On the outside, I try to project an image of having it all together. But underneath that, I'm kind of a disaster. Hence... the name of the site: GlossyVeneer. Since I was out of town for Valentine’s Day, the weekend before the pseudo-holiday we went out for dinner. This restaurant was selected by the Las Vegas Review Journal as the Best New Restaurant in last year’s “Best of” poll. It is a little out of site, it doesn’t have a glaring sign on the road or even visible parking from the street. But I am really glad that we found it, plus we could make reservations via OpenTable.com and accumulate points! That’s always nice.
Let’s start with the food, okay. We went all out, ordering appetizers, entrees and dessert. It was a celebration, right? Of course, we didn’t gorge on any of them either, leaving a little behind on each to leave room for the next. Well, I devoured my appetizer. I’ll admit to that.
For my appetizer I chose the butter lettuce salad with roasted red peppers, citrus vinaigrette and warm brie. The salad was lightly dressed, none of that over-drenching that chain restaurants seem prone to doing. And the brie… oh my… the brie was so wonderful, it was a small wedge (about 1 oz.) lightly coated in bread crumbs. When you cut into it and got the slightly oozy cheese, it was divine. My husband ordered the crab cakes and those were good too. Far better than ones he has sampled at a few other places, but not the best in the world. (Although, I’m not sure where to find those “best in the world” ones either, so don’t ask.)
For our entrees: I had the pan-seared salmon served over spaghetti squash aglio olio with a drizzling of a red pepper sauce around the plate. This was one of those dishes where you take a bite of the fish or the squash on their own and they are tasty, but when you spear some of the fish and squash together and push it through the sauce it is a whole new flavor experience. Very well done.
My hubby ordered the lobster cannelloni, of which he was generous enough to let me sample a tiny bite. The lobster was cooked very nicely, and while I don’t remember exactly what the sauce was on his dish, it was a cream-based sauce but it didn’t seem at all heavy. Which probably meant it had about a billion (delicious) calories.
And dessert, well we found that we couldn’t pass it up. And we couldn’t agree on one to split so we had to get two. My husband wanted the creme brulee trio, and I’m not a huge fan of creme brulee. It seems that it’s bad more often than it’s good when I’ve had it. His came with three small cups with a different flavor in each: pumpkin, pistachio, and maple. While the pistachio and maple were okay, the pumpkin was thick and gloopy, not really that good. But my dessert definitely was a winner, white chocolate cheesecake with warm apricots on top. It was a small round individual cheesecake with really smooth texture and consistency. And the apricots were a really nice compliment. It had a dollop of whipped cream on the side, that had a hint of chocolate flavor to it as well.
I’m not entirely sold on the environment here, but the food was excellent and I would gladly pay to sample more of the fair. Most of the patrons seemed to be of the uh… “senior” variety. The lighting was really, really, really dim, making it almost hard to read the menus. And even though the decor was pretty classy and elegant, there was still video poker embedded in the bar. Vegas, you gotta love it here.
And we figure that we must be kind of cool because as we were leaving we passed Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf at a nearby table. One of our rare celebrity sightings in this city that caters to those types all the time.
10100 W. Charleston Blvd.
Las Vegas , NV
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