Restaurant Review: Holsteins Las Vegas, Nevada

Holsteins Shakes and Buns - dinner on June 22, 2017

But first....Milk Bar

One of our team dinners was at Holsteins Shakes and Bun at the Cosmopolitan, another behemoth hotel-casino next door to the Aria. You approach Holsteins from a mall and on their floor were other stores and eateries. One of them was Milk Bar. I’d never gone to a real Milk Bar but I have their recipe book and I’d tried the corn cookie via their mix from Williams Sonoma. I was a little early at the meeting spot (and my coworkers were a little late) so I had time to line up and buy a corn cookie from the outer Milk Bar stand. I know I’d had them from the mix but I wanted to see how the real thing tasted straight from a Milk Bar location.

We were about to have dinner and I’d just eaten the AlmondBrioche from Jean Philippe almost 2 hours before so I tucked the corn cookie away for later (side note: it was good but I think I prefer making it from the Milk Bar mix) and joined the rest of the team for dinner.

As you can surmise from the name, Holsteins is a burger place. It was fairly large and we had the back room entirely for our group. They accommodated us with a price fixe menu that was a subset of their regular menu. Our event coordinator had ordered the appetizers ahead of time but we each selected our entrees.

Tuna Tartare

Caesar Salad

I have a love/hate relationship with burger joints. I love burgers. But since I’m a very plain eater, I hate all the extra stuff that burger places put on their various burger offerings. Seriously, I’m just all about the burger, bun, maybe cheese and when I’m really letting my hair down, a leaf of lettuce. No condiments, no tomato, no onion, no mushrooms, no pickles; don’t touch my burger with that stuff. 

Nom Nom Burger

Holsteins wasn’t exactly a plain burger kind of place so I settled for the plainest burger I could find, the Nom Nom Burger, but hold the dressing. A normal person who would order the Nom Nom Burger would get a burger, cheese, potato chips (on the burger) and dressing. Dressing. Ugh. Why do that to a burger? So I had them hold the dressing and ended up with, as my coworker sitting next to me helpfully pointed out, “a cheeseburger with potato chips”. Why, yes. And that’s fine with me. 

I will admit it’s a little odd to bite into a nice, juicy cheeseburger and crunch into chips under the bun. I’m sure it was Holsteins’ way of not being a typical burger place. There were a lot more exotic combinations than my cheeseburger-with-chips. But that was fine because it was a good burger.

Vanilla Milkshake

They made even more excellent milkshakes. I rarely have milkshakes – I love them but I don’t love the calories so they’re a sometimes-treat, not an everyday thing. But I’m not in Vegas every day so…. Someone ordered a cookies and cream milkshake and holy cow (bad pun intended), when Holsteins does a cookies and cream milkshake, they really mean COOKIES and (ice) cream. The milkshake came with a jumbo-sized ice cream cookie sandwich on top of the milkshake. My eyes ate it up but I was happy to stick with my regular milkshake. I was full enough. Overall thumbs up for Holsteins – friendly atmosphere, good burgers, fabulous milkshakes.

Cookies and Cream Milkshake

Bakery Review: Jean Philippe Patisserie - Las Vegas

Jean Philippe Patisserie - visited June 21-23, 2017 at the Aria in Las Vegas, Nevada

This will be one of those heavy food porn posts. I’d rather let the pictures speak for themselves but I’ll throw in my random commentary. I had a teambuilding offsite in Vegas (awesome perk, yeah?) and as luck and my baking-magnet universe would have it, we stayed at the Aria. Where, upon checking in and as I headed towards the elevator bank to go to my room, I discovered, right at the foot of the elevators, that there was a Jean Philippe Patisserie.

You can bet I had done my homework before leaving for Vegas with “homework” being looking up which bakeries I can walk to on the Strip. I’ve been to Vegas multiple times so I wasn’t unfamiliar with the bakery landscape. I knew about Carlo’s and Bouchon and had gone to both before. But it was my first time staying at the Aria and having Jean Philippe Patisserie right there was like getting instant nourishment for my foodie soul.

They’re open 24 hours – hey, it’s Vegas – and although I had arrived later at night and had already had dinner before my flight, that didn’t stop me from visiting the patisserie within minutes of dumping my carry-on in my room. It was on the edge of the casino and was doing a brisk business. I had to take a ton of pictures since I was on sensory overload and capturing the images to enjoy later was my way of handling all that sugary input.

Well, sort of. I also had to queue up, drool over the display cases and narrow my choices to an agonizing list of 1. For the first visit anyway. I selected the Snickers Cake and almost didn’t blink at the outrageous $10 price tag for a mini cake. True, it was beautiful, they did box it up and give me one of the classiest carrier bags I’ve ever seen to transport it the short distance of 24 flights back up to my room. Reminder to self: it’s Vegas and Vegas is expensive.

Snickers Cake

The cake was freaking delicious. It was layers of chocolate cake, chocolate mousse, ganache, something crunchy, a thin layer of caramel and just bites of perfection. And I’m not even big on peanut stuff. If I had to pay $10 for a little cake, it was worth every bite and calorie I consumed at almost midnight. Goodbye, diet. See you after Vegas.

