back to raku. oh, now i get it.

Let's get simple. There are three places to eat in Las Vegas. There's the Strip, there's your neighborhood, and there's Chinatown. For most of us, the Strip is for special occasions. (If you're just visiting Vegas, that's pretty special, right?) Your neighborhood is where you dine most of the time. It's normal for humans to do this. And unless it happens to be your neighborhood (or if you're one of the food obsessed), Chinatown is an occasional culinary adventure, for the more adventurous. That's all there is to it, really.

And now let's accept the fact that Strip dining, as dynamic as it is, can get old fast. It's too much sometimes. And your neighborhood can get boring, even faster. Chinatown doesn't have those problems. It's never too much, and it's never boring. It's the sweet spot every time.

So now let's return to one of the undeniable highlights of Las Vegas Chinatown, Raku. After my virgin visit, I accepted this place is something different, and can be a puzzling experience. But now I am compelled to recommend that you return to Raku often and find your own experience there. It will be rewarding. The high-fallutin' foodie folk will tell you this is just pure, authentic, clean Japanese pub food, but forget those people. Those are not normal people. There are challenging things on this menu, but you don't have to try them. There are just as many simple, delicious plates as there is crazy shit. It is inevitable that you will find something you love. For my lovely yet fearful wife, it was crispy asparagus okaki, perfect vegetable bliss (pic right). For me, it was everything else. But what really blew me away was something I would normally stay away from, an ingredient I only pretend to enjoy when it's mixed in and drowned out by lots of other ingredients and flavors. The beef tendon from the robata grill doesn't look like much, but after an evening of trying just about everything, tons of tastes subtle and powerful, it's the one bite that I can't get out of my head. First the lingering cloud from the charcoal grill hits you as you get ready to chomp, and then it's overwhelming. Distinctly beefy, but also salty, smokey, rich and buttery. And the texture attacks, spreading itself around without asking permission, but just go with it. This is not going to sound appetizing, but it's like The Blob from the old cheesy movies (I prefer the Kevin Dillon version), only a tiny version that tastes awesome and only wants to take over your mouth, not the whole city. It's simply a rendition of a dish that I've never experienced, and now it's the only way I want to eat tendon ever again. And there are so many other things at Raku that are just as great.

Kobe beef skirt with garlic.

More beef? Okay.

Back to the robata skewers, here's pork cheek, fatty, firm and delicious.

Peace in a bowl. Cold green tea soba noodles with a poached egg.

Amazing pork belly, great slabs of it in Raku's astonishing dashi with a little Chinese mustard. Wow.

And here's that beef tendon. Told ya it doesn't look like much. I'll have yours if you don't want it, sucker.

raku at last.

Aburiya Raku is one of the most talked about restaurants in Las Vegas. It has been hailed by critics, chefs and food and bev pros, and the common diner alike and may be considered the best restaurant in Chinatown. What is most fascinating to me about Raku, which was opened quietly in 2008 by chef Mitsuo Endo, is how it has managed to develop such a powerful following in spite of its location and the type of restaurant it is.

By location, I'm not merely referencing the fact that Raku is small and stashed in the back of a tiny, quiet strip mall on Spring Mountain Road. I'm talking about its location in Las Vegas, a young city without a huge population of foodies craving exotic cuisine. Raku is an izakaya, a Japanese pub and snack bar, and there are few of these establishments in Vegas. That's a generic description for the type of restaurant Raku is. The experience at Raku is compellingly different from anything else you'll find in Vegas, completely at odds with what most local diners (and probably tourists, too) understand as Japanese cuisine. That is why the buzz surrounding the place is interesting to me; I imagine many people -- including the drunken out-of-towners who sat near us on our recent first visit to Raku -- who have read or heard about the restaurant show up with excitement, expecting some sort of easy-access Asian tapas bar, and are perplexed by what they find. After my first meal at Raku, I am perplexed. Unless you are experienced with this type of food, it is a challenging restaurant.

Many bloggers and writers have offered their take on exactly how to dine at Raku, since the normal menu has about 75 different items. Most are small portions of intricately prepared, affordably priced food. There are daily specials exhibited on a chalkboard your server brings to your table. Since I'm still a Raku rookie, I am unable to offer such advice, but we did try quite a few different dishes. The restaurant's homemade tofu is a treasure. The simple, cold version has a creamy, almost cheese-like texture, delicous with soy, bonito flakes and Raku's green tea salt. Even better is the fried version, with a slightly crispy outside in a small bowl of amazing dashi with a bit of salmon roe on top. This was my favorite dish.

