Fountains + Cantonese = Start of Restaurant Week

This week starts the semi-annual Las Vegas restaurant week.  The first restaurant we went to was Jasmine in the Bellagio.  It's Cantonese cuisine.  Let me start off by saying the food was indeed good.  I'm saying this upfront because it didn't meet our expectations.  I don't know if that's because for a restaurant in the Bellagio Pat and I expected more and it just didn't quite live up to our expectations.

Now Jasmine has a FANTASTIC view of the Bellagio Fountains.  The restaurant basically sits out over the pond that the fountains go off in.   So when the fountains go off you get to watch from right behind the fountains.  I love the fountains at Bellagio and seeing them from this point of view was pretty cool and different.  As the water shot up you would get to see this wall of water out the windows and it was really cool.

Now onto the food.  Pat and I each got a cocktail to start.  They brought their cocktail menu out on an ipad.  It was pretty cool.  There were nice pictures and you could touch each drink and see a description and ingredient list.  Maybe a slight overkill of technology but still kinda neat.  Pat got a drink called the Kiss of the dragon.  It was an orange-y tasting drink which was supposed to be slightly spicy but it really wasn't that spicy.  I got a watermelon mojito.  It has a good watermelon flavor and was nice and sweet, which is how I like my drinks. 

For my first course I picked the prawns two ways.  There were four prawns, two with a walnut sauce and two with a wasabi sauce.  They were really good.  Pat got the baby spinach and clam soup.  It was good but very mild in flavor.

Pat chose the wok fried beef tenderloin for his main entree and I choose the pan fried Chilean sea bass.  Both came with egg fried rice.  The rice was somewhat disappointing.  It had egg in it but for fried rice being called egg fried rice I expected it to have more of an egg punch to it and it just didn't.  Pat's beef was good and my sea bass was also good.  The sea bass came with a medley of mushrooms, which again weren't bad but they just weren't as flavorful as I thought they would be. 

Dessert was quite the show.  It was a mango cream.  It had a consistency slightly thicker than a soup.  It had small dice of mangos inside it and a lemon sorbet on top.  It was probably the best part of the meal.  It also had a showstopper presentation.  The bowl was set on top of a larger bowl of dry ice so it was swirling with smoke as it arrived.  I actually managed to get a picture.

So unfortunately we wouldn't recommend Jasmine.  Not because it was bad.  There are just better places serving similar food on the strip.  I did write a blog about one of them...unfortunately it was one of the ones that got lost...so if you are on the strip and want some good Asian food we would recommend either Zine in the Venetian/Pallazzo or Rice and Company in the Luxor.  Both were very flavorful meals.  If on the other hand you are more interested in a cool view of the fountains and decent food then go to Jasmine.