In this YouTube episode, hosts Josh and Rachael Fillbrandt visit Jaleo, the José Andrés‑run tapas restaurant at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Rachael orders the restaurant’s tasting menu while Josh selects items off the regular menu, allowing them to compare both approaches. They walk through each small‑plate, describing the appearance, texture, and flavor of dishes such as chilled gazpacho, endive cups with goat cheese and almonds, chicken fritters, bacon‑wrapped dates with apple‑mustard puree, a crispy cheese‑bread with tomato and Manchego, an apple‑fennel salad, and a cheese‑bread toast. They add a chicken‑mushroom‑garlic paella as an extra, noting its hearty, fried‑rice‑like quality and the texture of the mushrooms. The main courses include garlic‑sautéed shrimp (a modest scampi‑style bite) and a whole sea bass served with a Mexican‑style salad, which they both praise for its size, flaky texture, and garlic flavor. Dessert consists of a very creamy Spanish flan with orange and a rum‑soaked pineapple. Throughout, the hosts share light‑hearted banter, admit unfamiliarity with some ingredients (e.g., fennel), and give personal rankings—both naming the paella as their top dish, followed by the cheese‑bread and chicken “nugget.” They conclude with a positive overall impression, recommending the restaurant and encouraging viewers to like, subscribe, and follow them on social media.
Chapters
Hey everybody, I'm Josh.
And I'm Rachael.
Tonight we're trying out Haleo at Cosmopolitan.
Tapas, or also known as small plates. Uh, restaurant is by José Andrés.
Can't wait.
See you in there.
This is gazpacho with what?
It's a chilled tomato and garlic soup.
Yum yum.
All right, gazpacho.
We're doing a tasting menu, at least one of us Yeah, so you can do it where it's one person does the tasting menu, the other person doesn't. So Rachael's doing the tasting menu and I ordered off the menu. So we're gonna do the best of both worlds.
It comes in a cup and there's no spoon, so—
So you better just drink it.
Wow.
Boy, it smells like tomatoes.
It does. Uh, it's chilled. I have not eaten tomato soup chilled before.
I don't typically like tomato soup. This is pretty good though.
It is, and it does have a garlic flavor, which we love garlic.
It's interesting. Yeah, it's a good. It's probably very good for a palate cleansing.
That's what I'm wondering. Do we keep a little to cleanse our palate? See. So these here are the indied lettuce cups with oranges.
Goat cheese.
Goat cheese and I believe almonds. And then here, I will have to look up the exact terminology, but in simple words, they're chicken fritters.
Yeah, go ahead and rip one open. Let's see what they look like.
Ooh, they are cooked hot.
Oh my, they look cheesy.
They do. All right, so I have to keep telling myself that tapas are known for being small plates because the endive lettuce cups are quite literally 2 bites.
It's like a shot glass, not a cup.
Cheers!
Oh, that's surprisingly good.
Um, it has a wide variety of textures.
Yeah, I didn't get much from the nuts, but the orange, the goat cheese, and the endive all stand out a lot for me.
What is endive?
I don't know, it looked like a— some kind of— I mean, some kind of fancy lettuce. All right, let's eat some chicken. Yeah, chicken nugget.
Um, I'm not a nugget.
If you're watching this, anybody remember when Owen Hart was called the Nugget? Comment down below. I'm not a nugget. I'm not a nugget. I'm not either.
It's not your typical chicken nugget.
No. So it's like shredded chicken, cheese, fried very nicely. Fried. It's good.
It is good, but it's not your typical chicken nugget.
No, this is not McDonald's here. All right, these are fried bacon-wrapped dates. If you've been watching us, we have suddenly fallen in love with bacon-wrapped dates. These ones are fried, and what is that sauce?
It's an apple mustard puree.
Apple mustard puree, bound to be good.
All right, bacon-wrapped dates.
Bacon-wrapped dates.
Joe thought I was crazy at Giada's for ordering bacon-wrapped dates, and now he orders them.
Yeah, now the third time. Third time we've ordered in 6 months.
They're hot.
Oh wow.
The smokiness like fills your mouth.
That's good.
That's tasty. That's a good date.
I don't notice the bacon as much.
I don't either, but I wonder if that's what the smokiness like— because that instant when you bite into it, it felt like—
I could see that. It doesn't melt in your mouth quite like some of the other bacon-wrapped dates we've had.
It's more of a firm date.
