Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Brunch every day at the westside’s new Toasted Gastrobrunch

Toasted Gastrobrunch

Courtesy

Smoked salmon toast at Toasted Gastrobrunch.

Five years ago, veteran restaurateur Sami Ladeki brought a new concept to Green Valley with Sammy’s Grill & Bar, an evolution of his popular casual chain Sammy’s Woodfired Pizza. This month, he’s unveiled his latest innovation, refashioning a West Flamingo Road location of Sammy’s Pizza into a restaurant focused completely on brunch.

Toasted Gastrobrunch serves only brunch fare every day until 3 p.m. The menu is stocked with creatively topped toasts (going far beyond avocado), inventive egg dishes like smoked beef brisket hash with sunny side-ups and a Denver scramble, pancakes, benedicts, French toast, breakfast burritos, salads, sandwiches and more.

“I didn’t want to do something simple like eggs with a bagel or a croissant,” says Ladeki, who’s been doing business in Las Vegas for more than 25 years and longer in Southern California. “I wanted to keep to what a great café can do and upscale it a bit. There’s a lot of demand for an upscale, gourmet experience, especially for brunch.”

Toasted is a spin-off of Ladeki’s Toast Gastrobrunch in Carlsbad, California, which he opened about a year ago. The concept has performed so well in the San Diego-adjacent city, Ladeki says he had to give it a shot in Las Vegas.

“In California, a lot of [diners] are rejecting the high prices and [going out] to dinner less frequently,” he says. “This is a place where you can have a good meal for brunch or lunch, sit down and relax and it’s laid-back.”

There’s a vast selection of boozy brunch beverages on the Toasted menu, including Bloody Mary varieties, bellinis, mimosas and flaming coffee drinks.

The restaurant maintains some of the most popular lunch dishes from the previous concept, including salads and burgers. Among the standout new plates are the Eggs in Purgatory (shakshouka in a sourdough bread bowl with pork belly, mushrooms and feta cheese), the duck confit toast with sour cherry jam, fried chicken with buttermilk pancakes and hot sauce syrup and the smoked brisket melt.

There’s also a specialty dessert that’s already getting rave reviews, a coconut-filled kanafee from Ladeki’s home country of Lebanon.

“You know, the Messy Sundae at Sammy’s Pizza, that made us millions of dollars and it’s still going strong,” Ladeki says. “I thought, why not do something different here? I wanted to put this kanafee on the menu and we were trying to figure out a name for it, but it sounds good in English. And we put a different twist on it by putting the coconut inside and adding orange blossom syrup and pistachio.”

Toasted Gastrobrunch (9516 W. Flamingo Road, 702-638-9500) is open daily from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.