In this vlog, hosts Josh and Rachael set out to replicate the experience of a high‑end Vegas buffet without paying the $85 per person price of the Bacchanal Buffet. They target the Cosmopolitan’s happy hour offerings, which run roughly 5‑7 pm, and aim to visit five venues—China Poblano, Mama Fuku, Blue Ribbon, LPM, and Jaleo—while keeping the total cost for two people under $170. At each stop they sample signature dishes, note happy‑hour pricing versus regular menu prices, comment on portion sizes, and recommend standout items (e.g., quesabirria tacos, pork belly croquettes, baked clams, the Tomatini cocktail, prawn and steak skewers, and croquettes with sangria). They also discuss logistical details such as bar seating requirements, holiday closures, and limited happy‑hour windows. Throughout the tour they track the cumulative spend, compare it to the buffet benchmark, and share practical tips for other travelers. The video concludes with a favorite drink recommendation (the Tomatini), a brief mention of other possible happy‑hour spots (STK, Beauty and Essex), and a call to action for viewers to like, subscribe, and follow on social media.
Chapters
Hey everybody, I'm Josh.
And I'm Rachael.
We love Las Vegas, but we hate buffets. So one of the ways that we're gonna try to do our own type of buffet is going to all the happy hours at Cosmopolitan, which is open from 5 to 7 most days.
Yes.
And we're gonna try to do it for less than the cost of a buffet.
Let's go!
Next stop is China Poblano. This is a José Andrés restaurant. It is not fusion, it's basically like 2 different menus where it's both Mexican and Chinese. But you can see there's a couple drinks, which— love the saltier margarita in the past.
And it is every day, it says from 4 to 6. Now the key is on this, you do have to sit at the bar.
Yes.
Like, it's not a regular seat.
All the restaurants start at 5 o'clock though.
Yep.
So this will be nice to try to fit some time in. There's your prices on your food. You can see everything ranges from $4 to $13. All right, first restaurant ended up being China Poblano because SDK was closed for a holiday apparently. Yeah, so watch out. Even though online it says they have happy hour every day, they may not. Anyway, 4 o'clock is when China Poblano opened. We are able to get a saltier margarita, pork and shrimp wontons, chicken shumai, burrito taco, quesaburrito.
Yeah, quesaburrito taco and a cactus taco.
Yes, nopales. Yes, the margarita is delicious, but we are not counting the margarita in this game.
No, because in every buffet or anything, the alcoholic beverages are going to cost more, right? So we're doing comparison to food, food to food.
Yes.
So first One, what did you think of the Nepalese taco?
It ate like a green bean taco, which I've never had before. But that's what we imagined it to taste like. That's what it ate like. I thought it was good. There, there is a decent amount of cheese on there to help me get through it. The quesabirria taco was the best. Easy. So good. And it was really cool just watching these little Mexican grandmothers just making these things nonstop the entire time we're there.
It was very cool. But the fried wonton was very delicious.
Extremely light. Yeah, so good. And then the chicken shumai was very good as well. All of these dishes you're looking at $2 to $4 off. Now the one that's not is quesabirria. It's only 50 cents off compared to, uh, otherwise, but you have to order 3 of them at a time.
Yeah, I would say, but you get a sample. It's kind of being able to sample it for a little bit better price. I do want to know how they pick what's on their menu because There were a couple things on their regular menu I wish were on the happy hour menu, but that's okay.
Yeah, but we're hoping to make it to 4 more happy hours tonight.
Yes, all in one shot.
All right, let's go.
Okay, so one of the best buffets here in Vegas right now is the Bacchanal Buffet over at Caesars Palace, but that is $85 a person. When we were thinking about this, we don't want to spend $170 on a buffet, so here we are at Happy hour, trying to find the best dishes for the best price and see if we can keep them under that $170. The key here is, at least for me, these are fresh-made dishes.
Yes.
