Wing Lei: Gong…(Las Vegas, NV)

By now I’m sure it’s pretty obvious I don’t know what I’m doing here. I mean, sometimes I don’t even bring up how much a place was. This is not my laziness though, its intentional. I’m not going to sit here and itemize the cost of my meal for you. For the most part, if the shit I’m describing looks expensive, it probably is. If it looks cheap, it is. I love all foods, and all priced restaurants. The only time I’ll bring up price is if I think it’s important to know. Otherwise, it probably costs what you are guessing it does. That being said, my meal at Wing Lei in Las Vegas cost $165.

Wing Lei is in the Wynn Hotel in Vegas, which is arguably the fanciest hotel on The Strip. The Wynn’s style is like a fancy Hong Kong motif. They have festive lanterns and ribbons throughout and the place is clearly top notch. This theme extends to the Wing Lei restaurant, only here they make it look even classier. Inside looks like an imperial ballroom or something, with ornate table sets and those Chinese lion statues everywhere. When I sat down, I saw in front of me gold flatware. Finally, I thought, I’ve wanted a golden fork for years. This place will be great! The waiter we had was nice enough, although he seemed almost patronizing. This old Asian gentleman would lean over towards us and very slowly and cheerfully ask if we were ready to order and so forth. Chicken Pot Hen thought it was pleasant, but I felt like he was talking to us like we were four year olds.

The menu consisted of standard Chinese food. When I say standard, I mean it. The menu was essentially exactly what you’d find in any Chinese food place. There was spicy shrimp dishes, kung pao chicken, egg drop soup, wontons, stuff like that. The prices were a real kick in the pants, with all the entrees being like $35 dollars each. I figured, meh, maybe they’re damn good versions of these traditional dishes. We seemed to wait a really long time for our food, and the place didn’t seem all that busy. While we sat there with our cocktails (which were great actually) we had a chance to people watch. It was mostly old people, which is usual for a more moneybags place. One person in particular caught my eye. She was about 30ish years old, wearing a black cocktail dress. She was attractive I suppose, maybe like 5 out of 7 smooches (the rating system for my new blog idea where I describe and rate the general appearance of strangers). Aside from the dress, she was also wearing a tiny top hat tilted askew on her head. This confused and troubled me. Why was a tiny top hat necessary? Nothing else in her ensemble seemed to fit this. Maybe if her whole outfit was like an old timely jacket or something, but not just a dress. I sat there, thinking about what was her thought process as she confidently affixed a baby top hat with a jaunty tilt upon her head. I attributed her decision to the best tiny top hat salesman in the world as our food arrived.

We ordered a sample platter for a starter. This included potstickers, fried prawns, and this duck ginger salad. The potstickers tasted exactly like every other potsticker I have ever had. Not bad though. You ever have a potsticker? It tasted like that. Likewise, the prawns also tasted pretty ordinary. The salad was good though, the ginger dressing was, to be fair, delicious. For entrees, I tasted the “Three Pot Chicken” and the “Lemon Chicken”. Both were pretty mediocre. The three pot tasted decent, nothing much different than my local hunan taste, except maybe a little less greasy here. This dish had pieces of chicken drenched in some spicy sauce, along with peppers and scallions. The lemon chicken featured breaded chicken cutlets with lemon honey sauce to drizzle on top. Everything was well prepared, but I had something exactly like this in a Tokyo food stand one time, and that one cost about $6. This one was $35, and that’s not including rice. That’s right, a tiny bowl of rice cost an additional $5. This felt like a petty money grab to me. I know it’s a swanky place and all, and that you pay for certain levels of swank, but jeebus, to tack on extra for friggin rice seemed like a fuck you to me.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I had high expectations for this place, it was rated pretty high on all the standard review sites (yelp, urban spoon, etc.). Ultimately though, it didn’t taste much different than something I can have delivered for a tenth of the price. If you like a fancy atmosphere with normal food, Wing Lei is your place. For me, I don’t care if I eat off the hood of a car if the food tastes good enough. This place seems like more of a place to dress up and put on your wee little top hats and look fancy than eating some seriously tasty cuisine. Not my cup of green tea, this place.