I was excited to try a 4 diamond chinese restaurant at the Wynn. Mind you, I have been to the Wynn to stay twice, and the hotel could not be better!

However, my experience with their supposed 4 star/diamond restaurants is laughable.

Open the menu's to prices that range in the $30 - $40 range for an entre. That is totally fine, if the food matches the pricing in quality! This DID NOT! Scallops were barely warm, and the Orange Beef was so overly breaded. the food was fine, for maybe a $15 dish at most, not $40!

The most expensive meal we had in Las Vegas and it was only slightly better than my local chinese take out joint. Thirty two dollars for Orange Beef? You've got to be kidding! The appetizer sampler for $18 only had 3 items on it! The decor was beautiful, downright elegant but that hardly justified the menu pricing.

Waiter seemed on another planet...did not quite hear me for some reason. The veggies were very good, the tenderloin was chewy, expensive, and poor. For the price I expected PRIME but got SELECT. Ribs were tender, but seemed overpowered by ginger.

Drinks were expensive as well, Grey Goose was insane.

Expected more from a WYNN establishment. Sad.

Have you ever worked really hard to make something beautiful and unique that went completely unappreciated by your friends, family, and peers? Did you keep it up after you were ignored? Doubtful.

I fear this same dilemma has hit Wing Lei. Chinese food is hard to get accepted as high cuisine with the same standards across multiple groups of people. The Wynn (the casino resort that Wing Lei occupies) caters to both American and Chinese high-rollers. Each group has completely different expectations of what constitutes higher-end cuisine - the Chinese focus on delicacies and the Americans focus on presentation and unique, yet familiar tastes presented in a new way.

The middle ground ends up being rather bland and unexciting.

Start with the room. If you arrive in the evening before the sun goes down, you are treated to a beautiful view of a garden with greenery and an impressive modernist statue of a woman. As you finish your entree and look up again, nightfall has come and the statue is lit horribly with harsh artificial light. reminscient of a diorama. What a mood killer.

Service was acceptable, sometimes friendly, often awkward (the waiter wiped his nose with a kleenex while taking my order, the tables next to me took 15 minutes to be bussed and cleaned after the parties had left, two different waiters tried to serve us, one server called a dumpling a ravioli to the non-Chinese customers but called it by its regular name to the Chinese, and the busser attempted to reuse our dirty utensils rather than presenting us with new ones).

The noodle dish and shrimp dumpling I had was good but not exceedingly better than something one-third its price in any other restaurant.

The main dish - a chili beef tenderloin - was mixed: the beef was beautifully cooked, so tender... but was completely destroyed by an overabundance of green chiles with seeds still present, completely destroying any other flavor in the dish. This is the perfect example of something that has gone simply amiss due to trying to be too much.

The wine parings with the dishes were good, the desserts were nothing special... very little Chinese influence - the chocolate bar and strawberry sorbet could have been present in any mid-level restaurant on the strip.

The bottom line is that you'll probably get Chinese food that is 25% better than your best Chinese restaurant back home in North America (assuming you don't live in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Vancouver, or Toronto) but at three times the price.