A great place for dim sum in Las Vegas!
The Cathay House is one of the busiest restaurants in Chinatown. As far as that goes, the Cathay House is easily one of the busiest restaurants in Las Vegas! When a restaurant is very busy, it means two things. The food is superb and the food is realistically priced! So many restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip open their doors with great food and fairly reasonable prices. Those restaurants become very busy and people go out of their way to try the food. Then the same restaurant gets cocky with their policy making and the management removes many interesting items from the menu, so they can lower payroll costs. At the same time, the restaurant raises the prices of the menu items by 45%. The restaurant then expects profits to increase and the management expects the high volume of business to continue. In reality, what happens is customers immediately notice that their favorite menu items are no longer available and the food is extremely overpriced. Those disappointed customers never return and those customers spread the news that the restaurant has turned into a rip off. This recently happened a privately owned restaurant in the Cosmopolitan Casino and I happened to be the very disappointed customer. I wrote about the place in this blog, but not enthusiastically like I did on my first visit. The first thing that I noticed, when I returned to the restaurant on the Strip for a second visit, was that there were virtually no customers dining there at all. Previously there was a waiting line to get into the place. The worst part was feeling like I was extremely overcharged for the menu items that I purchased! The management only succeeded in ruining a good restaurant business with their policy making decisions that were designed to drastically increase profits. In Chinatown Las Vegas, the competitive atmosphere is on more of a natural playing field, even though there is a high number of restaurants in Chinatown. If a restaurant in Chinatown overprices its food without justifying the cost increase with quality and great service to match, then the restaurant does very little business. Asian restaurant customers are very keenly aware of the value of their money and whether a restaurant experience is worth the price paid. The same customers that dine in Chinatown and at local Las Vegas restaurants, have for the most part gave up on going to restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip many years ago, because the value of the money spent, does not guarantee a satisfactory dining experience. As a food writer and chef, I do check popular places out on the strip, because readers are interested in going to those places, but I rarely return to the same restaurant on the Strip for a second visit. In Chinatown Las Vegas, I have a hard time when it comes to trying new restaurants there, because the restaurants that I have already tried in Chinatown provided such a good dining experience, that I find myself going back for a second or third visit, just to try other items on their menus! Successfully creating an atmosphere where customers want to return to spend more money is possibly the best and the highest idealistic goal that a restaurateur can achieve! That is the true nature of Chinatown Las Vegas and that is why I have never had a disappointing dining experience there. Besides, the food is not Americanized and the food is very authentic! I have heard great things about the Cathay house for many years. I have wanted to dine at the Cathay House for a very long time. Just like every other time that I went to Chinatown with a certain dining destination in mind, I almost decided to return to one of my favorite Chinatown restaurants for a third visit, just to try another menu item! I then realized what I was thinking and I slapped myself out of my hypnotized stupor! I then focused on my original intended dining destination, which was the Cathay House! The Cathay House Restaurant is located at 5300 Spring Mountain Road in the Cathay Hills Plaza. The Cathay House is a short drive west from the Las Vegas Strip. A the simple front entrance to the restaurant provides no clue that a pleasant view overlooking tree tops can be seen through the windows of the Cathay House dining room! I am so very glad that I finally gave the Cathay House a try! I have been wanting to experience an afternoon of dining on authentic Cantonese dim sum. Afternoon dim sum is the Cathay House specialty. There was a line of customers waiting for tables and none of those who were waiting looked like they were impatient. In fact, those who were waiting in line for a table were smiling and they looked very eager to be there. Nobody waiting in line was asking for drinks at the bar, because traditionally only tea is served with afternoon dim sum. In China saying "going for tea" or "yum cha" is pretty much the same thing as saying "going to eat dim sum!" First of all, the tea was perfect! I was sat at a table that sat on a deck above the dim sum cart path that ran through the dining room, so I had a good vantage point for looking down at the items on the dim sum carts. Dim sum carts can be plain for room temperature items. Steam basket items are