Um, and then the bacon, it's not like a strong sense of bacon, but I think that the— it's the smokiness and then the crispiness kind of takes over.
I agree.
Yeah, but very good.
And Manchego.
All right, we got some fancy cheese bread here.
Uh, it is a crispy bread with, uh, ethereal fresh tomato and Manchego cheese. There we go.
Oh, cheese bread.
It's fancy.
It's fancy. All right, this one is apple and fennel salad with Manchego cheese. You can see some walnuts in there. All right, cheese bread time and apple fennel salad.
That's some big slices of apple pie. Some crispy cheese—
or not crispy cheese, crispy toast.
Isn't fennel like an onion?
I don't think so, but leave a comment down below and let us know what it really is.
What is a fennel? Root vegetable?
Sure, I'll go with that.
You would think being self-proclaimed foodies we would know what a fennel is, but I don't. I don't have a clue.
We're not there yet.
Nope.
We're not professionals, we just pretend to be on YouTube.
And for our close friends That is so refreshing.
You want to see refreshing? Eat that, eat that toast. It's like a fresh tomato jam, basically. Yeah, the, the toastiest toasted bread.
That's delicious.
It actually is. I just threw stuff in.
It's just— yeah. Wow, I would not have guessed that was bread. I honestly would have thought that was a cracker if they had not told us.
Huh, they did say it was very important bread. Wow, that's good, right? I'm trying to figure out my thoughts on this. You would think I would have remembered that there was apple in an apple and fennel salad, but I didn't. It's good. Yeah, it's refreshing.
It's very light.
It's, it's more— it does seem very cleansing. It does not seem like a hearty, like, oh my God, the flavors are amazing, but it's, it's just a nice working your way through.
I would say it's a very simple dish, but oddly the largest dish we've had.
Correct, largest dish. Uh, what are there, like 8, 8 items on your menu? So remember, this is a tasting menu, so a lot of small plates. It's like Even smaller than normal small plates. That's basically what we're getting here. And then, um, the dates, that was one that I ordered. And then I got one more item that I ordered, and the rest of these are all on, uh, on Rachael's.
Yeah, on the tasting menu too, you could add the paella of the day, so we ordered that. So that'll be coming too.
Yeah, so we added, of course. All right, this is an add-on. It's chicken mushroom and garlic paella.
I don't think I've ever had paella before.
It looks like really good fried rice.
It does look good like that.
All right, paella time.
I've never had paella, so I'm excited to try it. But like Josh just said, it looks like—
it really looks like fried rice.
If I remember from one of my favorite movies, paella takes a long time to cook.
Grown-ups. I knew it when you said it. This is great.
This is so good. Yeah, like, this is a filling— this is hearty.
It feels very hearty. Definitely worth the upgrade.
All right.
Um, some of the bites are just a little too light, a little too not, not exciting, but this is good.
Now Josh isn't a fan of the texture of mushrooms, and there are mushrooms in here, but I'm gonna encourage him to eat one.
What, with rice or without?
With, like, as a big bite. Even add a piece of chicken. Because it gives such an earthy, meaty flavor. I was kind of surprised it was a mushroom.
All right, the— what was I gonna say? Oh, the rice. I do like the texture of the rice. It's like really well cooked.
It is.
It's, it's not chewy, it's not hard. It's like perfectly cooked the way it should be.
And if he doesn't like the mushroom, that's okay because I will eat all of them in this bite.
All right, I did not do it with a piece of chicken. I didn't spit it out.
That's a bonus.
But for me, it's generally a texture thing. I don't— I like the flavor of mushroom, I like the flavor of coconut, I just don't like the texture. And so like biting into it wasn't— isn't the greatest. If you could finely cut it every single time, I'd love it.
But the, uh, the flavor of the mushroom really stands out, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Good, then I'll eat the rest of the mushrooms that are in it. It does not hurt my feelings.
And I'll eat the rest of the chicken.
No.
All right, this is garlic sautéed shrimp. All right, garlic sautéed shrimp. It's not the biggest shrimp we've seen.
It reminds me of little baby shrimps, like for shrimp salad.
This is not baby shrimp. It's somewhere in between.
Yeah.
Um, all right, I, I did just grab the biggest one for size reference. It's good. It's like shrimp scampi.
But obviously, but it doesn't stand out.
No.
Especially coming from the paella to this.
Yeah.
I mean, it's okay.
