Friends -
My SO and I live in Los Angeles, and don’t tend to get too far out of the Westside for restaurants - it’s not because we don’t love the food in other SoCal centers of great cuisine - we just have lives that make traveling far except for a special occasion challenging.
My SO wants to go to Las Vegas for his birthday, so we’re taking a few days of vacation, and we’re thinking it might provide us an opportunity to get food of the type we’d get in DTLA, the SGV or OC - we realize it may not have the quality or “authenticity” of the food we’d get in SoCal, but we thought we’d see what we can find. Here’s an example - he loves the fried whole catfish that you get with tamarind sauce and all sorts of herbs on the side, and rice paper to make your own rolls, but we can’t get down to the OC very often, so if by chance there’s a place in Las Vegas that does a pretty good job on this, we’d be happy with it. FYI, we’d be happy with places like Lotus of Siam.
Other things we’d be looking for - I want to do one big blowout with live fish from a fish tank - and so I’m not only looking for places, but also curious whether folks think garoupa or marble goby taste better - we like fairly rich fish, even if it has a strong taste. In this connection, I’m wondering if Mott 32 at the Venetian is worth it.
In terms of other cuisine and styles - we enjoy some of what I would call “simpler” dishes, although I realize they are not simple to execute well - like three cup chicken or whole soy sauce poached chicken. In terms of what we would avoid, just because of our preferences - I love Sichuan and other spicy foods, but I seem to have some tummy issues lately after eating them. I don’t know whether it’s an age issue, but that’s not my preference, unless there’s some non-spicy items on the menu I can order. My SO is not into places that only do noodles, dumplings or dim sum. I can convince him to go to those places when it’s my birthday - but this is his celebration. Also, he’s not a big fan of red meat - he’ll eat it, but a red-meat-centric restaurant wouldn’t be something he’d enjoy.
We’ll have a car, so we won’t be confined to the Strip or any specific geographic area in the city. And while we can do a few very expensive meals, we also want some places that are mid-range or moderately priced.
Also, I realize this is a long post - so thank you all so much in advance - I’m a bit of an FTC lurker, but a really big fan.