Momofuki in New York City, Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn, Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, Bourbon Steak in San Francisco, Border Grill in Los Angeles, Bouchon in Yountville, Emeril’s in New Orleans, Jaleo in Washington, D.C.. These are among the many restaurants on every true gastronome’s bucket list. In addition to being helmed by some of the culinary world’s most celebrated luminaries, these pantheons of deliciousness share another commonality. They all have a presence in Las Vegas casinos where well-heeled guests with plenty of disposable income come to gamble and to eat well.
Whether celebrity chef restaurants in Las Vegas are as good as their originals is a matter of debate. Award-winning restaurants throughout the fruited plain are similarly scrutinized when they launch satellite restaurants in Las Vegas. Many consistently receive high marks for quality. Others are considered overhyped or not worth the cost. A virtual certainty among them is that the big name chefs aren’t at the kitchen preparing meals for every guest who visits. The connection many celebrity chefs have with their namesake restaurants often ends at the name. In most cases, chef glitterati do develop the restaurant’s menu, vision and concept but they’re executed on a day-to-day basis by another talented chef. For the most part, if you want to have a meal prepared by a celebrity chef, you’ve got to visit the restaurant that started it all.
As a devoted husband to my much-better-half, I always take her tastes into consideration when determining where we should dine. She knows this and trusts my opinion. Knowing my Kim loves fried chicken more than she loves me, I scoured local and national sources to find “the best fried chicken” in Las Vegas. Yeah, it’s a matter of opinion and tastes vary, but several lists consistently named Miami’s Yardbird Southern Kitchen & Bar as one of the country’s very best purveyors of poultry. In March, 2025, Food & Wine ranked Yardbird as the seventh best fried chicken in the fruited plain.
At 39, neither my Kim or I are youthful and cool enough for the Miami vibe, so chances are slim we’d ever visit “Vice City” for that exalted fried chicken. Happily, Yardbird now has locations in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, LA, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C. Its Las Vegas home is within the Venetian casino where it’s located within restaurant row. Yardbird isn’t your stereotypical Southern fried chicken restaurant. It’s neither bright nor colorful and you won’t see clucks of chicken artifacts strewn about. Instead, this Yardbird is rather dark, its setting more conducive to the “Bar” portion of the restaurant’s name. In other words, it’s the perfect setting for a Las Vegas restaurant frequented by casino and bar-goers.
It’s been a long time since cheap all-you-can-eat buffets defined the Las Vegas dining scene. Most casinos house high-end restaurants where you pay high-end prices. Yardbird is several orders of magnitude more expensive than KFC. Our expectations is that the cost of our meal would be exponentially better than anything the Colonel’s restaurants can proffer. Unlike many fried chicken restaurants, Yardbird offers so much more than fried chicken. You’ll find everything from a 44-ounce Tomahawk steak to barbecue. We didn’t pay much attention to anything else on the menu; our goal was to learn what the seventh rated fried chicken in the country tastes like.
But first–something from the “starters and sides” section of the menu. Few sides are as closely associated with Southern fried chicken as are classic buttermilk biscuits. Yardbird serves its biscuits with honey butter and a housemade jam. The housemade jam, a caramelized green apple jam was the highlight. Reminiscent of an apple butter, it has a tangy flavor that tastes like autumn. The biscuits themselves aren’t nearly as fluffy and light as true Southern biscuits made with White Lily soft wheat flour. Thank goodness that caramelized green apple jam stole the show.
Food & Wine describes Yardbird’s approach to fried chicken: “Following a 27-hour soak in a sugar-salt brine with a hint of paprika and cayenne pepper, the fantastic chicken here is fried in lard and served with Tabasco-spiked honey.” We don’t normally have left-overs when enjoying fried chicken, but we did at Yardbird’s. Perhaps we shouldn’t have ordered the whole bird (accompanied by chilled watermelon, sharp Cheddar waffles, bourbon maple syrup), an eighty-dollar splurge. The waffles were easily the star of the show with that sharp Cheddar serving as a superb counterbalance to the sweetness of the bourbon maple syrup. The watermelon was a bit out-of-season and not very sweet. As for that seventh ranked fried chicken, well…let’s just say it was better than any chain’s fried chicken, but in our estimation not nearly worth the cost. The chicken is cooked using a pressure-cooking method with very little oil. This is different from traditional deep-frying and results in a less greasy, but still “buttery-soft” interior. Despite being pressure-cooked, the chicken has a crispy, golden-brown skin with a crackling texture that is not overly salty. To say we were disappointed is an understatement.
Back to the question as to whether second instantiation restaurants in Las Vegas are as good as the original, we’ve never visited the original in Miami. After being so disappointed in the Las Vegas version, it’s unlikely we ever will visit Yardbird in Miami.
Yardbird Southern Table & Bar
3355 South Las Vegas Blvd.
Las Vegas, Nevada
(702) 297-6541
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LATEST VISIT: 21 October 2025
# OF VISITS: 1
RATING: N/R
COST: $$$$$
BEST BET: The Whole Bird, Dr. Brown’s Root Beer, Classic Buttermilk Biscuits
REVIEW #1494