placed on carts that have built in steamers. Hot food dim sum items are placed on dim sum carts that have built in hot plates or holding ovens. There are refrigerated carts for cold and iced dim sum items. There are specialty dim sum carts for stir fry and freshly made sweet tofu. Cathay house has all of these kinds of dim carts rolling through the dining room! When the dim sum carts started rolling by, I realized that I was in for a bit of culture shock. Asian customers prefer to eat authentic asian cuisine and the dining room was filled with asians happily eating dim sum. I heard no English words spoken anywhere in the dining room and then a smile came over my face. I then realized that I chose a great place for lunch, because the food was certainly going to be authentic and good! This restaurant was busy and bustling with business. The Cathay House is a great place for experiencing just how busy a popular dim sum restaurant can be. On first impression, I thought that the dining room was like a chaotic madhouse of rolling dim sum carts, waitresses offering dim sum specialties and customers eating everything in sight. Then I noticed that there was a method to the madness! I kept watching what was going on and looking at the food on the dim sum carts. There were many great looking dim sum items that I have never seen before. Every time that I looked at a dim sum item on a cart, the waitress asked if I wanted the item and she described the item. Then I got interested in the dim sum item the waitress described and asked for the item to be placed on my table. After this happened three times, I finally figured something important out! When a waitress sees a customer looking at a dim sum item on a cart, the waitress pushing the cart immediately hits the brakes and instantly starts making a sale. If a customer pays no attention to the food items on a dim sum cart, the waitress continues on down the dim sum cart path through the dining room, looking for more interested customers. The waitresses pushing the carts at the Cathay House are very adept at describing the food and getting customers interested in trying the dim sum. I happen to be an easy person to make a sale to, when it comes to good food, especially if the food item is something that I have never tried before. The problem for me was, the chefs at the Cathay House prepare so many great dim sum items that I have never experienced before! I wanted to try all the good looking dim sum items that I have never tasted before, but my tummy only will hold so much food. The Cathay House staff would have had to cart me out the door in a wheelbarrow, if I ate everything that I wanted to try! My first three dim sum items all featured shrimp. Shrimp stuffed steam noodle tubes with sauce, shrimp steam dumplings and the breaded fried shrimp mousseline skewer all turned out to be well prepared and great tasting. The shrimp dim sum offerings were very fresh and good tasting! A cart of house made fresh sweet tofu passed by. Yes, many restaurants in Chinatown Las Vegas do make their own fresh bean curd from fresh soy beans! That is tradition! The fresh soft bean curd was kept warm on a special dim sum cart. The bean curd was covered by a fresh clear sugar cane syrup. The waitress carefully scooped a portion of the fresh bean curd, so no crumbs would cloud the clear syrup. She then carefully used a smaller spoon to gather some of the sugar cane syrup and pour it over my portion of warm bean curd. Honestly, this was the very best freshly made warm bean curd that I have ever tasted! The texture was perfect and the flavor was soothing! The freshly made bean curd dim sum at the Cathay House is worth going out of your way to try. As another cart passed by, I recognized an aroma that I have not smelled in many years. Lotus bean paste! Of course I sampled the fine looking hand crafted lotus bean paste pastry dim sum. I then thought to myself that these chefs at the Cathay House are really very good! After getting an energy boost from eating two sweet dim sum items, I craved one last savory dim sum. I stuck with my shrimp flavor theme for the afternoon and I tried the shrimp stuffed bell peppers. The stuffed peppers were presented as bite size shaped squares of green bell pepper with a mousseline style shrimp stuffing. The flavor was awesome! Dim sum billing is done by waitresses stamping different areas of a dim sum ticket with their own personal stamps. The areas of a dim sum ticket are separated into different price levels. The key to the pricing is usually posted on a main menu card. I never bothered to look at the pricing key, because I have always found menu pricing in Chinatown to be fair and honest. Lets put it this way, a six course light meal of high quality dim sum at the Cathay House, like the one that I had costs less than $20. That is fair honest pricing and it is a good value! I very highly recommend the Cathay House Restaurant afternoon dim sum for any visitor of Las Vegas and locals alike! The dim sum is unbelievably great! Cathay House also offers late night dining too. If their is a waiting line, smile and look eager to dine. The great food is worth the wait! ... Shawna
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