After spending a decent and satisfying chunk of time back home in the Las Vegas Valley, my next trip is already underway. Shortly before heading out, I dined at Kabuto Edomae Sushi in the Chinatown neighborhood of the unincorporated town of Spring Valley for one of my last meals in town until my return. I opted for the premium chef’s omakase experience, labeled on their menu as the namesake “Kabuto course.”

The meal began with an assortment of appetizers. Out of these appetizers, the tofu particularly stood out—I think this is the best tofu I’ve ever had in my entire life, and it tasted like they had compacted about five times the normal tofu flavor into a single slice.

Next was the warm dish, chawanmushi. Japanese steamed egg custard is usually the color of scrambled eggs, so it was interesting to see it come out very dark brown.

This was a traditional Japanese omakase experience, so while we were eating, we were able to watch the chefs prepare food for us and the other diners.

The following course was a trio of sashimi. This sashimi was exactly as you’d expect from a high-quality sushi restaurant—thick, fatty, and rich in flavor.

Next up was the seasonal grill item, fish with asparagus and ginger. The fish was remarkably tender and took “melt in your mouth” to a whole new level, while the vegetables had the perfect balance of crunch to add some variety to the texture of the fish.

By this point, the chef had finished preparing the slices of fish for our nigiri.

After finishing our grilled fish, the premium selection of nigiri service began.

Each piece had a very generous portion of fish. It is often considered to be Japanese etiquette to consume each piece of nigiri in one single bite. I managed to do this and get an abundantly pleasurable mouthful of fish each time, but I wouldn’t blame someone if they had a smaller mouth capacity and need to eat each in two bites.

After five pieces of nigiri, we took a quick break for some ikura and uni.

Shortly afterwards, we finished nigiri service with our final few pieces.

The subsequent course was a hand roll. It was just a regular roll with some cuts of tuna belly inside, which we had already eaten earlier during the dinner, but I still appreciated the added variety of style of preparing the items.

As a bonus after the conclusion of the sushi items, we got a prism of tamago. I don’t know if it’s because I just finished eating a large portion of amazing sushi so it was just a matter of bias through comparison, but this tamago was somewhat underwhelming and didn’t taste special at all.

There were two different omakase experiences—the full Kabuto option and the abridged Yoroi option. I saw the chef preparing some more sea urchin and salmon roe, and my guess is that this was for the diners on the opposite side of the sushi bar who had opted for the Yoroi course.

As our second-to-last course, we received clam miso soup. We had an option to pick between mushroom and clam; it’s rare to have a non-vegetable version of miso soup, so I opted for the clam.

To accompany our dessert, we received some tea.

Dessert was an assortment of three sweet and fruity dishes.

All the fruit was explosively packed with flavor. The sweetness also had an interesting phenomenon where it had very high intensity of sweetness, but that intensity didn’t come with any of the usual downsides of excessive sweetness that makes it overwhelming and “too” sweet.

The table to the right shows how much we paid.

I thought this was a very well-rounded traditional Japanese omakase experience that perfectly captured what you’d expect from high-quality Japanese fine dining, both in the cuisine and in the impeccably attentive service.

There was nothing particularly innovative or revolutionary about this dinner, but that’s okay—sometimes you just want a predictable and straightforward Japanese meal, and Kabuto Edomae Sushi satisfyingly fulfills all those checkboxes.

My friend and I were seated at the edge of the sushi bar, which made for a nicer experience—we had an effortless view of all the chefs in the bar area, and it made for a slightly more private meal as a result of not being surrounded by other diners.

With that being said, Kabuto also has regular tables set up behind the sushi bar, and the isolation of those tables from the chefs means that diners seated there will just chatter among themselves. I think I just got unlucky, as there was a particularly loud group of young adults at one of those tables that came in about half an hour into our meal. Hopefully this doesn’t sound too bratty, but I think the omakase diners would have appreciated it if the wait staff asked that group to avoid yelling and keep their voices at a volume suitable for indoor dining in order to maintain the classiness of the environment.

