Gordon Biersch

I told the hubby that any restaurant we visit in November should be new to us. Since he goes out to lunch with business associates, he has visited a lot more restaurants around the valley than I have. Thus we changed the rules so that we would go to places that I had not been yet. It gives me the chance to experience new places and it will give me some blog fodder for NaBloPoMo.

So our first encounter was Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant. There are two locations of this restaurant here in Las Vegas. Kevin has been there for dinner with co-workers. He had spotted a dish that he wanted to try while there previously, but he ordered an expensive steak while the company was picking up the tab. So on this visit he ordered the dish that had caught his eye before: Goat Cheese Ravioli. The pasta is in a browned butter sauce with spinach, mushrooms and pinenuts. While it was tasty, it didn’t seem to have the explosion of flavors that we had anticipated.

I ordered the Hummus and Goat Cheese salad. The dish was very light on the ‘salad’ aspect and very heavy on the flatbread. In fact, it had about three times the amount of flatbread that I would have expected. I would have liked to see more greens and more roasted red peppers, (I think I only got one little piece of pepper!). The hummus was good, but nothing exceptional. And I had about 4 little crumbles of goat cheese on the plate, so maybe that didn’t really warrant a spot in the title of the dish.

Since we went during late afternoon we were still able to eat off the lunch menu. This meant they featured smaller desserts at really reasonable prices. While we normally wouldn’t indulge in a dessert unless it was a special occasion, today we decided that the price and potential blog fodder made it worth the splurge.

I selected the key lime cheesecake. The graham cracker crust tasted like onions. EW! The filling was tasty, with three different levels of lime flavors. I’m not entirely sure what each layer was specifically, but one seemed kind of like a lemon meringue filling texture, then a light cream layer and then the lime-flavored cheesecake layer. But I was so turned off by the onion-essence crust that I didn’t eat much.

The spouse ordered the carrot cake. This was a nice piece of cake, moist with a good blend of spices and a tasty cream cheese frosting. It had a layer of walnuts pressed into the outside edge of the frosting that was a little overwhelming considering there was a nice balance of walnuts on the inside of the cake. But this was by far the best part of the entire meal.

So was I greatly impressed? No, not really. I would give it another shot. But nothing really struck me as a must-eat destination.