They aren't on the buffet, so that's a key. We're not going to include alcohol on that because alcohol is separated at all buffets. So, and before tax and tip, again, those pieces are other add-ons that you can't go with. So base price for the Bacchanal Buffet is $85 per person. So we're trying to get through this Happy hour at five different restaurants for less than $170.
All right, not happy hour, but we had 30 extra minutes, so we went to Ghost Donkey, had a great drink.
So good.
And now it's five o'clock. All right, next up is Mama Fuku.
The mezcal idea may have been a good idea in the moment.
On that note, we are trying to get at least one drink at each of these bars, and this is the highball. It's only eight dollars at Mama Fuku.
Yeah. All of their happy hour prices are eight dollars across the board. It's a small menu, but still, that tastes like some alcohol in there.
Great.
All right, food coming. You have to like crack one of those open. You know that, right?
With this.
Yeah. Oh my! It's like molten lava.
Should be. It's hot.
Yeah, those are frozen fries with some chilies.
And a ketchup.
And a green thingy. All right, we are heading upstairs. We did get a pork belly croquette, which was amazing.
Really good, but really heavy. Like, it was not light at all.
There were 4 of them. They were big. They were delicious. The fries are definite frozen fries.
Yeah, so nothing major.
And then the highball is, uh, quite alcohol-y.
It's whiskey on the rocks with a splash of water.
Yeah, if you're interested in Japanese whiskey, I definitely recommend it. But we had to go upstairs because we're going to our next spot.
It's happy hour at the bar, open seating. Perfect, thank you.
All right, next up is Blue Ribbon. You can see beers are $7, but they're normally $10 to $11. And then wine by the glass is $12, which is normally in the $16 to $20 range. And then we're gonna do some deviled eggs, some steak tartare, and baked clams. Which, if we can find out the price on those, I'd be impressed. Baked clams is normally $26. Deviled eggs is normally $22. And the steak tartare is normally $38. So this is a huge discount that we're getting right here at Blue Ribbon. All right, here you go. This is your steak tartare.
Do you think those are sweet pickles?
Uh, we're gonna find out very soon. Rachael's gonna try it.
Yep.
But check. Oh, that's falling apart. All right, there's your beef. Here is some deviled eggs with a little bit of pickled onion and some jalapeño. I like the look of it.
Me too.
See a lemon, use a lemon. It's going on my fingers.
Now I will say that the portion sizes for happy hour are a bit smaller than what you normally get, but they're Almost.
It's the right size though.
$15 difference.
Yeah, it's significantly different.
Yeah.
All right, big clam.
So this might be the best happy hour menu so far that we've ran into. It's got 5 different—
Wide variety.
Yeah, 5 different, um, courses for the— I would call them savory dishes— and 5 different dessert dishes. In addition, all of their beers and all but 2 wines, their champagne and their dessert wines, are on the menu. So you can, you can choose whatever you like.
If we had planned better, this probably should have been the last one now that we see the dessert, but we've got 2 more to go. And, um, I'll say my favorite bite at this one was the baked clams.
Agreed. And I'm with you, if I would have known dessert, we probably would have had this. But this one also has a limited time frame of 5 to 6:30, so we had to get it in first. Hi, we were hoping to get in for a happy hour.
All right, next up we are over here at LPM, which there is a drink here everyone should try. It's called the Tomatini. It is a tomato-based drink. I don't think it is. It is not like a Bloody Mary.
It's not a Bloody Mary.
Don't think that it is. It's like the freshest tomato drink ever.
Yeah, it's not a Bloody Mary for sure.
All right, as far as snacks go, it's $13 each. There is calamari, burrata, beef skewers, prawn skewers, and snails. We're going to get a few of these.
3.
3 of them.
It's time for 3. So here and at Blue Ribbon, we got bread service, and included in the bread service at LPM, a tomato you slice yourself and a lemon.
As well as a lemon, yeah.
And some olive oil.
Which we joked about this before, but it really was good. It was quite tasty, like better than it should be.
It absolutely— and this is probably the most packed bar so far for happy hour. Yeah, but they will have you or let you eat in the lounge as well for the happy hour menu.
