When we got our first look at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas in March, Nick Mathers of the Wish You Were Here Group—the company behind LA’s Elephante, the Eveleigh on Sunset Boulevard and the Kassi Club, along with as New York City café Ruby’s—promised that the food would come first at Kassi Beach House, but the fun would always be there.
“My experience in Las Vegas is definitely high energy when I’m at restaurants, but there are separate feelings when I go to Joël Robuchon and have a very formal dinner or when I go to a nightclub like Hakkasan,” he said. “I want this place where you can have a lot of fun and there’s a lot of energy, and it might be day or night and you might be having oysters or a magnum of rosé, but you can hear yourself talk. We want to create synergy between good food and being able to have a good time, like a gap between the club and the restaurant.”
That mission has certainly been attempted many times over in Las Vegas, yet seldom is it truly accomplished. But as soon as you walk into Kassi Beach House, whether through the dramatic casino entrance or from the pool via the tropically swanky patio, you’ve already recognized that fun is about to happen. It feels like that dream vacation at a pristine Italian coastline resort that you can’t afford.
Long ago, Las Vegas shattered the cliché that clubby casino restaurants can’t serve great food. Expect to be wowed at Kassi, where the specialty is Italian and Mediterranean cuisine you can share with your party posse (but might not want to). Daringly, it’s open for brunch every day from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m., adding a dynamic dimension to Virgin’s restaurant portfolio and basically telling you to celebrate the weekend every day. Who are you to argue?
If rosé isn’t your thing, you can sip a lime-watermelon Cazadores slushie ($15) or a draft Aperol spritz ($15) with your pistachio crumble-topped avocado toast ($14) or smoked salmon platter ($18) with mascarpone and fennel salad. Other brunch highlights include a mezze platter ($16) with crisp, thin puccia bread for dipping; grilled flatiron steak and eggs ($26); a savory Dutch Baby pancake ($16) layered with mushrooms, spinach, goat cheese and pumpkin seeds; and scrambled eggs with Prosciutto San Danielle ($15) or all the green veggies and Parmesan ($13). There are pastas and pizzas, too, but you might want to save those for dinner, because they’re so good, you’ll need to share so you can try as many as possible.
The crispy, chewy pizzas are unexpectedly incredible, from the simple margherita ($19) to the spicy soppressata ($22), with chili and honey cutting through creamy mozzarella. Vegas has become rich with amazing vodka sauces, and Kassi’s version ($22) has just the right kick from Calabrian chilis. The squid ink gemelli with Dungeness crab and tomato butter ($27) is another showstopping pasta dish.
But this is a clubby casino restaurant, not just an Italian escape, which means you can also order hamachi crudo ($18) from the raw bar, Wagyu meatballs ($17) or fried mozzarella ($18) to pass around the table, and you can add royal white sturgeon caviar or shaved truffled to pretty much anything. There are baller entrees like whole roasted fish ($74) flanked by pee wee potatoes and Castelvetrano olives and a 32-ounce bone-in ribeye ($125) dry-aged for 30 days.
There are plenty of distinctive dining experiences at Virgin, and we plan to explore them all, but Kassi Beach House packs a lot of different food and fun into one lively place.
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