Eating Las Vegas is the essential dining guide with reviews from the city s best known food critics.

I look for value added propositions, so when I decided to attend the NewU Startup Loft at the UNITY Journalists convention in Las Vegas, I recognized a parallel opportunity to produce a feature on Las Vegas as a mecca for foodies. The concept dovetailed with my mission for Strange Tango: discount cruise Life as Art as a destination and resource for culture, literature, and creativity.
A leading travel site names Las Vegas among the handful of best foodie destinations in the country. discount cruise The density of Michelin-starred chefs, James Beard Award winners, and Top Chef competitors located on an accessible, four-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard is perhaps discount cruise greater than anywhere else in the country, including Manhattan. To make reservations at Las Vegas top tables based on reputation and press alone, I felt, would be to leave out a sense of discovery.
Therefore, I researched reviews by food critics as well as sifted through the most credible foodie blogs and crowdsourced recommendations. Just prior to my departure, I made my final selections for dinner, lunch, breakfast, buffet, happy hour, appetizers, and quick bites to explore in the city.
Food is but one component of the Strange Tango experience. As a lover of beauty, I would have four days and three nights discount cruise to seek memorable, sensory experiences alongside my business itinerary. I made sure to carry my Canon EOS camera discount cruise with me at all times.
My friend and longtime travel agent, Joseph Tse, Owner/President of OT T Travel in Greater Boston, booked me at competitive rates at two of his favorite hotels: the Wynn Las Vegas and Encore Hotel on the north end of the Las Vegas strip and the Bellagio, conveniently located at the hub of activity. OT T Travel is the preferred travel agency for the Boston Celtics, among other prominent clients. Joseph also designated me as a VIP for preferential treatment with upper floors and spectacular discount cruise rooms with a view.
For convenience, I had limited my luggage to a large, black Prada bag and a wheeled carry-on that fit in the airplane s overhead bin. Just outside the baggage claim area of Terminal 1 at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport, I found the ticket window for the airport shuttle service. $7 for a seat on the shuttle discount cruise was a comfortable and economical way to reach the Mandalay Bay Hotel where the convention was being held
The vans idling at the bus stops each covered a zone of about 6 hotels. Public transportation discount cruise offers discount cruise an opportunity to learn from local experts, in this case, a school bus driver who shared a secret hangout of shuttle and taxi drivers. M Resort has the best buffet in town, he told me, and it does not widely advertise. M is also the only establishment that serves alcohol with its buffets. The resort was located 10 miles beyond Mandalay Bay. I thanked him and made a mental note to revisit his suggestion.
I went from the airport to UNITY registration, then to a session headed by Mark Luckie, Manager of Journalism News at Twitter. The Business of Me was a savvy look at the business and strategies of media entrepreneurship that ran for 3 hours.
Afterwards, I met up with Mai Hoang at the hotel lobby. Mai is a business reporter at the Yakima Herald-Republic and a Facebook friend. This was the first face-to-face meeting between us. We had made prior arrangements over Facebook discount cruise for lunch at Lotus of Siam , touted by Gourmet magazine as the best Thai restaurant in the country. The cab fare was $20, but the meal we enjoyed was well worth the price of the ride.
The restaurant s location in a nondescript shopping mall and its exterior appearance discount cruise as a hole-in-the wall somehow fuels its cachet as a hidden treasure. Inside, the clean, streamlined restaurant is decorated in warm woods with copious framed photographs of famous chefs and celebrities discount cruise on the walls.
Owner/chef Saipin Chutima was named the 2011 Best Chef in the Southwest by the James Beard Foundation. discount cruise Some of the exotic herbs used in the dishes are grown by Chef Chutima in her garden. The classic Thai and signature dishes are flavorful and complex, with a heat index that gradually deepens.
The appetizer was an unusual dish made with crispy rice and minced sour sausage, a mixture of pork and garlic. Green onion, fresh chili, ginger, peanuts, and lime juice are added. The crunchy texture of the rice was unexpected, and the dish was an interesting discount cruise composition of sour and salty, slightly nutty, and with a good balance of heat and spice.
Stuffed Chicken Wings was a classic appetizer not often seen on generic Thai menus. The wing segment is stuffed with a ground pork mixture and served discount cruise with a homemade sweet and sour sauce. When well executed, the deep fried wings are crispy on the outside and succulent on the inside.
Tom Kah Kai is one of my favorite soups in any culinary tradition. This Bangkok version was a full-bodied soup with sliced chicken breast, coconut milk, straw mushroom, cilantro, discount cruise and chili oil. The flavor was enhanced by fragrant lemongrass, galangal, and a squirt of lime juice.