That first trip did set me up for some “long-range” planning. In my-speak, that means I planned ahead to what I wanted to try for my remaining brief time in Vegas. We had team dinners I had to work around so I couldn’t actually camp out at the patisserie during my entire stay. Not that I didn’t briefly toy with the idea. Plus I had to work the calories in somehow. Which turned out to be easier than I thought since the Aria conveniently offered a nice gym which I utilized the next morning by banging out 7 miles on the treadmill. It was triple digit temps outside so no way was I running outdoors in that desert heat.

But the 7-mile run emboldened me to choose the Nutella Beignet for my breakfast that morning. Here’s the funny thing about running. I can’t eat before I run; my stomach can’t handle it. And even though I burn a ton of calories during the run, I can’t eat right after a run either. I’m just not hungry. An hour later though, I’m ready to chew off my right leg. The Nutella beignet went down easy after that hour although I have to correct the name and call it a doughnut rather than a beignet. I’ve had beignets at no less an august venue than Café du Monde and this wasn’t a beignet. It was a doughnut. It was delicious but a doughnut nonetheless.

Nutella Beignet

I had aspirations to sample more delicious goodness from Jean Philippe Patisserie but alas, I hadn’t factored in how much heat really does suppress the appetite, even mine, and a day spent outside at the pool cabana where the team was pretty much killed my sweet tooth. So effectively that, despite my 7-mile run, I wasn’t even hungry for lunch and didn’t eat again until 4 pm that day.

At that point, our team dinner wasn’t for another couple of hours so I did indulge in another Jean Philippe purchase to tide me over. This time was an almond brioche. I’ve had brioche before too but this one they did a little differently. Instead of a whole brioche roll, this seemed more like a round brioche loaf that was cut into a slice, layered with almond paste and sliced almonds. Whatever they did to it, it was also freaking delicious. Soft bread, sweet almond paste, crunchy sliced almonds – amazing. It also had the benefit of being cheaper than the Snickers Cake. This one clocked in at $5.

Almond Brioche

There’s also a Jean Philippe Patisserie at the Bellagio which is where some of my coworkers and I did end up as part of the scavenger hunt after dinner that night. We were supposed to hunt for the “world’s largest chocolate fountain”. Took us awhile to find it, even with the help of google and our iphones, but mostly because the Bellagio is so Vegas-Strip huge that we had to cover a lot of ground to end up in that part of the Bellagio.

I don’t know what I was visualizing when I thought of the world’s large chocolate fountain but it wasn’t what I expected. Maybe I had been hoping more for a pure waterfall of chocolate a la Niagara Falls in gushing streams of liquid warm chocolate. Hey, I can dream. Instead, it was a bunch of small pools of various types of chocolate in an elaborate structure that connected to each other but the chocolate flowed quite sedately. Huh. Oh well, at least I can say I got to see it.

I had good intentions of making one final stop at Jean Philippe Patisserie on my last morning before leaving for the airport since it was literally on my way to checkout at the lobby. I wanted to try the Nutella Brioche. Or the sticky bun. Or a scrumptious-looking muffin. Even perhaps get something for breakfast there then a snack later at the airport. Alas, when the time came, I just wasn’t hungry. I know, who am I, right? But the triple digit heat was still doing a fine job of suppressing my appetite plus I’d had a big dinner the night before (next post). So I missed a third opportunity to indulge in Jean Philippe’s offerings. Bummer. Next time, Vegas, next time.

Restaurant Review: Cesario's

Cesario's - dinner on June 13, 2017

While I was in San Francisco for my conference, I didn’t just eat pastries from Mr. Holmes’ Bakehouse. I also had dinner with a coworker at Cesario’s one night. It’s always fun to check out new places when I’m away from home and it’s easy enough to google “best restaurants” near whatever hotel we were staying at. Cesario’s popped as #4 on Trip Advisor and it was easy to make a reservation through Open Table so that’s where we ended up.

Turns out it was a good thing I had made a reservation as, when we arrived, the tables were nearly all full, there was a party ahead of us looking to be seated and we were able to leapfrog them, both because of the reservation and that the only table available was a two-topper. The restaurant was at a corner and, typical of San Francisco, was fairly small in terms of seating. 

Service was pretty decent, considering how crowded they were, and our server took the time to answer questions and requests for recommendations. The bread in the bread basket wasn’t crusty, which is a little surprising considering it was an Italian restaurant. I suspect they outsource their bread and get it from a bakery (a common practice) rather than baking inhouse.

We were hungry so we ordered polenta “fries” as the appetizer. The “fries” came out as fried polenta cut into chunky rectangles and served with marinara sauce. While they didn’t bear any resemblance to actual fries, they were pretty tasty and hit the right spot. 

Polenta "fries"

Linguine Vongole

For my entrée, I ordered my ubiquitous spaghetti and meatballs, my go-to choice whenever I try a new Italian restaurant, much like pad thai is my go-to test for a new Thai place. In hindsight, I really should mix up my order since it isn’t that hard to make good spaghetti and meatballs and I probably didn’t give Cesario’s enough runway to impress me with their Italian dishes. My coworker, on the advice of our server, ordered the linguine vongole. And we split the tiramisu for dessert. The food was good and the service was nice. It’s the kind of restaurant that’s a safe choice in terms of the food but if you wanted a little more adventure in your dining choices, San Francisco offers many options. For myself, I enjoyed it but it’s hard to go wrong with pasta.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

Tiramisu