All right, first up we went with the prawn skewers. Those are much larger than you would think for that price. That's actually really good, I think.
Yeah, that's a decent price and a decent serving.
Yeah, a little bit of lime. I think that's gonna be delicious.
All right, please enjoy.
Cheers.
Thank you. Thank you.
2 tomatinis, super refreshing. Tomato drink.
After we eat some tomatoes.
Yeah, if you come here, you should definitely get it. All right, and we did a little bit of sweet harissa beef skewers and then escargot, which has a nice little puff pastry to it. It looks very cute. Are you ready? Let's eat. All right, just leaving LPM.
Thank you.
We ended up doing a second round of tomatinis because they're so good.
Because they're delicious.
And my favorite was the prawns.
Steak skewers, hands down the favorite.
The meat was amazing. We got one more to go though. All right, we have made it to our final spot.
I can't believe we made it. Yeah, mainly because I would have had another tomatini.
Yeah, that's Tomatinis are good, they're dangerous.
They're ridiculous, yeah.
Yeah, but we are here at Jaleo, and this is— they call it their sangria hour.
Well, we started with José Andrés and now we're finishing with José Andrés.
That's true, and we're gonna do a sangria. We both love the cava when we've been to Spain, so we're gonna do that, and we're gonna do a couple different croquettes because when we came here the first time, we called them fancy chicken nuggets.
Fancy chicken nuggets. And my friend gave us such a hard time about it.
So yep, so we're gonna fix that tonight and maybe we'll get more. But, uh, there's seafood croquettes as well. You can see this is in the bar area.
This place is busy. This, this and LPM, I would say, are the 2 busiest happy hours we've been to.
I would agree, but it's also the latest.
True, true, true.
Let's eat and drink. This is your chicken croquette on the right. And your seafood on the left. And there's sangria in the middle. And your cava on the middle. Look at that seam. Looks beautiful.
Oh, that's so good.
So good. Chicken nuggie?
Seafood nuggie.
I love it.
Me too.
It's a fancy chicken nugget.
It's a fancy seafood nugget.
Yeah.
So tomato bread was one of our favorites when we were in Barcelona last year. Or no, now almost 2 years ago.
Oh gosh.
Oh my gosh.
But, and there's also some Iberico pork and some Manchego cheese. Now a little bit upcharge, but we had the money to do it.
Yes. Amazingly.
We're coming in under budget actually, so this is gonna be our final bite. All right, we just got the pan con tomate with the pork, with the cheese.
I've said it before, I'll say it 100 times over, when a bite can take you back to a memory, that's when it wins. And this one did it.
Yeah.
This one took me right back to Barcelona.
It's, it's crazy that literally our last bite of the evening is our best bite of the day.
All of them were great. This was super fun.
This was a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed watching it, actually.
Yeah, and if you get a chance, Cosmo has a great selection, especially early on between what, 5 and 7 PM?
Now there's 2 other places that you could check out: STK, which was not open today because of a holiday, and then, uh, Beauty and Essex, which is only on certain days.
Monday through Thursday for Beauty and Essex.
Yeah, which we're weekend travelers. Yeah, but this was great. I hope you enjoyed it. And we drank a lot too.
Sticking with this?
I'm sticking with this. I think it was the best. My favorite drink of the night, the tomatini. You should absolutely go there and get it.
It doesn't even make sense, but it is so good. It's not explainable.
Yeah, I hope you enjoyed it. We enjoyed it.
We did.
If you're enjoying our videos, don't forget to hit that like and subscribe.
You can also follow us on social media, Facebook, Instagram, and X. All our links are down below. Also This is our last video of this trip. We need to shout out everyone, and I mean everyone, who stopped and said hello to us. It means the world to us. We can't thank you enough.
Yeah, I don't know what happened, but suddenly people know who we are. Yeah, um, it was pretty freaking cool. We've been recognized more times every day than we ever have been recognized, and it feels so fucking good.
It was awesome. So thank you so much. Never ever ever hesitate to stop and say hi to us.
