Rachel's is named for the owner's young daughter and is situated alongside a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in a newish Summerlin strip mall. Inside or out, seating is at mosaic-tiled round tables, which are cute but impractical, on wrought-iron chairs set with Kermit-green cushions.
My favorite meal here is breakfast, because I like all the muffins, scones and cookies that are baked fresh daily in a back kitchen. Muffins are eggy and crusty, everything from chocolate chip and cranberry orange to a bacon and Gruyere cheese muffin that has a nice flavor but tends to be overly dry.
The breakfast wrap is done inside a whole-wheat tortilla, scrambled eggs laced with bacon, tomato and cheddar cheese, alongside breakfast potatoes in small crunchy cubes. The fine, fluffy pancakes deserve a better fate than being doused with a generic syrup that you can buy in any supermarket.
Lunch and dinner (the restaurant stays open until 7 p.m. every day) run more to salads, wraps, sandwiches, burgers and a few pasta dishes. There is a soup of the day, too, and one day, it was a hearty chicken soup full of wispy noodles, heaps of diced carrot, celery and chopped chicken, a nice soup, really, yet still redolent of an industrial-strength soup base.
Chinese chicken salad has a nice sesame-oil tang, lots of grilled chicken, crisp greens, a few Mandarin orange slices and too few wonton crisps—I only found one in my entire bowl. Chopped salad is healthy, made with broccoli, red cabbage, tomatoes, olives, garbanzo beans and mozzarella cheese, tossed around with balsamic vinaigrette.
One of the most creative salads on this menu is also one of its best. We're talking pear arugula, the fruit and greens with shaved fennel, goat cheese and lemon-herb dressing, all garnished with caramelized pecans. I don't much care for Rachel's sweet, insipid chicken curry salad, which lacks oomph and has lots of grapes in it. This also seems to be popular as a wrap, but there are plenty of other wraps I'd rather eat here.
One is a near-perfect chicken Caesar; another is a barbecued chicken wrap, enriched with nicely crunchy onion rings. The tuna wrap is made with Rachel's tuna salad, an austere version of the American classic made with trace elements of mayonnaise (they're trying to be healthy, remember). The beer-battered fish wrap uses pollock, a tasteless fish. Why not make it with Icelandic cod instead?
I tried the Ultimate Grilled Cheese, a blend of Gruyere, cheddar and Parmesan cheeses with roasted tomatoes. Take out these tomatoes, which are too acidic for the sandwich, and you've got yourself a winner.
The pastas could also be tweaked a bit. A meaty Bolognese is served with angel hair, a delicate noodle that turns to mush in such a hearty sauce. The signature pasta—penne, chicken breast, eggplant, sun dried tomatoes, mushrooms and cream sauce—is fine, though, and I also like traditional tomato basil, penne tubes with garlic and olive oil thrown in to round things out.
Rachel's doesn't do much by way of dessert, though there are a few ice cream pies made by Cold Stone Creamery for the restaurant, and buttery homemade snickerdoodle or chocolate chip cookies, soft, chewy cookies that take you back to lunch-box days.