Restaurant Guy Savoy at Caesars Palace serves updated French food from a Michelin three-star winner who was named Chef of the Year in France a few years ago. But all of that naturally comes at a price. File Photo
The 17-course extravaganza served at Joel Robuchon at the Mansion at MGM Grand earns its premium price, but readers complain that some spots in the valley don't quite measure up. File Photo
If it seems that dinner out in Las Vegas represents an ever-larger proportion of your budget, you're not alone.
Rita Cream, who has lived in Las Vegas since 1990, has watched prices go up and up.
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"Everything was so cheap" in the early '90s, she said. "In the casinos -- the nice restaurants, the steakhouses and the pasta places -- they had specials. The prices were pretty reasonable. The food was good, and it was nice because you weren't going in a coffee shop that didn't have any atmosphere."
But during the past few years, she said, prices have skyrocketed -- "especially on the Strip. They have all those gourmet restaurants there -- I mean really gourmet, where you know you're going to go in and spend $300 and $400 with no problem."
Finding restaurants that charge that much per person, often without wine, doesn't take a lot of imagination. Special menus can be even higher; the prix-fixe Chinese New Year menus at Wynn Las Vegas topped out at $988 -- with more than 200 early reservations at that level.
But while Las Vegas' widely hailed restaurant revolution has brought many truly fine restaurants to the city, it also has brought a valleywide outbreak of "The Emperor's New Clothes" -- places that have priced their menus on the same level as the finest restaurants but fail to measure up.
"It's really beautiful inside," Cream said. "When you go in, you go, 'Oh my God, it's gorgeous,' and then the food is a joke. Tourism's so good they feel like they can charge whatever they want and the people will come."
And Cream especially is miffed by neighborhood restaurants that charge Strip prices.
"Casinos off the Strip, or restaurants, why do they have to charge $50 for a steak?" she asked. "I don't know who they're catering to."
She mentioned one neighborhood-casino restaurant where she felt the prices were skewed too high.
"We went there three or four times," she said. "You give a place a chance, and then you say, 'What, am I nuts?' "
The same question crosses the mind of William Hammant, who moved here last April from the Laurel, Md., area between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, and said restaurant prices in that region were slightly lower than they are here.
Hammant said he is widely traveled. "I really enjoy fine dining.
"I don't mind paying, if the quality is there," he said. "But at the same time, it just seems to me that everybody's trying to charge top dollar."
And he said he sees how that practice can backfire, especially for those restaurants outside the tourism area.
"On the Strip," he said, "maybe this has worked all right for them with the tourist trade, but with all these restaurants opening up, you can get somebody to come once, but people aren't going to come back, because they have more choices."
Hammant said he'll give a place that looks interesting a second chance if the prices seem higher than the quality, but "beyond that, I'll just keep looking. I've found some that were good, and just stuck with them and went back."
Those, he said, include Marche Bacchus, Rosemary's Restaurant, Marc's Restaurant and Wild Truffles.
"They're not cheap, but I think the prices are in comparison to what the quality is," he said.
Hammant said that in his experience, a frequent reason that a restaurant's food quality may not measure up to its prices is because the owner isn't paying attention. The food isn't consistent, he said, or meats aren't well trimmed. He cited one example of a popular neighborhood restaurant where an $11 appetizer of mussels included only five or six shellfish -- and they were burned.
"Nobody's watching what comes out of the kitchen," he said. "It takes effort on their part."
Cream said she and her husband are always on the lookout for good prospects.
"We don't go out anymore and spend hundreds of dollars for dinner," she said. "We try to look for a place that has nice atmosphere and the food is reasonable.
