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Pet Peeve time.

When did every upscale Strip restaurant decide it was a good idea to shave raw black truffles on top of things?

Black truffles — the good melanosporum ones from the Perigord region of France — are best when cooked in dishes.

White truffles release their full bouquet when raw. Black when cooked (being less pungent, black needs heat to fully release its aroma).

A shaving of black truffles might impress Mr. and Mrs. Fannypacker from Bumfudge, Utah, but it does nothing for ELV or his staff.

And it doesn’t add much to a dish, except pretension.

And it really didn’t add anything to an otherwise excellent Alsatian tart flambee.

They don’t do this in France, and they shouldn’t do it here. But we swear to god we’ve had the big black truffle shower bestowed upon us at least ten times in the last few months…all to zero effect, except that the restaurant staff(s) (at Jean-George Steakhouse, Sirio, and Sage just to name a few) thought they were impressing us.

But they were only impressing two things upon us: 1) they’re getting inferior truffles cheap; and 2) they think ELV was born yesterday.

Memo to all pretentious restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip: Stop shaving raw black truffles entirely, or learn how to use them for taste, not affectation.

Of course, actually incorporating them into a recipe coming off a kitchen line would be time consuming and very expensive. It’s so much easier to show off by selectively bringing them to certain, anointed tables and making an elaborate presentation of something that, in the end, brings precious little to the party.

Btw: the staff at Spago (whom we otherwise hold in great respect) told us the truffles were from Burgundy(?), which further made us doubt the tuber’s authenticity and functionality. It did smell of truffle, but not enough to make a difference when tasted raw on anything.

Btw #2: The choucroute and the lamb gyro (made with a freshly butchered lamb from Pahrump (Nevada, not France), were both drop dead delicious.

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.

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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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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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(Update: Effective March 1,  Silk Road  is no longer open for dinner.)

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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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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.

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The Tuscany Kitchen isn’t a restaurant per se. What it is is a conference room at the very ends of the earth within the Bellagio, that management has outfitted with an exhibition kitchen and enough tables and frippery to make a reasonable facsimile of one.

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Mundo seems to be happening at lunch. Dinner looked reasonably busy too, and we’re guessing management is pleased with its first month of operation (they need to fix the wobbly tables, however).

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The Fat Greek has been getting a lot of love recently, and it deserves it.

Here is our TV take on its food featured yesterday morning on Channel 8’s Dishing and Dining: