Bite Breakfast & Lunch
Bottomless Coffee
BEER CAKES – Guinness beer batter with crispy smoked Applewood bacon pieces
BITE’S ULTIMATE PANCAKES – Fresh egg surrounded by our buttermilk pancake batter filled with bacon and sausage pieces
MONTE CRISTO FRENCH TOAST – Turkey, ham fried egg & Swiss cheese
FUNFETTI PANCAKES – Cake batter with rainbow sprinkles and topped with yogurt (…or not, bro)
CHOCOLATE MOCHA WAFFLE – Whipped cream and chocolate fudge
MINT CHOCOLATE CHIP PANCAKE – Minty green pancake batter, loaded with chocolate chips and topped with whipped cream and chocolate fudge
BANANA NUT FRENCH TOAST – Homemade banana nut bread dipped into our French toast egg batter, grilled and topped with sliced bananas
Replacing the shuttered Sun City Café, Bite quickly garnered attention when I discovered it was less than ten minutes from home and giving the restaurant a few weeks to get its footing before paying a visit with three friends the simple conclusion is that either they still haven’t figured it out, or perhaps that they never will.
Located in a strip mall, pretty standard for Las Vegas, Bite is the invention of Chef Andrey Ariza and having personally contacted the restaurant weeks prior to find the website and menu (and subsequently linking it to their urbanspoon, yelp, and foursquare accounts) the first tip-off regarding customer service occurred when their online question form went unanswered and finding similarly disinterested staff located in store suffice it to say that those who drink their coffee quickly should sit close enough to the back of the restaurant to fill their own – the bottomless cup of $2.85 brew admittedly good, though the temperature could have stood to be turned up a few degrees.
Pleasantly decorated for Christmas, with a small kitchen and at least three line cooks manning the fryers and grills, it was with football in the background that an order was placed and requesting the food in two rounds the items rolled out at a good pace – the mistaken substitution of pancakes for French Toast one flaw, while the ‘funfetti’ stack was served without yogurt as though no one would notice – a later excuse of “we just replaced it with butter, sorry ‘bout that bro” apparently felt to be service-recovery enough.
Speaking to the quality of the food, much like the rest of Bite it was a bit of a mixed bag, the first round of savories honestly proving superior to the second set of sweets with the Monte Cristo fairly well constructed despite being unfried while the “Ultimate” was interesting if only for the runny eggs at the center, though this also contributed to a substantial degree of sogginess when taking into account the somewhat greasy sausage, the Beer Cakes surprisingly my favorite plate with light hoppiness and a crispy griddled layer overlying a fluffy center that paired nicely with smoky bacon.
Transitioning to more childish delicacies after a bit of respite, and a couple of trips to the coffee machine as the restaurant began to fill, 09:10:11 on 12/13/14 arrived just after unordered banana pancakes and funfetti pancakes lacking the menu-promised yogurt arrived and returning the first while settling for flavors no different than average white bread in the other it was in the crispy chocolate waffle and a single $3 mint flapjack that we indulged, both decent but nothing to write home about, while the late arriving Banana Nut French Toast was admittedly quite good, a crispy topcoat overlying a pudding like center with plenty of bananas made all the better by a drizzle of warm maple syrup.
TWO STARS: Stunningly unapologetic for serving items without the toppings promised on the menu and mostly underwhelming in their execution of plates that sound far more interesting than they taste one of my dining companions summed Bite up best when she said that it seemed they were trying to capitalize on the success of BabyStacks, but with four of them already populating a valley with plenty of competition from EggWorks, The Cracked Egg, Blueberry Hill, Hash House, and so many others that offer a better overall experience I’m not really sure Bite offers any good reason to go back.
RECOMMENDED: Beer Cakes, Banana Nut French Toast.
AVOID: Funfetti Pancakes (particularly without the yogurt,) and letting the Ultimate sit for too long as the rim around the egg became congealed and quite unpleasant.
TIP: Currently offering a Buy-One-Get-One Entrée deal, those interested in checking out Bite at a bargain are advised to watch the Review-Journal or community delivered “View” with the caveat that the deal is only available M-F (just like deal offered at The Cracked Egg.)
WHAT THE STARS MEAN: 5 World Class, 4 Excellent, 3 Good, 2 Fair, 1 Poor
http://thebitelv.com