In in effort to fully Raku myself and get outside the comfort zone, I sampled the poached egg with roe and sea urchin (pictured), one of several dishes on the menu that fit that "challenging" label. The slimy texture of these collected components is not for everyone, and the egg was so soft that I'm not sure if it added or subtracted from the dish. The explosive flavors of urchin and roe were nicely complemented by tiny mushrooms and okra. Very interesting, to say the least. A simple dish of green tea soba noodles also was augmented by this soft egg and roe combo.

The name of the restaurant reflects its specialty of charcoal grilling, and we tried quite a few different skewers of meat and vegetables imparted with a very deep smokiness. Bacon and smoke always go together well and you can order just about anything wrapped in bacon; sweet cherry tomatoes and asparagus were delicious. Great grilled meats we sampled included duck with balsamic soy sauce, American Kobe beef filet with wasabi and skirt steak with garlic, and salmon.

The setting is intimate, the menu is puzzling, the service is polite and the food is --like it or not -- otherworldly. After getting past an intial shock to the system, I am looking forward to tasting the oden hot pot (which you can construct using various ingredients such as fish cake, boiled egg, seaweed and fried bean curd), a mini foi gras bowl, and some of those chalkboard specials.

pho little saigon.

Is all pho the same? Restaurants that specialize in the traditional beef broth noodle soup are most common when it comes to Vietnamese cuisine in Las Vegas. There's even a pho joint on the Strip, in the Treasure Island hotel casino, and that's not a bad thing.

The dish may be similar from one restaurant to the next, but there are many differences, big and small, that set each eatery apart. Pho Little Saigon, for example, is a relatively large, family-friendly spot on the corner of Spring Mountain Road and Valley View Boulevard. Long, numbered tables line the dining room, lending an authentic feel. This is not unusual decor for a pho spot, but the size of the place and speedy service offer a little more comfort than many of the smaller mom-and-pops that serve similar cuisine.

The satisfying soup itself is just fine, the broth soothing with a clean taste if not overwhelmingly rich or salty. There are plenty of extra ingredients to choose from to customize your pho, chili sauce or fresh basil, bean sprouts or sriracha, along with your choice of meats. The beef served at Pho Little Saigon appears to be of a higher quality than we've experienced elsewhere, but overall, the pho is not as flavorful as it could be. That's just fine, because there are plenty of other tasty items on the menu. Sure, they'll serve up fresh rice-paper wrapped spring rolls, but the crispy Cha Gio, densely packed ground pork with shrimp and carrot, are even better. Unfortunately the kitchen was out of the Vietnamese pancake Banh Xeo on our recent visit. Pho is far from the only soup option available; you can sample porridge of beef, shrimp, fish, chicken, pork blood or pork innards. Rice plates and noodle bowls round out the menu, and some of the specialty dishes strike some Chinese notes. There's marinated beef with lemon grass grilled tableside, fried rice noodles with meat, seafood or vegetables, and finally, the titanic Seven Courses of Beef. At $24.99, it's hard to avoid. You'll get Goi Bo, or beef salad, beef in sour sauce, beef wrapped in Hawaiian lot leaf, grilled beef sausage, that grilled lemon grass stuff (Bo Nuong Xa), steamed beef and beef porridge. That's a lot of cow.

Of course, we were stuffed after the delicious Cha Gio and about a third of a huge bowl of pho. You have to be serious to try that magnificent seven.

killin' some korean barbecue at tofu hut.

Tofu Hut probably is named so because the house specialty is a soft bean curd soup. The restaurant also touts its traditional bosam, boiled pork and duck eaten with steamed cabbage, onions and pickled beets. But we hit the hut for lunch with a certain something else in mind: Korean barbecue.

One of my partners in Chinatown exploration, Chi, recommended Tofu Hut and was happy to lead me through the all-you-can-eat, grill-at-your-table barbecue menu. He also proved particularly adept at relieving our busy (and kinda slow) server at moving the meats around the hot grill in the middle of our modest table, using tongs ninja style and shears to clip our food into smaller bite-sized pieces before tossing them onto our tiny plates. Chi had first experienced Tofu Hut on a visit to a different, nearby Korean barbecue joint that was closing and couldn't accommodate his crew's late-night urge. A Korean friend suggested Tofu Hut instead, especially since the all-you-can-eat prices are more affordable here (It's about 18 bucks during the day and 15 after hours).

We attacked, ordering everything that looked interesting: the marinated sirloin known as bulgogi, thinly sliced beef tongue and beef brisket, pork belly marinated in chili paste, sugar, garlic, soy and sesame, and some squid to top it off. Everything cooked up quickly. The squid and brisket needed some additional seasoning and the salt-and-pepper sesame dressing served on the side worked well. The bulgogi was so flavorful and tender that we ordered a second plate, and the tongue was almost as delicious. But as always, it's hard to top pork belly, especially crispy-grilled, spicy pork belly.