Overall, this was a fantastic experience. Japanese is my favorite type of cuisine, and it was great having this meal be one of the conclusions of my stay before heading out for my next leg of travels. Paying over US$200.00 per person for a meal is a sizeable amount, but if that is within your budget, I think Kabuto Edomae Sushi is a solid option if you’re looking for a great traditional omakase restaurant.

After finding it on a list of recommended and relatively new tasting menus in the Las Vegas Valley, I decided to dine at A Different Beast, a Spanish restaurant in the Chinatown neighborhood of the unincorporated town of Spring Valley. I opted for their ten-course chef’s tasting menu without the wine pairing.

The tasting menu started with the pintxos trio. The first item was octopus tapenade with Ibarra chili, piquillo pepper, and house-marinated olive.

I couldn’t really distinctly identify the octopus flavor in this; instead, it tasted more like a seafood and vegetable mixture. It had a good balance of savoriness and tartness, and the texture of the bread was firm enough to hold everything up, yet still delicate enough to be soft.

The second was buñuelo de alcachofa atop some Ibarra amarillo aioli.

I think this was a little bit too fried for my personal preference. Flavor-wise, I still thought it was fine. However, texture-wise, it was very fun to eat—it had a nice balance of both crispiness and softness.

The third small bite of the trio was seared gamba with confit cherry tomato and paprika vinaigrette.

This was fantastic. The shrimp was tender and had the perfect amount of intensity of flavor; the cherry tomato was mild enough that it didn’t overpower the shrimp, yet wasn’t so mild that it watered down the bite; the vinaigrette added a nice depth to the flavor, but wasn’t too sour like other vinaigrettes; and the bread was neither too firm nor too soft.

Next up were our tapas. The first one was pan con tomate, containing heirloom tomatoes and jamón ibérico bellota.

I’m usually not a fan of jamón ibérico due to the extreme fattiness and intensity of the flavor, but this was very mild and subtle. I had originally thought the purpose of this dish was to showcase the jamón ibérico, so I actually mentioned how it was so mild that the flavor of the tomato was overwhelming it. Then my friend pointed out from the menu that this was actually intended to be a tomato dish, and not a jamón ibérico dish.

With that additional context in mind, I thought this was great. The jamón ibérico served its purpose in adding an additional dimension to the tomatoes, and the tomatoes were rich and flavorful. I am sometimes wary of tomatoes because of how sour they sometimes are, but these had no sourness whatsoever.

Next came vieiras crudas with royal ossetra and mango caviar, almond milk, and crispy jamón.

The fish was fantastic and resembled sashimi I would normally get at a Japanese restaurant but with two additional dimensions of flavor. The crunch of the jamón and the pop of the caviar accompanied the experience of biting into the fish very well. My favorite part about this dish was the sauce; it was light and smooth, and I ended up drinking the remainder as soup after I was done with the crudo.

The friend with whom I was dining loves foie gras, so we of course added in the foie gras supplement with frisée, peaches, peach caramel, MitiCaña goat cheese, and walnuts.

This is literally the best foie gras dish I have ever had in my entire life.

The flavor of the foie gras was very strong and pure. There was a generous portion of salt on it, which extracted and enhanced the foie gras flavor even more.

Everything surrounding the foie gras served as a perfect compliment to it. The frisée and peaches were refreshing and absorbed some of the intense fattiness. The peach caramel and walnuts added an additional element of savoriness. The goat cheese was relatively mild and didn’t have a moldy taste to it.

Our next dish was a croquetta de jamón with jamón ibérico bellota and garlic aioli.

Although it was still good, this was the dish that I was least impressed by. It had a somewhat generic hearty flavor profile to it that I didn’t find to be particularly unique or memorable. However, on the grander scale of things, I think it still played its role well as a component of the overall tasting menu.

