Viva Las Vegas - The Food

Ah finally, the long awaited post about what and where we ate in Vegas! This is very important as it was possibly our favorite part of the trip!

It's hard to decide on something like that though, I mean the rock climbing was awesome and it was so nice just to relax and spend time together period, but the food...

I'll just start at the beginning. We arrived at our hotel at just about dinner time and we were tired from our 7 hour drive so we didn't really feel like going out somewhere to find a restaurant. Instead we decided to explore the hotel/casino a little and eat at one of their restaurants. The Yard House had the best reviews on Yelp so we went there.

I got the mac and cheese (which had bacon and chicken and mushrooms...mmm, it was really good!) and Pete had the Jambalya which he enjoyed. We were pretty satisfied with this place. It is a sports bar so you have to go into it expecting it to be kind of crowded and noisy, but we were ok with that.

Friday was our first full day and we just went strait to Whole Foods where we got big, expensive green juices from their juice bar, some Cinnamon rolls and some snacks to take with us out to Red Rock Canyon. We had an awesome day and just basically snacked for lunch. By the time we got back to town, we were hungry and it was dinner time so we didn't even stop at the hotel, we went in search of the famous Thai restaurant: Lotus or Siam. I had amazing reviews so we had to try it.

I ordered this soft shell crab salad that had cabbage and peanuts and the most amazing sauce that I wish I could have eaten more of. It was SO spicy! I have never eaten anything so spicy in my entire life. My first bite, I got a bit of everything, including a lot of the sauce and I thought I was going to die! And, as you can see, I didn't have rice with it.

Luckily, Pete's dish arrived shortly after, and I stuffed a bunch of his rice in my mouth. I think I drank 3 glasses of water, along with more of Pete's rice as I worked on eating my dinner. I was able to eat most of it, just not what was sitting in the sauce. It was really good despite the heat and I'm glad I was brave and ate it anyway. At the end, the waiter was really nice and brought me a small cup of Thai ice tea which has cream in it, and that helped a ton! It was really good too.

One complaint I had about this place was that the service was really slow, but it was really busy and we were seated by two pretty large parties, so maybe it's not always like that. The fact that we were able to get into such a place on a Friday night with only a 30 minute wait was a plus though.

The other down side was that it was just freezing in there! It wasn't too hot outside, but most people there (including me) were dressed in summery clothes so I thought it was an oversight to have it that cold in there. Even with my jacket on and the spiciest food on the planet in my mouth, I was still shivering and I was happy to get outside when we were done.

Saturday morning, after my run, we wanted to take it easy so we decided to find breakfast at the hotel. We wanted to go to The Grand Cafe which had the best reviews for breakfast, but there was a huge line for that so we decided to go try out the breakfast at the pool Sandbar Grill instead. They didn't have a big selection for breakfast, but a breakfast burrito sounded just right for me after a long run anyway so that's what I got. We also got some expensive drinks that probably were not worth the $13 we paid for them, but hey we were lounging at the pool, you're supposed to order drinks!

Unfortunately, we were not impressed with the food here at all. My burrito just had eggs and potatoes in it. What kind of breakfast burrito is that?! It did it's job and filled me up quickly which was good since Pete's breakfast sandwich did not fill him up so I was able to give him half of mine.

For dinner, we got dressed up and went to Spago by Wolfgang Puck. It is located in Ceasar's Palace near the forum shops. I called ahead to ask where to park and they told me to just go to the valet and that it was complimentary. Nice! So, after some terrible traffic, we managed to get to the valet totally late for our reservation, only to find out we were supposed to go to a different valet to get to Spago! Well, we weren't going to try and fight traffic on the strip again (not fun!) so we opted to walk through the casino. How big can it be anyway, right? Hahaha, right. It took a lot of walking and asking around to find the place, and I was seriously regretting not breaking in my shoes beforehand.

Once we found the restaurant, though, everything was smooth sailing!