It's really good shrimp, but it is a little bit of a letdown after the paella for sure. You want to try this bread? I'm gonna dip it.
I'm gonna dip it in that garlic butter juice, I would assume. It seems crusty, like a crusty French bread, but It's like a breadstick.
All right, well, uh, we're supposed to save all of our answers till the end, but I don't think we are. That one's a— that one's a letdown. All right, this is my other choice off the menu. This is a whole sea bass. You can see big chunks of garlic, and then it comes with a Mexican salad. All right, main course time.
It's a good— okay, let me just say this before we get started. I was a little nervous because my dish, or my order, consisted of 8 different plates, and I was a little thinking, why are we ordering such a big another plate? I didn't think we would need it. I'm really glad we did.
To be fair, we split curries. Yeah, so I mean, so we could— maybe you would get full off of it, but it's a lot of Small bites.
It's a lot of small bites. And I, I guess maybe I've never been to a true tapas restaurant to know that piece about it, but I do like the fact that we're heading into a decent-sized piece of fish. Yeah, I mean, it's a whole fish. Yes.
All right, I'm gonna try the fish.
Okay.
The Mexican salad tastes like a salad. Um, nothing too exciting. It, uh, kind of like an Italian dressing is what it tastes like. I'm sure that's not what it is. I'm sure there's something else to it. All right, the fish is great. Um, it's a fluffy white fish.
Oh, it's got a kind of a crispy edge.
Yeah, there's like a, a white I think Rachael was laughing because there's like a— just a big old clump of green vegetables just in the fish head. Is that what you were doing?
Yeah, and there's a fish head.
She also liked the fish head itself. Yeah, I do like the fish. What do you think about it?
Wow! Again, thank you for introducing me to fish the way it should be because this is delicious. Like I could get behind eating this on a regular basis.
Yeah, I definitely, I definitely do recommend the fish. It, it's tasty.
I can taste it.
I'm just gonna keep on eating it.
It's light and it's got that good garlic flavor, but it's, but I can tell by the end I bet it'll be.
Very filling, isn't it? I think so too. But if it's not filling, I don't know that we have more dishes. So anything after this is probably us going back to the menu and ordering more.
Could include dessert.
Will include dessert. Dessert. All right, first course of dessert is a Spanish-style flan.
With vanilla custard and oranges.
Vanilla custard and oranges. There we go.
As part of the tasting menu, you actually get dessert. We were going between 2 different desserts, so luckily—
Yeah, we were excited to hear that we got one of them already for free.
Well, uh, included in the price.
Yeah, I'm jumping into the flan with an orange. You're just seeing the cream.
Just the vanilla custard.
Vanilla custard.
Custard.
All right, that is like one of the creamiest flans I've ever had in my life.
I don't know that I've ever had flan, so that's delicious.
Yep, very good. We're gonna eat it quick. Yeah.
It'll be gone soon.
Yeah, dessert course number 2 coming out.
Rum-soaked pineapple. We do not need dessert cocktails with this.
Nope, we are gonna eat our cocktail tonight. All right, it's getting really loud in here because it's getting late, people are getting drunk, and now we're eating rum-soaked pineapple.
It tastes like pineapple soaked in rum.
It's so good.
It's delicious.
All right, we just wrapped up here at Haleo. What'd you think about that?
I thought it was good. A little bit different, uh, I'm not used to this small plates at all, so it threw me off. And most of the flavors were really, really good.
I would agree. Um, yeah, the small plates were a little smaller than I was expecting.
Yeah, I agree.
Um, definitely glad that we got the whole fish. I thought, I thought that was good and the size was good. Um, overall I thought it was really good. I, I enjoyed it. I'd come back again. It was a good experience.
I agree.
What was your favorite dish?
Oh, the paella, hands down. Paella. Yours?
I would say the paella as well.
Good.
How about your second favorite?
Okay, it looked like pizza with that cheese thing on it.
It was the crispy bread.
The cheese bread.
It was so tasty! It was really good, actually. Um, call me crazy, that chicken nugget was good. I'll eat that thing all day and all night. It was delicious.
Yeah, the desserts were really good as well. The flan was very creamy and palate cleansing, but— and, and then that pineapple. Yeah, just finished it off.
It was just really good fresh pineapple. If you're enjoying our videos, don't forget to hit that Like and subscribe.
Follow us on social media as well. All of our links are down below— Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
