STK STEAKHOUSE We arrived a few minutes before our reservation and were told we had to wait outside the restaurant while they finished prepping. Ok, that wasn’t so bad. I always enjoy the opportunity to peruse the menus of the other high-end restaurants that circle the dining level of Cosmopolitan. When we arrived back for Brunch, about two to three other parties, including ourselves, the staff of appropriately cast Vegas “beautiful people” waltzed around all of us for about 10 minutes before any of the parties were finally seated at a table. I was initially told that we were going to be served a tasting of the whole menu and instead were informed that we could pick one appetizer to share, one entrée each, alongside either a Bloody Mary or a Mimosa. A bit of a letdown, but hey, this was on them, so why not take advantage. We both opted for Bloody Mary’s, and our server told us we could go up to the bar and customize them with extra treats, such as pickled veggies, peppered bacon, and my new obsession, blue cheese stuffed olives. That was fun. Every table when service starts gets warm coffee cake bread on a board with a Sweet Crème Anglaise sauce to dip the baked delight in. The bread seemed to be a hit at every table, including ours. We started things off with their Niçoise Salad. The tuna was perfectly cooked, and the hard-boiled quail eggs were adorably tiny and good. The potatoes were presented well but very underdone. They also seasoned them with sautéed onions, which wasn’t that bad, but we had specifically asked our server to take the onions out of our salad if there were any in the dish. My friend ordered the Steak and Eggs for our main entrees, and I ordered their Pork Belly Eggs Benedict. I had been waffling between ordering their Short Rib Hash and the Benedict, but my lifelong and not-so-healthy obsession with hollandaise sauce won me over. Our food came, and while they both looked good, the execution was very disappointing. We were in a restaurant called STK, and the steak was Meh Meh, not very good. It was slightly overcooked and didn’t have a very good flavor. The eggs and potatoes were just ok, too. My Eggs Benedict was a very similar experience. The hollandaise sauce was good, and my eggs were poached well, but the pork belly underneath them was very thick, chewy, and hard to cut. Underneath the pork was a bao bun, a light, fluffy bread that didn’t seem to pair well with the thick, chewy meat on top of it. It’s pretty hard for those who know me to make a Benedict I don’t care for, but STK was the first. I know that I am lucky that I was invited to try the place, and for free at that, but as we sat there nursing our Bloody Marys and tallying up the cost for the experience if we had paid for it ($144 breakfast), we did a double-take. The Strip is widely known to price gouge tourists while on vacation, but this was over-the-top. As a rule, the Cosmopolitan is one stop I usually take visiting friends and have never had a bad meal, until now. It’s pretty sad to leave the place and wish you’d just gone to Egg Works.