Caribbean Cooker

Food wasn’t very good. Prices were high. Service was poor.
The floorplan of the place was bizarre to say the least. We gave it 6 months to close and were overjoyed to find out it only lasted 4. The sign on the door blamed the economy but that blame is misplaced.
Great location, hopefully someone that knows how to run a restaurant /​bar will give it a go.

Props to Mamie P. for introducing me to this place. Eric R. and I hosted Mamie P. and her hubby and they brought over key lime pie and coconut cream pie from Caribbean Cooker. I kind of forgot about this place until my mom recently stayed at the hotel next to the restaurant. I still never thought of it but then Eric R.‘s parents came to town this week and his mom mentioned an interest in eating paella.
I figured they probably have it, and not only did they have it, but they had like 6 house versions plus a make your own paella version. They also have tapas, salads, soups and stews, sandwiches, entrees, and on and on!!! We ordered a ton of food to try. Our waiter’s name was Chance (haha great Vegas name right?)
We got Valencia paella with no chorizo (it had mussels, clams, shrimp, scallops, chicken, crab — the works!), the ropa vieja paella with saffron rice, dates stuffed with goat cheese, jerk crusted ahi tuna with strawberry and mango sauce, a scallop-​shrimp spinach salad with mushrooms and an orange-​mustard dressing, lamb chops with goat cheese and greens, garlic-​parmesan waffle fries, banana pudding (didn’t try that), and coconut cream pie.
The food all was soooo good. I LOOOOOOVED the waffle fries! They kicked the ones at max brenner and the ones at shuck’s tavern in the tushy!!! Not double-​fried, not greasy, just flavorful and amazing!!! The paella had crispy rice on the bottom. The seafood was plentiful. I had iced tea. ALL OF THAT FOOD, including dessert, tapas, salad, 2 paellas, and tax was under $ 90 for FOUR people!!! Amazing!!! I have to come back for late night waffle fries!!! Restaurant open til 2 AM, bar 24 hours and serves food all night. Lost a star for slow service, Chance was awesome but stretched thin and the other 2 guys around were not doing anything or didn’t want to refill drinks when we asked. Overall, a delicious, spicy, ethnic dining experience!

This place is very good! I come to Henderson every once and a while as my grandmother moved there after the wall fell. She couldn’t resist those slot machines!
Anyway the last time I was there she took me to this place near her house and I was blown away. As a German I am a very big fan of pork, so I had the Cubano Sandwich, which has both pork and ham. I can’t say enough about it, it was really very good. Oma had the crab salat which was also very good (I had a few bites of it).
And, once again, being Germans, we had to try the beers at Ernies, the bar connected to the Cooker. Needless to say, that was excellent as well.

I loved the Caribbean feel and the staff was so friendly. The food was delicious and quite reasonable. I am excited to go back!

This place was unbelievable, the service was friendly and the food was flavorful, unique, and superbly executed. The atmosphere is friendly and relaxed. Excellent value for the price too. Definitely give it a try.
We chanced in at 1 in the morning, and were very pleasantly surprised. We ordered the avocado and roasted red pepper salad, which was served with crisp plantain chips and was delicious, and the cook sent us some complimentary mushroom dip (it had hints of thyme and wasabi, yum!) also served with plantains, very surprising and fresh flavor, we loved it.
My BF ordered the Paella Valenciana, which was bursting with flavor from the seafood juices and the rice was cooked perfectly (and it was the right type of rice for paella). This is one of the few times I’ve had paella out and it actually tasted like paella.
I had the island burger, which is made with ¾ beef and ¼ pork, marinated and cooked to perfection, and topped with ripe avocados, home-​made spicy ketchup, and onion straws. Words can not describe the richness and complexity of flavor. The well-​seasoned sweet potato fries that came with it were a nice touch as well. I’m not big on burgers, and under normal circumstances I would have regretted not ordering the paella, but these two very different dishes were so well executed that it was impossible to pick a favorite.
In a shameful display of gluttony, we couldn’t resist finishing off the meal with a their home-​made rum cake, which was much lighter and more delicate that I anticipated, sort of like a small bundt with crème anglaise and a hint of rum, delicious. We will have to come back to try their home-​made coconut cream pie.
According to our server, they hand-​make everything, including the mixers for their drinks, so we will have to make it a point to come back and give those a try as well.