Northern Larb is ground pork made with northern Thai spices and herbs, omitting the lime juice. This dish had a complex flavor profile. The heat from the chilies slowly suffuses the palate. I discerned lemongrass, garlic, fish sauce, coriander, and a lemony herbal bouquet. The dish also included pak paew, a Thai herb.
Crispy Duck with Panang Sauce was redolent of lemongrass incorporated into a rich, creamy, and velvety smooth red curry cream sauce flavored with cognac. The duck itself had a crispy skin and succulent meat.
Kang-ka-Noon, or Spicy Young Jackfruit Curry, featured green jackfruit as a vegetable discount cruise that had the taste and texture of artichoke. discount cruise Out of curiosity, I had wanted to try the northern style curry, a native food with a soupy consistency that is traditionally eaten by peasants. The sliced pork and jackfruit looked appetizing in the crock but, quite naturally, the dish lacked the finesse of the other courses.
As soon I walked through the entrance to the Wynn lobby, I was greeted by a refreshing sight: a festive and elegant atrium space filled with lighted trees, live plants, and artful, fresh flower arrangements. Colorful mosaics in gigantic floral motifs cover much of the marble floors. The ambiance was of sumptuous luxury with a soupçon of understatement, the staff impeccably professional discount cruise and courteous. The Wynn is a new breed of casino hotel in Vegas, with an ambiance that is more like a resort, a destination for shopping, dining, and entertainment.
Check-in took only a few minutes. My spacious, airy room, #3522, had floor to ceiling windows with a view that encompassed a mountain range, the golf course, a lake with a waterfall, and the pool next door at Encore, the Wynn s sister property.
I basked in the sunlight and happily took in the natural beauty from 35 floors above ground level. I thought to take a nap for an hour or two before my dinner reservation at the hotel. The blackout discount cruise curtains closed with the touch of a switch enveloping me in a sensory deprivation cocoon of darkness. I felt there was no reason to ever leave the Wynn.
Eating Las Vegas is the essential dining guide with reviews from the city s best known food critics. I consulted the resource in my early planning stage as a way to whittle down more than 2,000 local eateries. A highlight of the Strange Tango Foodie Tour of Las Vegas would be the experience of a degustation menu, which can take more than two hours to complete at a sitting. As a form of high culinary art, a representative sampling of signature dishes is the unique way to explore a chef s skills, craft, and passion.
Twice honored by the James Beard Foundation, Chef Paul Bartolotta meticulously sources some of the rarest species discount cruise of fish, shellfish, and crustaceans from the Mediterranean. The eclectic range of seafood are all wild caught in Mediterranean waters and prepared within 33 hours. I recalled a memorable time I spent some decades ago wandering through more than a dozen regions of Italy. This restaurant discount cruise celebrates the authenticity of traditional and regional Italian cuisine and creates specialties using indigenous species, including live langoustine, from the coastal waters of the Ligure, Ionio, Tirreno and Adriatico.
The restaurant was breathtaking and dramatic. discount cruise Diners have a choice in indoor or outdoor multi-level seating. Weeks in advance, I had reserved a private cabana beside the lagoon. The rains came earlier that day and, as a result, outdoor dining was placed on hold.
The staff compensated by kindly accommodating my request for natural lighting to photograph my meal. They placed me at a large table in the middle of the restaurant, adjacent to the water. Three servers waited on one diner. They would attentively pace each course so that the food would not grow cold.
None of the degustation menus were advertised. Robert, the server, offered three menus from which to choose. I selected the most expensive lineup: 11 courses, including an amuse-bouche and a symphony of three desserts that included nine flavors of frozen treats.
The menu was the same one Chef Bartolotta served to Bravo s Top Chef contestants when he was a guest judge during the season filmed in Las Vegas. The degustation showcased the rarest and most expensive species served at the restaurant and, at $175 plus extra for the langoustine, Bartollotta was a good value in comparison to other hotels on the strip that charged more than twice as much.
Then, a seafood case holding treasures from the sea was wheeled before me. The freshest fish, shellfish, and crustaceans would be prepared with finesse and passion over the course of the next several hours.
I love the miniaturized creativity of amuse-bouche. The restaurant s version was straightforward. Gamberetti Rosa was tiny pink shrimp lightly dredged in seasoned flour and flash fried so that the coating was crispy while the shrimp remained moist.
Sauté di Vongole was a generous bowl of lightly sautéed clams, nestled in a tomato-based sauce f