Once in a while, something new catches my attention and I start going down a deep rabbit hole of research about the topic. Lately, one of these new things was afternoon tea, a British tradition where you consume sandwiches and pastries, among other treats, while sipping some tea during the middle of the day. There is apparently a variant of this called high tea, which people thought was for high-class individuals, but was allegedly actually simply called high tea because it would be served at tables that had chairs with high backs.

The association with tea time and high-class individuals apparently stuck in the United States, because a lot of American afternoon tea services exaggerate the elegance and classiness of the tea experience. I did some scouting for some good options so I could try my very first afternoon tea, and I decided on Peacock Alley at the Waldorf Astoria Las Vegas.

Upon our arrival, we were seated at one of the inner tables. When booking the reservation, I was given the option of getting a guaranteed window table for an additional US$25.00 per person for US$50.00 total (i.e., that was just the extra fee for the table, and did not include any food or beverage and did not act as an off-setting credit on the bill). I thought that was not at all worth it, especially considering that the photographs on their website showed how already bright and airy it was throughout the entire restaurant thanks to the floor-to-ceiling windows and the north-facing view.

When we got to our table, we were greeted with some nice silverware along with a trio of sauces—Devonshire cream, lemon curd, and homemade berry jam.

The berry jam was my favorite out of the group, and it was probably the best jam I have ever had in my entire life. It went well with literally every single item that we were served, and my friend and I finished the entire portion of it. The cream and lemon curd was also good, though those two tended to go better with certain pastries more than others (while the jam was just an overall universal enhancement).

This afternoon tea was a three-course experience, and we received plates with all three courses at once in this tiered serving stand.

We started our meal with the sandwiches. Pictured in the front and rotating counter-clockwise, we ate (1) egg salad and Kaluga caviar gougères with fines herbes; (2) smoked salmon with dill and chive boursin and cucumber on pumpernickel bread; (3) French ham and Swiss with salsa verde on soft white bread; and (4) roast beef with horseradish, provolone, and arugula on rye bread.

Everything was good, but I was especially impressed at the construction and texture of the sandwiches. Small sandwiches like this usually have an issue with the innards sliding around when you bite down, but for these, everything was somehow very easy to hold and keep in place.

The bread also had a perfect consistency—it was just barely dry enough that it was firm and convenient to grip without it collapsing under your fingers, but still soft enough that it tasted like high-quality bread.

The next plate contained freshly-baked signature scones. They were kept inside a cloth so they could retain their warmth. They were nice and flaky, and biting down on these scones was a very fun and satisfying experience due to their great balance between crispiness along the edges and softness on the inside.

The last plate was our desserts. These looked nice enough that I took individual photographs of each one, so I will share what they are shortly.

For my tea selection, I picked an herbal tea called Mountain Berry which had a blend of Saskatoon berries, red and black currants, raisins, and wild blueberries. This tasted strangely similar to chocolate at first when the tea was extremely hot, but after it cooled, I was able to detect more of the berry flavors.

For my friend’s pot of tea, she opted for a special pear blend that was not listed on the menu.

The first dessert we had was the lavender blueberry macaron. This tasted like any good macaron you’d find at any high-quality bakery or dessert shop.

Next was a banoffee tart with Italian espresso, roasted banana, and caramelized toffee. I liked the roasted banana on the inside, and the caramelized toffee crumbles along the edge were delicious, but otherwise, the rest of the tart was just overwhelmingly chocolatey and sweet.

Then we had a strawberry basil petit choux. This was a decent sweet treat, and the flower on top added a nice crunchy texture.

Finally, our last dessert was a Thai tea mousse dome with condensed milk and white chocolate. By this point, I was getting pretty full and getting a bit of “sweetness fatigue,” but I still liked this and appreciated the contrasting cookie base.

Back when we arrived, it took a few minutes for the wait staff to get our table ready, so I had an opportunity to walk around and take some pictures of the restaurant.

After exiting the elevator on the 23rd floor, you step out into this waiting area with the host’s podium.

This is the hallway that leads deeper into the restaurant and towards the other dining section of the restaurant.

The elevator foyer on the 23rd floor had this interesting gold art on the walls.

The restaurant also had a bar for people who were there for an à la carte experience, rather than the afternoon tea.