Next up was wild mushrooms with truffle powder and 63-degree egg.

I don’t really have much commentary or feedback on this dish—it just felt like I was eating very high-quality mushrooms covered in egg yolk. However, my friend is a big fan of mushrooms and has a far more refined palate when it comes to mushroom flavors, and she thought these were some of the best mushrooms she’s ever had.

Last on the set of tapas was wagyu bocaditos with machego, ibarra amarillo aioli, petite watercress, and fennel slaw.

Although I find burgers with ketchup, mustard, and cheese to be somewhat nostalgic, I personally prefer them with pickles, peppers, and a spicy mayo sauce, so these wagyu sliders fit my preference perfectly. It had the rich fattiness you expect from wagyu beef, and the accompanying vegetables were pickled just enough to help pierce through the fattiness without being too sour and without overwhelming the flavor of the meat.

We were able to pick one item each out of a list of platos. I opted for a bacalao Pacífico with basque salsa verde, lemon, and yellow fingerlings.

This was a very interesting flavor profile that I had not ever experienced before, and I still have no idea how to even begin to describe it. It had a degree of bitterness to it, but it was just salty enough that it counteracted the bitterness before it actually became an entirely negative characteristic.

The fish was strangely somehow rubbery and tender at the same time. Cutting and biting into the outside of the fish was tricky because it was chewy and gave a decent amount of resistance, but once you actually got into the fleshy center, it was still soft and somewhat flaky. Even the vegetables had a somewhat comparably interesting texture phenomenon—the outside was gummy, while the inside was soft like normal boiled vegetables.

My friend’s plato was Spanish octopus with Yukon Gold potatoes, frisée, and lemon paprika vinaigrette.

By this point, I was getting pretty full, but I still sampled a small portion of the octopus so I could see how it was. The octopus was a little bit crispy on the outside but very tender on the inside. I also appreciated the char, as it added a degree of depth to the octopus’ flavor as if it was a natural seasoning.

The postre, i.e., dessert, was a crema Catalana congelada with brûléed frozen custard and lemon curd.

This had everything you’d expect from solid crème brûlée—a satisfyingly crispy top, a delicate inside, and an overall sweet-but-not-too-sweet flavor profile.

Normally the tasting menu comes with the crème brûlée as the designated dessert, but instead of giving us two of the same dessert, the chef swapped out one of them for a cheesecake.

I’m usually not the biggest fan of cheesecake, but this one wasn’t too bad. I much prefer the fluffy Japanese-style cheesecake over the thicker and heavier cheesecake that I often see in the United States, and this cheesecake more resembled the Japanese version.

Our reservation was booked right at opening time, so after we were seated, I was able to get some shots of the empty restaurant before other diners arrived.

The bathroom had a comically high-tech toilet and bidet system attached to it—something that, to my knowledge, you would normally only find in countries like Japan, and not in the United States. I thought the bathroom was very clean and it had a nice theme to it, so I snapped a photo of it while I was in there.

The table to the right shows how much we paid.

I think this is some of the best value I’ve gotten out of a chef’s tasting menu in a long time. The food was all prepared very well, and the portion sizes were all reasonably large enough that each item completed its chapter in the flavor storyline, rather than leaving me wanting a few more bites of the dish.

I don’t find myself consuming Spanish cuisine too often, so I’m glad that this positive experience was my introduction to Spanish fine dining. The theming of the restaurant was nice, and I appreciated the commitment to demonstrating Spanish culture both in the food and in the environment.

Without any supplements or enhancements, the US$89 meal comes out to just shy of US$115 after sales tax and a service charge in lieu of gratuity. That is still on the higher end of cost for a single meal, but if this is within your budget, I highly recommend giving it a try—I don’t think there are too many other restaurants in Las Vegas where you can get this amount of value in terms of food quality, portion size, and service at this pricepoint.

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.

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.

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.

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).