Potato Valley Cafe

Just how good can a baked potato place be?

Pretty good, as it turns out.

There isn't anything particularly novel about a restaurant that sells meals based on that culinary blank canvas, the baked potato. I know they've been around since at least the '80s, and seem to remember a few from my childhood, which was ... well, let's just say before the '80s.

But Potato Valley Cafe definitely provides a different spin. Yes, you can confine yourself to butter and sour cream or bacon and cheddar (or, presumably, butter and sour cream and bacon and cheddar), if you wish. But you also can order a number of vegetable-heavy options, plus toppings with ethnic interest such as Jamaican hot sauce, Cuban chicken or chicken curry. And some of them may turn out to be a lot more than you bargained for -- but in a good way.

My Broccoli Blue Cheese with Cheddar ($6.65), for example, sounded pretty straightforward. So when it arrived, I went back to the window (more on that later) to find out if it was, in fact, what I had ordered. What it was was a potato whose interior had been scooped and fluffed a bit and mixed with not only broccoli, blue cheese and cheddar, but also nonfat yogurt and some shredded cabbage.

But wait; there's more. Along with the Danish roasted onions that I'd ordered extra (59 cents), it was topped with a couple of thin spears of cucumber and one of mango, a ring of red bell pepper and enough chopped lettuce to make this very nearly qualify as a salad. It was cooler in temperature than I'd expected, but very good, the vegetables all fresh, crisp and flavorful. And even the potato was exemplary -- a big, well-scrubbed Idaho, oven-baked so that it was fluffy and a little creamy, instead of mushy and a little gummy, as would be rendered by a microwave.

Potato Valley offers a bowl of soup and baked potato option ($6.25) as well, which on the day of our visit involved Golden Broccoli soup. It was a nice rendition -- lots of broccoli, crisp-tender, in a cream soup that was just thick enough to cling to the broccoli, and served quite hot. The baked potato included with this one comes with just butter and paprika, so we decided to try some of the chili-lime sour cream (69 cents), which we were invited to sample beforehand. It was, as an employee told us, not as spicy as we'd expect, blended not to cater to the can't-get-it-hot-enough types but to bring out the flavors of chili and cumin, which when balanced can be deep and complex, and the bright, acidic flavor of the lime.

So back to the window: I'll include a caveat here that Potato Valley Cafe is about as casual as it gets -- a true downtown breakfast and lunch spot, open only from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. You order at the counter, pay and then take a seat at one of the tables in the dining room with its broad walls of windows and locally produced art (complete with price and artist's phone number, if you're in a mood to buy), on the ground floor of an art deco apartment building. As soon as your food is prepared, your name is called and you pick it up and dig in.

Potato Valley also offers sandwiches and salad plates if it's not a potato kind of day. Desserts, too, but we decided to skip it.

If you don't think a baked potato can suffice as a complete meal, Potato Valley Cafe will prove you wrong.

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.