Restaurant.com in Vegas

First off, I have no affiliation with Restaurant.com, or with Vegas.  I just enjoy saving money and eating a lot of food.

On our recent trip to Las Vegas for the 2011 RnR Las Vegas half marathon, The Wife and I decided to try out Restaurant.com.  This is a website that offers "vouchers" for a list of restaurants, and sells them for a few dollars.  Typically, you can get a "$25 off of a minimum purchase of $35" voucher for about $2.  At first, this seems like a slam dunk of a deal.  But when you read the fine print, it's not as clear.  When you use these vouchers, there is an automatic 18% gratuity added to your bill, and it cannot be used toward tax/tip.  So, your bill has to be $35 for food/drink, then they add tax and an 18% gratuity, then they take off $25.  We figured that we would still end up saving around $10 per meal by using these vouchers.  We did some investigating and ended up with 6 different vouchers.

I should mention that these vouchers can be purchased in a number of different denominations, and the discount is not always the same.  Sometimes it is $10 off of $25, or $25 off of $35, or $50 off of $100 and so on.  It really just depends on where you are planning on going and what you would normally eat.  For us, the $25 off of $35 seemed like the best deal.

Figuring out which places to eat at was kind of a pain in the butt.  It's pretty hard to tell, without having been to any of these places, which place is going to be a dump and which one is going to be nice.  It actually took me a fair amount of time to decide on the 6 places that I chose.  Even still, we had no idea if these deals would work out.

The first voucher we used was for Aromi d'Italia.  For the amount of food we ate, it ended up being a great deal.  I'm not going to go into exactly what we ate and how much it cost, just know that it was worth it.  In fact, every one of our vouchers ended up being a good deal.  So, if you're headed to Vegas and looking for some good places to eat and want to use a Restaurant.com voucher, try these places:

Aromi d'Italia

Coconut's Beach Bar and Mexican Grill

The Alexis Garden restaurant

Strip Burger

I know I said we had 6 vouchers, and we did.  We actually had 2 vouchers for Aromi d'Italia, so we ate there twice (I'll get to this in a moment), and we had one for El Segundo Sol, which we didn't have time to eat at, unfortunately (but it looked very, very good!).

Part of the stipulations of these vouchers is that you are only allowed to use one restaurant specific voucher, per party, per month.  In other words, you can only use a coupon at the same restaurant one time per month.  We knew that this was printed on the coupon, but we figured we'd just try it a few days apart, and they didn't seem to care.  Now, had we gone in on consecutive days, maybe they would, but whatever.

Next time you're going on vacation, why not try out restaurant.com and see if there's anything on there that looks good!  We did, and it seemed to work out pretty well!