Upon the conclusion of our meal, I stopped by the restroom, which had a nice design.

Although we didn’t get a window-side table, another party that was seated window-side left shortly before we did, so I snuck over to that area to grab a picture of the view. In the left, the eastern Veer Tower is on the side, with the Shops at Crystals below it and the Cosmopolitan behind it. To the right, there was a nice view looking northbound onto the Las Vegas Strip, as well as some of the city to the east.

The table to the right shows how much we paid.

Almost US$80.00 per person after tax and gratuity for what is functionally a fancy brunch is a little bit pricey, but also not too crazy considering the circumstances.

With four sandwiches, two scones, four desserts, and one pot of tea per person, that comes out to 11 “items,” and if you divide that into the base price of US$64.00 per person, each item ends up being US$5.82. Account for the fact that you’re not only on the Las Vegas Strip where everything basically already has a tourist mark-up, but also inside a luxury hotel, and it ends up being expensive, but not a rip-off.

CityCenter is my favorite area of the Las Vegas Strip. I have stayed at the Aria Resort & Casino, the Aria Sky Suites, and the Vdara Hotel & Spa; I have toured the Veer Towers in the past as a prospective resident; and I have spent multiple thousands of dollars buying gifts for friends at the Shops at Crystals. Interestingly, I had never been inside the Waldorf Astoria, even back when it used to be the Mandarin Oriental. This was my first time stepping foot inside the building, and it was a great experience.

I enjoyed my afternoon tea experience. There are obviously plenty of other places where you can get better value for your money, but I really enjoyed the atmosphere and environment of Peacock Alley. I wouldn’t say I would come here often, but I think this is a decent spot for me to be a seasonal regular every handful of months and stop by whenever they make changes to their afternoon tea menu.

I’m not too picky of a person, especially when it comes to food, but there are still some things that I prefer and don’t prefer. With that being said, I do still like to experience things that I know I don’t like for two main reasons—to make sure that my preferences haven’t changed over time, and to make sure I keep my understanding of my dislikes up-to-date to ensure that I can articulate myself in case I ever need to justify myself in the future.

One type of food I don’t prefer is anything with a large amount of hot liquid. Obviously, this isn’t a severe dislike—I still consume soup, ramen, and tea, among other similar things. However, having too much of it induces an interesting phenomenon for me where it feels like the inside of my body is itchy. There are no other symptoms, i.e., I don’t have difficulty breathing and I don’t get any external inflammation, but it can still be a bit uncomfortable.

Now of course, although I don’t go to hot pot or shabu-shabu restaurants too often, I still want to visit once in a while under the philosophy I just mentioned. So, last night, I had dinner at The X Pot, a Chinese restaurant by the Chubby Group in the Grand Canal Shoppes at The Palazzo in the Venetian Resort on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada.

Normally, The X Pot has a few different menu options, ranging from standard à la carte to some special chef’s and VIP tasting menus. However, in celebration of their five-year anniversary, they currently have a 100-minute all-you-can-eat special offer from mid-June to the end of July 2025, which is what my friend and I got.

My friend ordered the oxtail tomato soup base, while I got the X special spicy. I should’ve know that this was Asian levels of spicy, considering that the menu had Chinese translations for everything. Unfortunately, my brain did not make the connection at the time, so I ended up ordering this soup base that was tolerable, but still too spicy for my preference. I ended up handling this by removing almost all the spicy peppers in the soup, which actually ended up being a substantial pile, and that helped a lot.

While we were waiting for our meat to arrive, we ordered an appetizer feast, a set of four premium items limited to one order per customer per meal. The feast included ribeye nigiri, wagyu tartare, foie gras with caviar, and a wagyu and uni roll.

For our first round of meat, we got Japanese A5 wagyu ribeye, ribeye cap, chuck roll, and shoulder clod. We also got some Australian stone axe chuck roll and domestic thin-cut wagyu tongue.

I forgot to take a photograph of our first round of meats; instead, here is a photograph of the second round, which is a plate of only tongue, my favorite cut of beef.

To go along with our soup and meat, we also got a bowl of assorted vegetables.

