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| - "Wolfgang Puck" equals top-notch cooking with the sensible, clean tastes of California cuisine. But then there's "Bar and Grill" which equals accessible, unpretentious food. And this combination is exactly what this restaurant provides.
The menu was mostly pizzas and pastas in the $15 to $25 range plus the usual range of entrees ranging from $25 to the more than $50 steaks.
Jeannene and I went with the the crispy-fried calamari appetizer. The batter and tenderness is what you would expect from any restaurant, let alone Wolfgang Puck's, but the star of this plate was the lemon aioli which was the perfect thick (but not goopy) creamy consistency and had the necessary acid. For the main course, I had the rigatoni with sweet fennel sausage bolognese. It was a creamy bolognese, which I've never had, and the rigatoni were half the size than the pasta I'm used to. Both were improvements as the pasta was not clunky and the sauce had the cheese factor you often expect in an Italian dish.
Jeannene had a corn tortellini that she had no compaints about.
To drink, I had the Trampled Rose, which featured rye whisky with five-spice syrup and cranberry liquor. The sweetness countered the blunt rye, which in turn kept the sweetness from being cloying. It tasted like Thanksgiving. Normally I get two different drinks but this time I demanded an encore,
As far as ambiance, it is an open-walled dining room in the MGM Grand's casino so it is either irritatingly noisy or full of energy depending on your mindset going in. As for me, the simple, perfect foods lowered the level of pretenciousness so I'm going with "calm amid the casino storm."
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