4 Best Restaurants in West Side, Las Vegas

This is maybe the best example of a Las Vegas adage, "Never judge a place by its ugly strip-mall facade." In a shopping center you'd usually drive by lies a coffee and tea house that's about as beautiful as they come. An indoor greenhouse covers the central kitchen area, amid a well-appointed warehouse feel with plants, art, and cozy seating and a singular three-tiered reading and browsing area (shoes off, please) in back. The coffee's first rate as well, and it's not unusual for customers to take way too long to ogle the display case of delicious-looking pastries or read the full menu of specialty-drink temptations. There's a soup, sandwich, and quiche menu for those who want to extend a coffee break into a meal. Gäbi now has a second location in Henderson (136 N. Stephanie St.).

Modest little Ichiza has developed a cult following for serving sublimely delicious, authentic Japanese food and drink in a casual social environment that borders on controlled chaos. Located on the second floor of a shopping center in the city's Chinatown, this boisterous Izakaya-style pub is crammed with tourists, students, and local hipsters who love a good value and the chance to chow down on a variety of tasty small-plate offerings until the wee hours (It's open all night, switching to a breakfast menu before closing at 11 am). Forget the menu and study the walls instead, where dozens of haphazardly taped signs list the daily specials, or ask your server for suggestions, which might include black cod with grated white radish; stir-fried calamari with ginger butter; a seaweed or salmon-skin salad; and deep-fried, breaded quail eggs. From dinner to dessert, it's best to order with a sense of adventure. Ichiza 2 Hanari is a second location offering private dining rooms with call buttons a little further West (5300 W. Spring Mountain Rd.).

Look past the sad, faded strip mall exterior: Lucy is bright, cheerful, and big—with a designated bar area and a stage for DJs or bands. Separate breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus offer various stews or deep dishes, which include cubed beef goreb goreb, and collard green and bone-in beef gomen besga, both meant to be scooped up with spongy injera flatbread. If you're curious, the name Lucy comes from Ethiopia's most famous fossil skeleton, and this place feels like a community hub. Officially designating a loosely defined area as "Little Ethiopia" in 2023 might have seemed as optimistic as the signs pointing the way to Chinatown did in the early 2000s, but the area is definitely evolving, and Las Vegas is said to have some 40,000 Ethiopians. Ethiopian restaurants and markets are scattered around the edges of Chinatown, but this restaurant is a solid place to anchor it.

Some of the best doughnuts in Vegas are sold at this tiny Chinatown storefront tucked in a strip mall along Spring Mountain Road. Locals rave about the apple fritters, but more traditional selections, such as Boston cream, are addictive, too. Surprisingly, a good number of the offerings are vegan, a quirk that has put the hole-in-the-wall on the national map in recent years.