Le Cirque, Bellagio – Las Vegas

I am so behind on blogging that I never finished my Las Vegas restaurant trilogy from the first week of June!  I left the best for last; now after almost two months my memory is a little dicey! Same is the case with so many Seattle restaurants in my drafts, but those I can go back and refresh my memory any time I want.   With so many more Vegas restaurants remaining in our must-try list, a Las Vegas repeat is going to take a while. So I am just going to write about what I remember from the visit!

Pros

The ambience and the décor – top class! The place is decorated in bright colors with fun animal prints to invoke the feel of a fun circus tent . A clear view of the Bellagio fountains is definitely a plus! And wait till you see those festive tableware!

Service – Outstanding! It was all you would expect from a high end restaurant and much much more! When I was trying hard to take a picture of the menu, our way too friendly waitress offered to give me a copy of the menu to go. I forgot about it by the end of the meal, but she didn’t! Along with the check came a full menu folded and packed in a nice Le Cirque envelope to go, now that is some service, don’t you think?

Food – None of the other stuff matters if the food was just mediocre, but food really was the highlight here! Amazing fine French cuisine and excellent wines. Each and every course at this Michelin rated restaurant was outstanding. Freshest ingredients, exquisite flavors, each dish carved with so much detail and perfection, real treat for all senses!

Cons

Pricey – It is on the expensive side, the total bill for two came to almost $500 including taxes and tips, but we knew that going in. This was the anniversary dinner, and I would say it is totally worth it if you are celebrating something special. 

Portion Size – Wow, I really don’t know what kind of people they had in mind when they decided the portion sizes. We had the Le Cirque Degustation menu which has an amuse-bouché, 5 courses plus a pre dessert, Dessert and Pettit Fours! That is three dessert courses people! To top it all, the main dessert course is huge, and each person on the table gets a different variety! So all in all that is 9 courses + a taste of your partner’s dessert course. With that many dishes, they should’ve really made each dish half the size. After the first couple of dishes we got the idea, so we deliberately didn’t finish any of the dishes afterwards, a really hard thing to do since everything tasted so darn good!

The Food

We had the Prix-fix menu as I mentioned before, which is $145 per person + $65 for wine pairing. Siv went for the wine pairing, there was no way I could have 6 glasses of wine, so I opted to just get wine by the glass. I also got a special glass with the foie gras course, since the wine they paired with foie gras was just out of this world! I had a sip from Siv and I had to have it! One of the few dishes I can really understand the whole wine pairing philosophy and appreciate the difference a wine makes to the dish is foie gras.

We started with the Amuse-Bouche which was a classic oyster and caviar combo served on crushed ice. Delicious!

Lobster Salad consisted of large pieces of fresh succulent lobster served on top of a salad of peas and some other veggies and topped with a frisee salad and a generous piece of shaved black truffle!

Sauteed Foie Gras with nectarines, grapes and diced fruits topped with a micro greens salad, was oh so delicious! It was paired with a Royal Tokaji 5 Puttonyos, a sweet Hungarian wine.

Tomato, Basil and Mozzarella Risotto with Roasted Diver Sea Scallops was delicious, but I didn’t think it belonged in a six course menu. It was rather heavy and as I mentioned before the portion was huge. We deliberately had just a little bit of this. I think just this course would suffice for a normal lunch.

Paupette of Seabass with Braised Leeks and Red Wine Sauce – I don’t remember the details, but I do remember it tasted great!

Roasted Beef Tenderloin, Cocoa Nibs, Peas Mousseline and potato souffle. Everything worked except for the shaved chocolate, I am not a big chocolate and meat combo fan, I just ignored the chocolate and had the rest, and it was one of the most succulent pieces of meat I’ve ever had! Again, a tad too big for this meal though, but I guess they can’t make a tenderloin any smaller and still keep it moist inside!

This was the pre-dessert. A sorbet with some fruit salad, I can’t remember what exactly was in it, it was a palate cleanser to get us ready for the real dessert course.

The dessert fantasy course had two different desserts for each of us. The table next to us was a party of four and I saw that they were served four different desserts! Siv was served a pineapple-coconut-mango ice cream in a real coconut half, and mine was a chocolate souffle. But I couldn’t take a heavy chocolate souffle after the meal we had, the ice cream was more to my taste, light and refreshing. We did a decent job on both the desserts.

Finally the petit fours to finish up the meal. You would think we couldn’t have another bite, but we did, these were too cute to resist.

And just in case all these sweets weren’t enough, they gave us individually wrapped gift boxes of chocolate truffles to go!

All-in-all, it was a meal to remember! Extravagant, over-the-top, pampering fine dining experience; just what we needed to celebrate the 10 wonderful years.

http://www.bellagio.com/restaurants/le-cirque.aspx

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Category: Las Vegas, Travel