Does Hakkasan Deserve to Be Called 'Awesome'?

Max Jacobson at Vegas Seven is the first to review Hakkasan, the massive new Cantonese restaurant at the MGM Grand. He says the restaurant deserves the term "awesome" to describe it.

Michelin-starred chef Ho Chee Boon has made the menu approachable, "and few are so exotic that you'd shrink away from trying them."

He recommends the duck salad tossed table side and the soft-shell crab "amazing for its whipped egg-yolk batter; I promise you'll spoon up the crumbs greedily." Also of note, the crispy quail appetizer. "If you didn't realize this wasn't your grandmother's Chinese food before this, you will now."

Other dishes of note: the Pi-pa duck ("just about the crispest duck you'll ever taste"), stir-fried black pepper beef rib eye, Shanghai fried lamb tenderloin and Hakka noodle with mushrooms and Chinese chive ("completely addictive").

Of course, the prices here are sky high. "It may seem expensive, but I'm willing to bet it's a lot cheaper than bottle service upstairs in the nightclub."

Jacobson also compares Downtown's Pop Up Pizza and Radio City Pizza. He calls the pies at Pop Up "state-of-the-art" while at Radio City, "The servers are friendly, but not what I'd call super organized." [VS]

Al Mancini at CityLife thinks the food at La Comida is good but expensive. He says the guacamole and some shrimp tacos "were good but unexceptional." The street corn "drenched in cotija cheese and chile lime butter, was excellent — some of the best I've had in town. Nonetheless, eight bucks for four small half-ears is a bit excessive." But probably most noteworthy: the $20 valet parking fee. "It's waived if you show a receipt from the restaurant." [CL]

Heidi Knapp Rinella at the Las Vegas Review-Journal tries the mom and pop Gaetano's Ristorante and has only one "quibble," a word she likes to repeat. "The gnocchi themselves, though, not so much. The potential was there — we could easily see that — but they were soggy in the center." She gives the food an A- and everything else an A for an overall A-. [LVRJ]

Brock Radke at Las Vegas Weekly recommends the panuchos a Chicken Itza. "Think of them as a hybrid of tostada and Salvadoran pupusa: A handmade tortilla is fried crisp, split and filled with black beans, then the whole thing is topped with shredded chicken or pork, pickled onion, avocado and lettuce." [LVW]

Erik Chudy at Vegas Burger Blog heads to Binion's Cafe for a short but sweet review. "Cheap it was, good it wasn't." He gives the burger here a 51 out of 100. [VBB]