They had held our table for us, since I had called ahead and told them about the bad traffic, and they took us right to it. We told them right away that we wanted to do the tasting menu so from there on out we just got to sit back and let them wow us. It was the fanciest restaurant I've ever been in. We spent a few weeks worth of grocery money for it, but it was the best, most amazing food experience I've ever had! The meal took us about 3 hours, but we never felt bored. We felt so pampered and they just kept delighting us with the next little dish. We decided to just sit back and enjoy it and not take pictures which makes it hard to tell you about anything, because I have a terrible memory. I wouldn't do it justice trying to describe it anyway. Here's the one picture we took of the dessert. It was amazing. Everything was so amazing. There wasn't a single dish that they brought us that we didn't love. We were super impressed and can not wait to save up and go back!

Here I am admiring the amazing man who made this food experience possible. Thank you Wolfgang Puck! (Haha, this was actually just a card with his picture on it that Pete held up when he took the picture!)

Here's the man I really love and enjoyed spending the evening, and the last 12 years with so much! (We were celebrating our 12th wedding anniversary, a few weeks late). We weren't really trying to take a picture of that family behind us, but of the mirrors so you can kind of see what the room was like. It was very elegant.

We finished dinner at about 11, then walked around the forum shops for an hour before heading back out to the valet to get our car. Oh, well guess what, that valet closes at midnight so we had just missed it. They told us we had to go down to the other valet (where we were supposed to go in the first place, but where they told us we could not pick up our car. So confusing!) My feet were hurting so much from walking around in my brand new heels, so I told Pete I would just sit there want wait while he ran and got the car. I had to sit for a long time because it took him a while to even find the place, then of course he had to get back through the traffic to pick me up. I really should have just gone with him. I felt kind of weird sitting there on the Las Vegas strip, in a nice dress, all by myself in the middle of the night. I really didn't feel unsafe, there were so many people around, but you know...

I did get to watch the billboard movie about Shania Twain about a million times so now whenever I hear "I Feel Like A Woman" I will think of that night. :)

Pete and I ended up finding each other and making it home just fine, feeling super happy about our wonderful evening and ready to take on the world the next day!

Sunday morning we went in search of a new breakfast place, again looking to Yelp, and found Rachel's Kitchen. It's just a small place and we got to sit outside on their patio. They had green juice for a much better price than Whole Foods and we were really happy to be able to get that!

They also had delicious food! I got something, I think it was called The Favorite, with eggs and goat cheese and it was really good, but we both fell in love with Pete's French Toast! We ended up coming back here for breakfast every day for the rest of our stay (2 more days), and I got the french toast both times along with my green juice to balance it out. :)

We pretty much just snacked for lunch while we were climbing, got smoothies when we got back to the hotel, then we went to Saffron Flavors of India for dinner. We didn't take any pictures here. This place was dead, I guess everyone else was at Easter Dinner. 

The curry was really good, nothing better than what we normally get in Salt Lake, but they had the best naan we'd ever tasted! I was sad I wasn't able to eat all my curry since we couldn't save our left-overs like I would normally love to do!

Monday, we spent the day at the hotel (after our run to Rachel's Kitchen of course, plus some shopping), and since we had like the Field House so much, we decided to go back there for lunch. I had a BBQ chicken salad and it was delicous!  

After spending the day relaxing and going to the spa, we got dressed up and went out for one more expensive dinner.

We went to a Brazilan churrascaria steakhouse called Fogo de Chao. It was really good. I haven't been eating as much meat as I used to, especially red meat, so I really was only able to taste a little bit of each kind of meat, but they were all really delicious. Our favorite thing was the little cheese rolls they kept bringing out to us. Oh how I could not stop eating them! We also tried their signature desert, the Papaya Cream, which was very good.

One more trip to Rachel's Kitchen for us on Tuesday morning, then it was time to head home. Oh, and we at the The Pizza Factory in Cedar City for lunch. It was nice to finally spend less than $30 on a meal! :)

We had such a great time, and are already trying to figure out when we can go back! I would highly recommend any of these restaurants to you if you have a trip to Vegas in the future! Happy dining!