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| - I've been visiting Las Vegas for nearly a decade now, and I started to hear rave reviews for Lotus of Siam on my second or third trip. I love Thai food, but didn't get a chance to dine here until we had a car to drive off-Strip to the back of a sketchy strip mall. I wasn't put off by the location (I love a good dive), but it didn't seem like somewhere I really wanted to catch a cab.
We visited at lunchtime, tired and hungry from early-morning flights, and decided to hit the buffet. I think this was our critical error. The majority of the 5-star reviews here are for their menu service, not the buffet. But we were starving and the limited options on the buffet seemed like a reasonable trade-off for instant gratification. I wish we'd looked at the buffet before agreeing to be seated in the dining area around it - one glance and I think we would've opted for the menu dining room instead.
It was a small buffet and very little on it was Thai cuisine. Mostly, it offered the typical Pan-Asian dishes you find on cheap buffets - rice, lots of stir-fried veggies and meats, some noodles, some broth-y soups, sliced fruit, crispy fried appetizer things, etc. The Pad Thai and a veggie dish were the only recognizably "Thai" dishes out there, the rest were pretty uninteresting. Nothing seemed particularly well-made or seasoned, either. The highlight of the buffet was the fried banana wontons. We ate so many of those once we discovered how mediocre everything else was.
I'm sad to give Lotus of Siam a 2-star review, but the buffet doesn't deserve anything higher even if you're dining in a room literally lined in photos of the celebrity guests who have dined there (and a gigantic glassed-in wine cellar, which was incongruous with the buffet). I'd be interested to return for a real menu dining experience. I don't often give second chances to places that let me down this badly, but I know I must be missing something here.
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