Grape Street pairs wine with great food

1) If the wine list at Grape Street’s Downtown Summerlin location is beyond your budget — which I’ve heard from a number of readers — know that you can order a bottle of the less expensive wines on the by-the-glass list, even though the wine list doesn’t say that.

2) And if you go to the Downtown Summerlin Grape Street, be sure to ask for Brennan as your server. He filled us in on the above after we ordered a couple of glasses. And beyond that, he’s flat out the best server we’ve had in ages. I honestly think this guy could find a comfortable home at just about any high-end restaurant on the Strip or elsewhere.

I’ve always liked the atmosphere at the original Grape Street on Lake Mead Boulevard, and liked this one even more. There’s a similar brick-y, wine-cellar-y vibe, with accents including a stunning behemoth of a wine wall, complete with library ladder and oversized black-and-white prints.

The menu, if I’m not mistaken, is identical to the original, or nearly so. Another thing I’ve always liked about Grape Street is the fact that, beginning way before it became common, the menu has always been really varied: You can do tapas, have a salad, have a sandwich, go for a pizza or pasta, all the way up to an entree, which comes with soup or salad. All of it is, of course, designed to be compatible with wine, Grape Street’s raison d’etre. And we did a little bit of mixing and matching of our own.

Crab-stuffed shrimp ($14) seemed like a good way to start, and indeed it was. Five large shrimp had been stuffed with a mixture that was heavy on crab and light on bread crumbs, and served in a wine-butter sauce that we ended up sopping up with some of the bread from the basket on the table.

Chicken Gorgonzola ($17) was from the pasta part of the menu and based on penne. Atop the pasta was a profusion of large chunks of white-meat chicken, bathed in a relatively light but still creamy Gorgonzola sauce and strewn with lots of pieces of sun-dried tomato, their concentrated flavor pairing admirably with the assertive cheese, their bright color an effective foil for the neutral colors in the rest of the dish.

And an entree of short ribs ($30), which we almost missed tucked between the other listings. The meat was perfect, carefully braised until it was fork-tender, glazed with a rich Bordelaise, and served with sauteed fresh spinach and an offbeat but appealing dish that was sort of a loose, cheesy, creamy, risotto. Sort of.

Soup or salad was included with the entree and we chose the du jour, a creamy tomato basil, the only flaw of which was that the basil flavor was too subtle.

So, you can tell we liked Grape Street at Downtown Summerlin, for all the right reasons. And especially for Brennan.

Las Vegas Review-Journal restaurant reviews are done anonymously at Review-Journal expense. Email Heidi Knapp Rinella at Hrinella@reviewjournal.com. Find more of her stories at www.reviewjournal.com and bestoflasvegas.com, and follow @HKRinella on Twitter.