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Battle of the Buffets |
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Rio Seafood Buffet By: The Lady of The Night Out When the Rio opened, it pioneered a revolutionary concept in LVNV dining: gourmet food served at a buffet. After the legendary lines starting forming at the World Buffet, the Rio pushed the envelope even further: it created an all-you-can eat seafood buffet. Raw oysters and steamed lobster for all! Locals brought books because you calculated the wait time in hours, not minutes. When Harrah’s purchased the Rio, a public company corporate mentality was baked into the recipe. For a while, offerings at the seafood buffet were close to inedible: overcooked, rubbery, tasteless or all three. But a visit two weeks ago yanked me out of my shell: The food was as good as or better than the old days. Harrah’s figured out how to feed the shareholders and the public. Serving great fresh oysters should be easy. Buy the best and keep ‘em properly iced. You’d be surprised at the sorry oysters that show up on local plates. Not at this buffet. They are as good as the ones at McCormick & Schmick’s, my gold standard. Briny, slimy – great. They mated well with the stinging cocktail sauce. This stuff can cure the common cold. At the other end of the seafood spectrum, sushi and sashimi are hard. The Rio’s buffet has one of the most beautiful sushi displays in the city. And the food tastes as good as it looks on the plate. The buffet is accurate and authentic: fresh seaweed and edimame (cold soy beans) teamed up with well-marbled salmon and just off the boat yellowtail. The steamed lobster tails were good enough. Even though they were pre-cut, they were still hard to eat. A much better choice was the lobster slipper tails, Cajun-style. Slipper tails are miniature tails that are gigantic in tender sweetness. They are marinated in a Cajun sauce that won’t call the fire department but that will jolt your taste buds. The lobster slipper tails get my Big O award. The steamed clams in drawn butter were a close runners-up. Like the slipper tails, they were petite and juicy. The simple sauce had the cascading depths of richness of salted butter. The fried clams, on the other hand, were huge. They were the size of a gaming chip. The breading was not too thick and just crispy enough. Another great offering were the steamed mussels in black bean sauce. (The grouchy grammarian in me wanted to tell someone you do not spell the name of these mollusks “muscles.”) The fat and sassy New Zealand green mussels sat in a briny Asian sauce. They were presented in a lovely way: with the top shell already removed. The mussel meat looked like a juicy pearl in the chocolate-colored sauce. The only disappointment were the clams casino. Way too much breading. There were so many dessert choices you could have skipped the protein and made a meal of the sugar. I fell in love with the pumpkin pie. The creamy filling was shockingly spiked with lots of cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. And the coffee was great – no Starbucks here! Don’t wear nice clothes because eating at the seafood buffet is a messy wrestling match. Most of the good stuff plays hide and seek in shells; something else in the casino boasts the house odds. A spicy prawn jabbed me pretty good. The waitress brings a bowl for the shells, which is a great way to keep the mess to a minimum. The lines are still long, especially on week-ends. Now the Rio has bevertainment. There’s a stage at the cusp of the buffet line. Now there’s more to do than just read a book. The singers and dancers somehow shorten the wait. The Seafood buffet starts at 4 p.m. The cost is $29.99. 
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