All this meat was accompanied by small dishes of kimchi and seaweed, cold noodle salads, peppery potato-veggie pancakes, sweet fish cakes, and a salad of greens with a light peanut and sesame oil dressing. All these side dishes are all-you-can-eat as well, and the salad was particularly fresh and tasty and a perfect complement to all the grilled protein. Planted in a small group of auto repair shops on Spring Mountain Road near Valley View Boulevard (on the other side of the street from Chinatown Plaza), Tofu Hut doesn't look like much from the outside. The dining room is pretty humble, too. But the barbecue was delicious and there was plenty of it. Like so many mid-day meals of the past, this feast made me wonder why anyone would go anywhere other than Chinatown for lunch.

china mama. bosa 1.

Two of the more interesting recent discoveries in Chinatown happen to be right next door to each other, on Jones Boulevard just north of Spring Mountain Road: the Vietnamese Bosa 1 and the Taiwanese China Mama. I've been to lunch, alone, at both in the last month, and had some great food and kinda funny service. Not funny bad, just ... interesting.

China Mama is not the most English-friendly Chinese restaurant, but it's not too tough to figure things out here. The place is pretty big and the walls are a bright green color. This is not an Americanized Chinese restaurant, so there's no lunch special with an egg roll and egg flower soup on the side; why would you want another joint like that? Unfortunately, the menu is not built for the solo diner who wants to try different things, so I had a big dish of shredded pork and dried tofu for lunch. It was a bit salty and quite tasty, not spicy at all but very satisfying with rice.

Other notable dishes on the menu include green onion pancakes, cucumber salad, cold salted duck and pork soup dumplings. Those dumplings were what I really wanted to try, so once my lunch was brought out, I asked for the juicy dumplings, too. And then things got weird. They shot me down. The server told me I'd never be able to eat it all, this heaping plate of pork and tofu plus 8 rather large soup dumplings. He seriously talked me out of it. That hasn't happened before. Almost out of spite, I devoured my food, all of it, and I will be back for those dumplings. Be ready, China Mama.

Something very different happened to me when I visited Bosa 1, just a few steps away. I walked into the much smaller but clean and comfortable Vietnamese restaurant and immediately noticed a sign that read "Cash Only." Crestfallen, I started to ask the lady behind the counter where the nearest ATM could be found. "Well, if you want you can pay next time."

Um, what?

"Have you been here before?" No. "Well everybody always comes back, so you can pay next time you come in." Seriously? "Sure."

That's never happened. I wasn't sure if it was an act of supreme culinary confidence or just good faith, but I was impressed. Turned out Bosa 1 has every right to be confident, but they shouldn't be giving this stuff away. Las Vegas' top two restaurant critics both love this place, and now so do I. They stuffed me with fresh shrimp spring rolls that I could have eaten all day and a broken rice combo plate with a skewer of grilled shrimp, barbecued pork, a peppery quiche-like egg cake with more pork inside, shredded pork skin, a fried shrimp cake and a pickled vegetable salad. This was all on one plate, everything was delicious and had I paid, I would have cleared the place for $15. The best parts were the homemade fish sauce, which I mixed with a little scorching chili paste and dumped on everything, and the also homemade chicken soup, a clear, clean broth that I used to soak some of those vegetables and pork skin. At any price, this is one of the best lunches in Vegas.

pho saigon 8.

Chinatown Vegas is a very, very close second to the Strip when it comes to highest concentration of deliciousness in a certain area of the valley. The suburbs of Summerlin and Henderson battle it out, and then you've got some other neighborhoods on the rise or holding steady. You might think, of course, the Strip is a no-brainer. But Chinatown is right there, and if you take value into consideration, you've probably got an upset champion.

Another you-might-not-know is this: Chinatown Vegas is far from just Chinese. Every Asian cuisine is well represented, from Korean to Malaysian to Thai to Filipino to Japanese. For Vietnamese, one of the city's favorite spots is Pho Saigon 8, near Spring Mountain Road and Jones Boulevard. Like most of the incredible restaurants laced up Spring Mountain, this casual eatery is modestly decorated and serves authentic, soul-warming food. Today's utterly satisfying lunch consisted of bi cuon, two shredded pork skin spring rolls (in the soft rice wrappers, not the crispy fried egg roll wrappers), and a big bowl of pho chin bo vien, beef broth noodle soup with razor thin shards of lean beef and some mushy meatballs.

Pho. Onions and cilantro, chili paste and jalapenos, bean sprouts and basil leaves. That spicy, soothing broth. I just read some blogger's comments that writers should stop calling food "amazing," that food is never amazing, not amazing like landing a jet in the Hudson without killing anyone. But ... good pho is amazing. And this is great pho. And this is my biggest problem when trying to work my way through all the "amazing" restaurants of Chinatown: I get stuck going back to the same place and eating the same "amazing" food.