There were two all-you-can-eat options—one with unlimited wagyu, and one with both unlimited seafood and wagyu. My friend and I both like seafood, so we went with the option that also included unlimited seafood. I’m glad we went with this, because this also included Boston lobster, spotted prawn, oyster, and scallop. In addition to the set pictured, we also got several more orders of oyster and scallop.

My friend also wanted to try a bunch of different signature and specialty dishes from the menu. These are truffle fries, which came with a special house ketchup mixture that I liked.

This is a wagyu tart. I wasn’t the biggest fan of this—the meat inside was minced and didn’t have as clean and straightforward of a wagyu flavor as the other items.

We also each got one swan cake. The presentation on this dish was very nice.

We ordered some wagyu salad as well, but found out that it was basically just a regular salad with some tomatoes and pineapple, and the wagyu element of it appeared to just be crumbled dried wagyu sprinkled on top.

This is crispy pork. I thought it was fine, but it tasted pretty underwhelming compared to how good all the other meat dishes were.

Our order of black pepper A5 wagyu was cooked tableside. This was my favorite item of the dinner—it came with a nice little preparation performance, and the meat was incredibly thick and tender.

This is the wagyu carpaccio.

We also got one wagyu foie gras slider to share. By this point, I was already pretty full, so I only had a few bites of it. I’m sure this was an amazing burger and I would’ve liked it a lot in any other context, but during the dinner, I just preferred the plain wagyu that I could cook in my hot pot soup base.

My friend also got some healthier sides with less saturated fat so that we weren’t clogging our arteries too much with all the wagyu—she ordered some quail eggs, bean curd, and wintermelon.

For dessert, we received the chef’s choice special dessert, which was matcha macarons today.

This is what the dining area around us looked like.

The table to the right shows how much we paid.

My friend goes to Chubby Group restaurants once in a while, so she signed up for a Chubby Club Plus membership at the restaurant using a promotional discount and got US$20 deducted from each of our meals. It seemed like it was a good deal if you go to Chubby Group restaurants at least a couple times a year, as the membership seems to pay for itself via member discounts fairly quickly. (Of course, you would have to keep track of and remember to cancel the membership after a year if you don’t want to renew at full price.)

I had a very fun time at The X Pot. They curate the experience such that they keep things interesting, whether it be through the logistics of the meal (like having a combination of hot pot and plated items, or preparing one of the dishes tableside), or through the wide variety of plates and methods of presentation of the food items being served. I also noticed that The X Pot doesn’t cut corners to try and save money and minimize costs—everything seemed to be executed thoughtfully, and all the components of the restaurant seemed classy.

Unsurprisingly, I think I would’ve probably just preferred a high-end all-you-can-eat Japanese or Korean BBQ experience instead of hot pot. However, I’m glad I got to try out The X Pot, because it definitely adds a unique twist to what you’d expect from other restaurants in its class.

If this pricepoint is within your budget and you like hot pot, then I think The X Pot is worth experiencing at least once. It might not be reasonable to go here as a regular, especially with all the other amazing and more affordable all-you-can-eat BBQ and hot pot restaurants in the Las Vegas Valley, but if you’re looking for more than just a barebones experience and want to have a good time treating yourself with some friends, then I think The X Pot would be a good candidate for that.

One of my friends just flew in to visit for a while, so once I picked her up from the airport this evening, we wanted to get a relatively quick and light dinner afterwards. We both like sushi, so we decided on trying out Kase Sake and Sushi at the Spanish Palms Plaza in Spring Valley, Las Vegas, Nevada.

They had five different kinds of tasting menus of varying different price points—the four-course Hanban for US$32, six-course vegan Yasai for US$29, six-course Nami for US$48, seven-course Oomori for US$56, and premium nine-course Kase for US$120. As you might have guessed, we went for the premium tasting option that was named on their menu after Chef Toyonishi.

First was some salmon tartare with a side of chips. The chips were very good, but the tartare was a bit oversauced for my preference.

Next was yellowtail carpaccio topped with kimchi. This was a little bit of a mess of flavors because it felt like there was way too much going on in this dish, but if you consider it without trying to analyze the flavors too much, it was still pretty decent.

Next up was nigiri service, which came out three pieces at a time.

The scallop and sweet shrimp were good, but the portion of the fish was way too small relative to how much rice they gave—so much so that the flavor of the rice sort of just overwhelmed the taste of the fish.

