When you come to the Recommended Aureole Las Vegas, come thirsty. The 42-foot steel and glass wine tower that greets you at the door holds 10,000 bottles of wine and comes complete with “Wine Angel Stewards,” servers who float on wires to snag your bottle of choice from the towers.
But this restaurant isn’t all big names and acrobatic wait staff; there’s soul in the cooking, too. Charlie Palmer’s menu treats fresh-off-the-farm ingredients with elegance and sophistication. A handheld computer gives you access to the expansive wine list, which is directly sent to the aerialists in the tower. It’s worth ordering a bottle just to watch the show.
Our Inspector's Highlights
- You’ll find Aureole Las Vegas on the Strip at 3950 Las Vegas Boulevard South, right in the heart of Sin City’s best casinos and resorts. Celebrity chef and restaurateur Charlie Palmer’s Forbes Travel Guide Recommended restaurant occupies several levels inside Mandalay Bay and is adjacent to the Four Seasons Las Vegas.
- There’s no mistaking the inside of Aureole for another eatery: Head into the restaurant through the upstairs wine lounge and you will follow a glass staircase that snakes around the space’s most dramatic element, a hulking four-story wine tower made of glass and steel.
- To say that the Aureole Las Vegas offers special views is an understatement. The most striking feature of the Forbes Travel Guide Recommended restaurant is its one-of-a-kind wine tower, which shoots four stories up from the center of the main dining room.
- Aureole Las Vegas boasts the largest offering of wines in the city, with a list that includes more than 2,200 varieties and 50,000 bottles. It makes picking the perfect vino a daunting task, but the restaurant provides a special electronic tablet (which resembles an iPad) that breaks down the wine options by region, varietal and price.
- Aureole Las Vegas offers a three- or four-course tasting menu as well as a decadent dessert sampler, allowing you to try all the house favorites. Make room for rich seafood, savory meat dishes and a warm molten chocolate cake, served with unique ice creams such as blackberry chip or bananas foster.
Things to Know
- You’ll want to make a reservation. Since 1999, this hot spot has put a modern twist on classic French cuisine and is regularly packed, even on weeknights.
- For the most romantic seats in the house, request to sit at one of the 13 tables in “Swan Court,” an area in the rear of the restaurant overlooking an elegant swan-filled lagoon. When the weather permits, go one better and ask to sit outside at the lagoon.
- The one-of-a-kind wine tower at Aureole Las Vegas serves both utilitarian and aesthetic purposes: Holding up to 10,000 bottles, the steel-and-glass monolith is manned by “wine angels” who wear harnesses and use an elaborate pulley system to float up and down the 42-foot-tall tower stories and retrieve heavenly bottles of wine.
The Food
- Don’t miss the artisanal cheese course. Cheeses rotate throughout the seasons and include six varieties, among them Great Lakes Cheshire, a hard cheese made from cow’s milk, and Detroit Street Brick, a goat cheese studded with green peppercorns.
- You can’t dine at Aureole Las Vegas without trying a bottle of wine from the restaurant’s hulking four-story wine tower. With up to 10,000 options, the tower contains many excellent, young red wines, but the restaurant also has an impressive selection of vintage Bordeaux and rare burgundies.
- If you’re waiting for a table or enjoying cocktail hour in the wine lounge, order some of the excellent and affordable small plates from the bar menu. The garlic rock shrimp with chorizo risotto and the shiitake mushroom spring roll with yuzu rémoulade will make you forget you even wanted to sit down for a full meal.
- For seafood lovers, Aureole Las Vegas offers several traditional and more adventurous fish options. The menu changes with the seasons, but it always includes a good variety, like a roasted loup de mer, grilled swordfish, seared ahi tuna loin or a chervil-crusted Alaskan halibut.
- The dessert sampler is by far the most popular after-dinner dish. The four desserts change seasonally, but you can order the warm chocolate molten cake with ice cream year round, but the rotating favorites in the sampler include a lemon-lime pound cake, mocha brownie tart with salted caramel ice cream and Grand Marnier crème caramel.
The Look
- When you enter Aureole Las Vegas and walk around the show-stopping 42-foot-tall wine tower to get to your table, it’s obvious that the Forbes Travel Guide Recommended restaurant is every bit a Las Vegas performer. The restaurant’s dramatic four-story, glass-and-steel wine tower, which extends from the dining room floor up to the ceiling, almost steals the spotlight from Charlie Palmer’s progressive American cuisine.
- Although the wine tower takes center stage, at the rear of the restaurant lies a hidden gem: an outdoor, swan-filled lagoon — the restaurant calls it “Swan Court” — with 13 indoor tables that overlook the water. The snow-colored birds, trickling water and palm trees offer the perfect backdrop for a romantic dinner.
- To balance the dizzying spectacles, tables at Aureole are simply adorned with clean, crisp and fresh with white linens. Each table features an oil lamp and a glass bowl that holds a single orchid.
- The high-back chairs are upholstered with suede, and blue glass partitions separate various areas throughout the restaurant, giving you extra privacy so you can marvel at the light-on-their-feet wine angels.
Amenities
Bar
Business casual
Dinner
Outdoor seating
Private dining
Reservations recommended
Getting There
