items I had during the afternoon tea, i.e., excessively heavy and greasy, without any perceivable depth or specialty to the flavor. The chocolate cake in particular was so sweet that I believe it registered in my brain as bitter.

There was live piano music during certain segments of our meal. Normally, this would be a nice touch, but the fact that this was basically right on the casino floor created a very strange phenomenon where the sound of the classical music coming from the piano and the sound of the pop music blasting through the speakers from the casino were fighting for your attention. It was auditory sensory overload and made both sound somewhat unsettling.

Caviar afternoon tea ×2	$ 176.00
Sales tax (8.375%)	$  14.74
Gratuity	$  30.00
Total	$ 220.74

The table to the right shows how much we paid.

In case you forgot from the beginning of the blog post, do not go to afternoon tea at Petrossian in the Bellagio. And in case you couldn’t tell from my review, I absolutely hated it.

If you’ve read some of my past blog posts, you know that I really appreciate restaurants that try to be subtle and inconspicuous, yet clearly cannot hide the fact that they are at the level of fine dining due to the amazing food, great service, and impeccable attention to detail. Petrossian is the exact opposite of that. The environment at this restaurant is built to shove the idea of fine dining down your throat, but it’s all a disguise—I wasn’t able to perceive any qualities that truly define real fine dining at Petrossian.

There was one funny thing that my friend and I noticed during our dining experience. The friend I went with to Petrossian is the same friend I went with to Peacock Alley, so we had two afternoon teas side-by-side as comparison. Neither she nor I are particularly the emotional type, so even when faced with an experience that we find unpleasant, we both handle it pretty well and take it practically. Throughout the meal, we were both poking fun at how bad we thought the food was and discussing what we would do to make it better. We are also okay with occasionally having experiences we find unsatisfactory, because that keeps us aligned with reality and helps us appreciate the good experiences even more.

There was a pair of women who were also having afternoon tea at the table right next to us. Because of the way that the tables and couches were set up, they were in clear and direct view of us. Now, I’m not a mind reader, but based on their expressions, they seemed to be having an absolutely miserable time. Both of them were completely silent and eating their food as if the Grim Reaper was overhead and ready to perform an execution if they didn’t clean their plates. This was in stark contrast to everyone at Peacock Alley, who all seemed happy to be there.

I genuinely do not understand why afternoon tea reservations at Petrossian are in such high demand, or how there are so many positive reviews online. I guess if you’re going for just the caviar, then maybe it might be worth the money, considering that popular restaurants in major cities have been selling caviar bumps for US$20.00 each lately, and Petrossian seems to give you a decent portion size of caviar? But otherwise, if you’re not a caviar enthusiast, then my suggestion is to go to Peacock Alley at the Waldorf Astoria Las Vegas instead (and this is coming from a Marriott and MGM loyalist—which Bellagio is a part of—while Waldorf Astoria is a member of the rival Hilton family).