JR’s Place

I remember a reader asking a couple of years ago why I suddenly was reviewing so many Middle Eastern restaurants. The answer? A whole bunch of them had opened in a relatively short period.

The situation is a little different with Italian restaurants. Along with steakhouses, Italian long has been one of the most popular restaurant genres in the valley, as across the country. Ergo, there are always a lot, and I always end up reviewing a lot (though nobody ever asks me why, I guess because of their very popularity).

At any rate, the profusion of Italian restaurants presents a challenge to anyone thinking of operating one. They do, as a rule, need to offer the red-sauce favorites that have come to be comfort food even to those who wouldn't know a Nonna from a gnome. But because there are so many, they tend to all blend together unless they do something to distinguish themselves from the crowd. At JR's Place it's Lemon Spaghetti ($12.95; add $6.95 for chicken, $8.95 for shrimp).

Yeah, it's showing up on the Food Network these days, but Lemon Spaghetti isn't something you find at your average neighborhood trattoria, though for the life of me I can't figure out why. Because at least as it's prepared at JR's Place, this is a simple dish of simple ingredients -- so often the best way of doing things -- that share centuries-old roots and have a solid affinity for each other.

Think of your basic (nicely al dente) spaghetti alio oglio, only light on the garlic and with a big boost of lemon, and you'll get the idea. The sauce was as simple as it comes -- primarily olive oil and lemon juice -- but the flavors blended into a divine harmony, the touch of lemon providing springlike, astringent relief from the richness.

Then there was the JR's Chicken ($18.95). This one was similarly offbeat, but similarly based on a classic Italian combination of flavors. The pounded-thin chicken cutlet has been topped with a mixture of lightly sauteed Roma tomatoes, red onion and basil and nubs of fresh mozzarella, and sauced with a balsamic vinaigrette. It ended up tasting much like a warm caprese salad, with the addition of chicken. Again, perfectly logical -- and quite nice.

We ordered the garlic dough skins ($7.95) mainly because the name intrigued us; dough skins? What they were in reality were pieces of what tasted like thin pizza dough -- a yeasty, stretchy pizza dough -- sprinkled with just a bit of oil and garlic and cheese and served with a long-simmered marinara.

The only disappointment was a slight one, and it was mostly one of expectations. When I saw "hand-shucked fried clams" ($6.95), I thought they sounded an awful lot like whole-bellied clams, a rarity in these parts. They weren't -- at least they didn't have the nice plumpness that gave this New England treat its name; if these were fresh-shucked before frying, they must have been littlenecks, really little littlenecks. They were, actually, pretty decent as these things go, but the breading-to-clam ratio was too high for most die-hard clam lovers.

Service throughout was very good, with the two servers clearly at loose ends on a slow evening. The interior was quite pleasant; JR's is one of those modern poker bars that doesn't feel like a poker bar.

It does feel like an Italian restaurant, and tastes like one, too. But JR's finds a few ways, however subtle, to stand out from the crowd.

Las Vegas Review-Journal reviews are done anonymously at Review-Journal expense. Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at 383-0474 or e-mail her at hrinella@reviewjournal.com.