Cafe Deia is a very attractive, relatively new restaurant in Summerlin. If atmosphere were all, I'd give it five stars. There's a large main dining room and a spacious bar area. The patio is really nice, but the brave souls eating and drinking there in 100+ degree weather had more stamina than I.
Our waitress was a young Polish woman, business-like and without any warmth. That would have been okay. But when I pored over the menu for twenty minutes trying to decide what to order and finally settled on one thing, with another as a back-up, she came over and told us that the restaurant was out of chorizo. At a tapas place???? And why the hell didn't she tell us that right away - both items I picked had chorizo!!!
So it was back to the menu, and nothing was tempting. I finally gave up and settled on just a spinach salad, which was okay, but nothing special. My husband ordered the Mallorcan "soup." I will never understand why they call this a soup. It was good, but as someone else mentioned, it didn't live up to the hype. He also had the chicken kabobs, also okay, but somewhat skimpy for the price. I can't remember the other dish he ordered, but we both had the sangria, which wasn't terribly impressive. I think if you're going to pay a consultant to write menu copy, you should make sure that the items live up to the over-inflated descriptions.
While I was in the middle of eating my salad, the waitress came over and began to clear the table. My fork was in my hand, so it was apparent I wasn't finished. I had a mouthful of salad, so I could only gesticulate to get her to leave the stuff alone, including my bread plate, which she'd already taken. And a few minutes after that, she returned to hand us the dessert menus. Now I was pissed, and was more than a little hostile when I said "We're not finished eating!" It was a Monday night, there was no waiting line for tables, and the restaurant had a couple of hours to go before closing. This kind of rush job is rude and, to me, the epitome of poor service.
We had a restaurant.com gift certificate, which stated that a 20% tip would be added to the bill. Normally, that's what we'd leave for a tip - if the service warranted it. And most of the time in this city, it certainly does. But in this case - NOT! Restaurants sometimes do specify that they'll add on a tip, and often they don't do it, even if it's stipulated. But this is the first time I've ever seen a number higher than 18%, and this is the first time I've had a real problem with it. Unfortunately, I didn't know about it until after we'd left the restaurant, since my husband was the one who had the certificate and paid the bill while I visited the ladies' room. I would have had a quiet talk with the manager.
We would probably return to Cafe Deia. But we've been to so many terrific places in this town that it would not be at the top of my list. And we would make sure we had a different server.