The crab was… interesting, to say the least. It was a bit rubbery and wasn’t exactly the best in quality. My friend said that she would’ve rather just preferred to eat a stick of imitation crab, and that probably would’ve been better than this crab.

As an intermission from nigiri service, we got a spicy tuna hand roll. I’m usually not a fan of spicy tuna at sushi restaurants because I feel like it’s probably one of the cheapest items you can get, but this one was actually done pretty well—something crunchier was mixed in with the spicy tuna to give it an extra flavor and texture enhancement. My friend and I both commented that we liked this.

We went right back to nigiri service afterwards, with our next plate being tuna done in three ways—akami, chutoro, and otoro.

This had the same problem as the previous pieces of nigiri, in that the portion size of the tuna was so small that it just tasted like we were taking bites of rice with a sprinkling of fish. You can actually sort of tell that the akami is so ridiculously thin that it’s almost see-through on the edges.

The next set was seared wagyu beef, salmon roe, and what was supposed to be uni topped with caviar and gold leaf… but they ran out of uni. Instead, they substituted it with more of that spicy tuna mixture because the waiter had overheard us talking about how much we liked it, though I guess he missed the context about how I liked it only in comparison to other sushi restaurants’ spicy tuna, and not that I would prefer it over any other premium fish.

The salmon roe was interesting here, because it almost tasted like it had been diluted. Usually when popping the eggs in your mouth, you get a burst of thick liquid that coats the inside of your mouth with ikura flavor, but this tasted much milder and thinner, as if it had somehow been watered down.

Our last piece of nigiri was eel under a square of foie gras and topped with toasted coconut flakes. This was the one and only truly satisfying and deeply delicious item of the entire tasting menu. The amount of fish and foie gras was reasonable compared to the amount of rice, and the toasted coconut added a nice supplement to both the texture and the flavor.

Our final course of the meal was… a little lunch tin of side dishes.

This would have been fine as an appetizer or something, but this is probably one of the most confusing final courses of an omakase-inspired tasting menu that I’ve ever had. The quality of this was very underwhelming and did not even exceed regular side dishes you’d receive for free while, for example, dining in at any Korean restaurant (i.e., their “banchan”).

When I said that little lunch box was the final course, I meant it—they included no dessert in the nine-course tasting menu. They gave us some peach and watermelon gummy candy along with our check instead.

Here are some photographs I took of the interior of the restaurant.

Except for one single other group, it remained empty throughout the dining room during our entire meal, even though we went at a reasonable time for dinner. Based on my experience with this “premium” tasting menu, I guess it makes sense why they’re not doing too well.

Upon our arrival, I requested to be seated at the bar area so that we could see into the kitchen and watch the chef prepare our food while dining, but apparently that is not something that they offered, and we were seated at a booth instead.

The bar also remained empty throughout our entire meal.

The table to the right shows how much we paid.

This was absolutely not worth it. Especially for an off-Strip restaurant, I would expect much, much more from a meal that costs almost $150 per person after sales tax and gratuity.

In the waiter’s defense, he did recommend the smaller seven-course tasting menu for $56 per person instead. The fact that he took initiative to point that out to us as the most popular option indicates to me that I probably would’ve had a better experience with the $56 option, but if it’s the case that the $120 version is so poor in value that the waiter wants to draw attention away from it, then they should probably just remove it from the menu.

I think there are two ways that they can rework the premium nine-course tasting menu to make it work. First, they can either reduce the price down to somewhere in the $70-80 range, which would keep it as a strange tasting menu, but at least it wouldn’t be egregiously overpriced. Alternatively, they can double the portion size of fish on each piece of nigiri, get rid of the weird trio of side dishes at the end of the meal, replace it with a different warm specialty dish, expand the tasting menu to ten courses, and add in a dessert at the end.

Oh, and they should never, ever let themselves run out of sea urchin, but in the outerworldly chance that they do, they should replace it with a different premium item, not spicy tuna.

They have sake in their name, so I’m guessing maybe they’re better at serving alcohol than they are at crafting premium tasting menus? Regardless, in the state that this restaurant is in now, and on the basis of my experience today, I cannot recommend Kase Sake and Sushi.