The 5 stars might be inflated because of exceeded expectations as much as the quality of the food. We had a late dinner here at 1am on a Saturday night, and the place was nearly empty. We sat in the bar, and the waitress was incredibly friendly and did a good job of putting us at ease right from the start. We ordered the avocado appetizer, a burger, and the seafood paella with saffron rice. They also gave us complimentary dip and plantains. Everything was delicious, and cooked perfectly. The Paella might not have been terribly authentic — though maybe this is the Caribbean version, not the Spanish — it was still very good and satisfying.
We can’t wait to go back and try some of their other dishes, and to see how well this place holds up with a crowd.

I really like this place a lot. I just moved to Vegas from Florida, where I have been my whole life. I ate twice here.
You get free plantain chips with a mushroom based sauce (way better than chips and salsa places always give out).
Portions are ample; I’m always stuffed. Two people can easily eat for $ 25 including tip. There are sandwiches in the $ 10 range and entrees in the $ 15 range. They have tapas and soups that are also really good.
The set up is kinda weird, how it is attached to Ernie’s. I mistakenly walked into Ernie’s twice, once from the front, once from the porch. Once you grasp the layout, there is nothing odd or weird about this place, just really good food at a really reasonable price. Good service too.
And the music is authentic caribbean stuff.
Haven’t tried the bar yet.

I’d like to preface these remarks by pointing out that I have never been so inclined to write a review of a restaurant until now.
If it was possible to give this restaurant a tenth of a star, I still might have felt that too generous. Where to start?
I had no problem with service. We were seated right away in a decent patio area, and throughout the entire evening our waitress was pleasant. Of course, we appeared to be her only table on a Sunday night during Memorial Day weekend, which struck me as unusual. But now I understand why.
I started with an order of Conch fritters. I was NOT expecting good conch fritters. Having eaten them on many occasions from the fresh conch stands of Key West, I knew not to get my hopes up about desert conch. However, I did expect there to be conch in them. As far as I can tell, these are hush puppies. If there was any conch at all in there, it was undetectable. Sub par conch fritters in Vegas would have been excusable. Conch fritters minus conch is not.
For our main course, I chose swordfish, and my date chose red snapper. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of either. My fish was encrusted with enough Cajun seasoning to disguise the obviously frozen flavor to the fish, was too hot to the mouth, even for someone that enjoys spicy food, and was covered in mango and avocado. Even when I cleared that fruity goop off of the top of my fish, it was a chewy, lumpy piece of meat with no fish like texture or flavor of any description. And it was dry. It came served with what was advertised as rice and peas, but was actually rice and black beans, with a foul texture, and a flavor so stomach turning it defies explanation. Thank goodness I had a few carrots on my plate, or I may have starved to death at some point. I ate maybe 3 bites of the fish, a nibble of the foul rice, and a few carrots.
My date had mashed potatoes, which were not sweet potatoes but yet were colored bright orange. For a lady who never met a potato she didn’t like, she ate maybe a fork full of it and was repulsed. She described them as disgusting. She had a large portion of fish, but it was obviously poorly cooked, and she described it as flavorless. Neither of us ate more than a couple of bites from our entire entrée.
And at what cost for this smoking train wreck of a meal? $ 85. Sure, we had a couple of drinks. But who do these people think they are? This is sub par cafeteria food. It’s obvious why it’s empty. Bad food and insane prices. I almost fell of my chair when the check came. I eat at fantastic restaurants frequently with close-​to-​strip locations and pay half of this.
To summarize: Conch fritters with no conch, literally inedible main courses, on a night when the chef has all the time in the world to do it right, due to us being the only people in the restaurant. An abysmal performance, and the first time I have ever felt genuinely cheated after leaving a restaurant. I’m still strongly considering asking for my money back.
Save your money, your taste buds, and your faith in food. Don’t bother. Trust me.

