Off The Strip is not the sort of place prickly critics get excited about. The food is unchallenging to a fault—skewing heavily towards Italian—and is filled with cliché after cliché lifted straight from the Macaroni Grill/Maggiano’s playbook.

So why is it the No. 1-rated local restaurant on Yelp.com? Because, I surmise, Americans can’t get enough of fried calamari, Caesar salads, chicken wings and pasta in all its guises. And once they’ve had their fill of those, they will still line up for chicken Parmigiana, meatballs and shrimp scampi—not to mention a selection of steaks and chops.

The other reason this cozy (45-seat) joint packs them in: As overfamiliar as this food may be, it is being freshly prepared by people who take real pride in what they’re serving. Those same folks—chef Al Hubbard and owner Tom Goldsbury—seem to sincerely care about their customers, and also seem to know half of them by name. Combine that with being about the only decent restaurant in this neck of the woods (far south on I-15, adjacent to Southern Highlands), and you have a recipe for success that shows no sign of abating.

Photo: Beverly Poppe

Off the Strip is Vegas’ No. 1 rated eatery on Yelp.

To many locals, restaurants on the Strip represent cutting-edge (read: small portion/big price) cuisine that isn’t worth the time, the cost or the pretension. In contrast, Off The Strip and its ilk are happy to prepare the same old, generously portioned, sauce-heavy stuff that fits American eating sensibilities like a pair of 48-inch Sansabelt pants. Nowhere is this more evident than in some of the appetizers, which seem conceived with a Todd English-like too much is not enough philosophy in mind.

Order the sweet chili and bacon prawns and you’ll get good, sweet, jumbo shrimp, wrapped in bacon (with a dash of cream cheese!), cooked perfectly, then drenched (and we mean drenched) in about a cup and a half of sweet/hot Thai chili sauce. If a multitude of ingredients and flavors are your bag, you will find it hard to fault any dish that combines seafood, pork, cheese, sauce and Asian spices. But those looking for a little more subtlety with their seafood will be disappointed. Equally odd are mussels oreganata—coated with oregano-scented panko crumbs, baked and served with a cherry-pepper beurre blanc (butter sauce). The bivalves are perfectly cooked (again) but delivered to your table swimming in the sauce, and then topped with yet another, bright, white cheesy emulsion that subtracts, by addition, from the equation.

Photo: Beverly Poppe

Off the Strip’s pork roulade appetizer.

On the brighter, lighter side, the fried calamari are lightly dredged in seasoned flour, quite tender, and served with a serious fra diavolo (spicy marinara) sauce. Equally good are the grilled artichoke hearts—spectacular in their simplicity. But things return to form with the pork roulade—rolled, pounded pig stuffed with mushrooms, roasted peppers, two cheeses (Parmesian and mozzarella) and served on a bed of spinach with a spicy Marsala wine and pepper sauce. Whew! Tasty? Yup! Filling? You betcha! Out of date by about 20 years? Without a doubt.

Very few Italian restaurants serve food this way any more, but Off The Strip’s clientele seems to lap it up. If you seek something a bit more authentic, the pastas alla vodka and Bolognese are good places to start, as each accents the noodles with sauce, rather than overwhelming them. The Bolognese shows that Hubbard has some real chops, as it is rich with bits of meat cooked with a minimum of liquid, and as good any version you’ll find five miles north. The Caesar salad is serviceable, and the “softball” meatball is of Rao’s quality—which is to say, it is superb.

A final reason for the success of OTS: the prices. Most pastas hover in the $15 range, and only the steaks veer north of the $30 border. The wine and beer lists are short, but reasonable and well-chosen, and two of you will have to be really hungry to run up a bill in excess of a Benjamin.

After a meal here, you will be full and you will be happy, because the owners and staff will have taken good care of you throughout your meal. Whether or not you will be excited about what you ate probably depends upon how often you eat out and how adventuresome you are when you do. Despite its charms—which are many—Off The Strip is old-school, American-Italian mishmash cuisine to the max. Cranky critics—like me—be damned. “Just Real Food” (the restaurant’s slogan) is what its customers want, and what the restaurant delivers.

ELV ain’t no arch-ee-teck, but no matter how many times we walk past this sculpture (…usually on our way to Brasserie Puck or Mastro’s Ocean Club):

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…we stop and look at it…

…and it never gets old.

And it makes us think.

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With all due respect, those who diss the food at Lotus (with the exception of Jet Tila), don’t know what they’re talking about. And even Jet doesn’t put it down…he simply doesn’t find it as extraordinary as some of us do.

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Super Green Cuisine Dinner Event
Monday, March 29 at 6:00 p.m.

Chef Rick Moonen and Slow Food Las Vegas Chapter are proud to announce that Chef Moonen will present a Super Green Cuisine dinner event featuring seafood selections from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “Super Green List”. Read the rest of this entry →

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If you have just one dish to order at Bouchon, and don’t feel like tackling the superb chicken or beef, and are tired of salmon, and are over the oysters (all of which are excellent), the truite Grenobloise — pan roasted rainbow trout with lemon, capers, cauliflower, new potatoes and beurre noisette — is just the thing to order.

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Does anyone but ELV remember Nicky Blair’s? Ole Nicky was quite the SoCal restaurateur — known for catering to the celebs and high-rollers in LaLa land — when he brought his cheesy vibe to Paradise Road in the mid-90’s. For a couple of years the place was hopping with every nouveau riche, Gucci-clad developer, conventioneer and big shot wannabe in town.

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If you follow us on Facebook or Twitter, you may have seen that yesterday we had one of the all time worst corned beef hashes known to man. The particular abomination came to us via Mr. Lucky’s — the 24/7 restaurant in the Hard Rock Hotel that used to be known for some pretty spectacular coffee-shop/diner food.

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The renovations took two months longer than expected, and the wine bar won’t be fully operational for another two weeks, but here is your first look at the new, improved and expanded Lotus of Siam.

It will be, by far, the classiest digs in all of Commercial Center, but Saipin Chutima assures us not a darn thing’s gonna change on the menu…and America’s best German wine list promises to just keep getting better and better.

Expect the wine bar to be packed with industry and non-industry oenophiles from the day it opens.

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Is it just us, or does there seem to be a slow but steady Korean invasion taking place in Chinatown. If you’re going by numbers, Korea and Vietnam have twice as many restaurants as all the other Asian countries combined (we know, we counted).

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MOzen sits on the third floor of the Mandarin Oriental and serves as a three meal a day restaurant for the hotel’s well-heeled patrons.

Chef Shawn Armstrong oversees an operation that’s as adept at turning out superior sushi as it is an authentic lamb curry or first rate braised short ribs and pork bellies.

He and his staff have to be the culinary equivalent of a utility infielder because they never know what Arab potentate, Chinese high roller or Japanese mogul might stroll through the doors at any minute.

After two meals here (breakfast and lunch), we’ve yet to find a flaw in any of the food (except for sous vide-ing the meat – something we can excuse in a busy hotel restaurant)….and the elegant/intimate setting and the view and the service might put it at the top of all the three-meal-a-day hotel restaurants in town.

Once we have dinner here, we’ll let you know.