CARNE VINO

CARNE VINO

www.carnevino.com

Carne Vino, by Chef Mario Batali is the newest Italian restaurant in the Palazzo Hotel (Las Vegas Strip).  It is absolutely amazing!!  A PERFECT meal!!  I enjoyed (almost) every bite.  I went with a friend and we sat at that bar.  I had a really great drink with some kind of bourbon amd home made ginger ale off their cocktail list and then I had a dirty martini with three olives.  They used real olives.  None of that pimonto bullshit.  Why do other places do that?  It is SO GROSS.  They didn't give me a plate for the olives though.  We started with two appetizers and then we ordered two pasta dishes.  We ordered one dessert and were given another one on the house.  The bread was delicious and served with two kinds of butter.  I try not to eat it because I want to enjoy the other food, but I just couldn't help myself.

The first appetizer we ordered was the grilled octopus with with potatoes, puntarelle and chiles.  It had great flavors, was good perfectly and really delicious!!  It was rich, yet a little light at the same time.  This was our favorite appetizer.  The other one was the tuna crudo, it was sliced from the leanest to the fattiest tuna over a home made pesta sauce which was really light and flavorful and would be great on a pasta, but it didn't add too much excitement to the tuna. It was extremely fresh fish with a great flavor all on it's own though.  

Our favorite pasta dish and overall dish of the evening was the cannelloni with guinea hen and leeks.  Cannelloni is a delicate rolled pasta.  Some cheese was baked on top and it was in a really light sauce.  It was amazing!  We didn't enjoy the ravioli di stracotto.  It was basically a duck liver ravioli with acero balsamico.  The pasta tasted undercooked.  It was hard and had an grainy texture.  Since this was a fine dining Italian restaurant, we felt weird complaining because we weren't sure if that's how it was supposed to be served.  Most of the time Ravioli is soft and kind of breaks apart easily with a fork.  I also thought the sauce tasted a little bit like dirt.  It didn't have a nice flavor.

For dessert we ordered the honey glazed carrot cake.  OH MY GOD!!!!  The cake was served with walnut mascarpone gelato.  It was so dense, moist and had great flavors.  This was hands down the best carrot cake I've ever had.  It was drizzled with honey and was just simply fabulous.  The extra dessert they brought us was their most traditional Italian dessert, the chocolate bamboloni.  These are little balls of fried dough with candied pecans and bourbon caramel dipped in a rich chocolate sauce.  They were pretty good, but I liked the cake a lot more.

I would go back to this restautant again.  They also have a pre-theater menu that will get you in and out in time for Jersey Boys, which I saw on Broadway and is a terrific show (by the way)!!