After reading some reviews, I was not sure about going to this place, but I wanted to see for myself. We came to celebrate my husband’s birthday (five of us in our group). The server told us that 80% of the menu is spicy so if you don’t like spicy food, ask your server for alternate choices.
The server brought over plantains and mushroom dip-​very yummy. I really enjoyed it, although if you don’t like things too garlicky, you might not like it. We chose the coconut shrimp as our appetizer. It was good but not great. (Better at Bahama Breeze.) Two of us had the paella-​spanish valencia, which was really good. The portion was good, came in cute bowls, and had a good variety of seafood. (We would definitely get this dish again.) Two others had the burger (just a warning: there is guacamole on it). And one had the cubano sandwich-​my husband’s step-​mom liked it. I think that my father-​in-​law and our family friend, liked the burgers ok, but that it wasn’t anything spectacular.
If someone is celebrating a birthday, dessert is on the house– a plus. My husband chose the rum cake. It was delicious. On the way out, he saw someone’s cheesecake, and regreted not getting it (because it was huge).
The staff was very nice. The prices were reasonable. All in all, we had a nice dinner. Also, it’s nice that there is a restaurant like this, on this side of town.

I should have taken heed to what my fellow Unilocalers said.
The food here is mediocre and not worth the $. No windows, no music indoors, weird layout and I wish we would have went to Bahama Breeze instead. The server gave us this yummy hummus-​like dip with plaintain chips for free. That was seriously the highlight of my dinner.
Sangrias were $ 7.50 and I couldn’t even finish mine (had the white one) because the aftertaste was reminiscent of Dial soap.
I ordered the linguini without the chicken since I don’t eat meat. Maybe the chicken would have made a difference. Who knows? The cream sauce took over the entire dish and I couldn’t really savor my veggies.
Ultimately, you’re going to go regardless of what I say. I know I went despite being warned. And who knows? You may beg to differ with how I feel.
After waiting months for this place to open, the experience was rather anti-​climatic to say the least.

If I could give this place a half star I would. I watched this bar/​coffee house/​deli/​Caribbean cooker be built for 6 months with hopes that it would be a place I could get some good food and drink. Unfortunately after my first and only experience at the cooker I will never go back. In short the service may have been the worst i’ve ever had. The food was embaresing. There was a cook or chef at the bar; in a chef coat smoking… WTF?!? I hope thing will change for this establishment. It kills me to see so much money thrown away. P. S. I would be weary of the other comments they look like as sad ploy from the managment and staff to boost there rating.

Very odd layout, you walk in and it’s a weird backhall with a booths packed in to the side, bar area is thru yet another door… with no windows in the whole place… really weird, not to mention bad food.
Was expecting the shrimp appetizer to be cooked thoroughly, and for all three sides that were on the menu to come with it, but it only came with cocktail sauce. Garden salad was HUGE with a whole bag of greens thrown on the plate, any not much else. Service was spotty at the tables in the bar area. Overall, very weird vibe. Ernie’s next door is cool for drinks, they should of done the entire building in that concept instead.

A honeymoon at an all inclusive resort in Jamaica pretty much soured what little appreciation I might have had for Caribbean food. The resort flavored most dishes with a little sweet n sour sauce – even spaghetti sauce and California rolls. So I am surprised that I like the Caribbean Cooker. I ate here twice, once for take out (from the deli other Unilocalers had mentioned), and today for breakfast.
The big kicker here is not what they’re cookin’ but what they’re bakin’. Get the coconut custard pie. If you know someone else who makes better pie you must let me know. It’s $ 5.99 for a twofer piece. We paired the pie with a take-​out turkey sandwich with avocado. It’s served on a fairly thick wheat bread which looked scary at first but then shrunk down to a good edible size. My husband and I split the sandwich and it fed us both, easy.
We spent $ 20 on breakfast for 2 – french toast and a calypso omelet, and 2 coffees. Go ahead and keep the orders as they come, with the Caribe hash. I don’t know what the hash is made of, but the potatoish chunks are purple, orange, and delish! Both plates come with perfectly ripe fruit, not the type of fruit your return untouched but the type of fruit that makes you wish you had more of it.
Thanks to my fellow Unilocalers I found the front and side doors quickly. We were seated quickly and enjoyed excellent service. Even though this place kind of looks like a chain, it’s not. Why 4 stars and not 5? Caribbean’s just not my favorite flav.

Was told the wait would be a half hour, got seated over an hour later. Signature dish — coconut crusted snapper — was mediocre at best. Lots of angry people in the tiny waiting area, numerous people left while we waited. Fish was tough, overcooked, more like bar food than restaurant food, and definitely not worth $ 16. Jerk chicken was overcooked and lacked flavor. Their made-​on-​site fruit drinks were good, the best part of the meal, but the food was a real let-​down. Worst of all, even though it took an hour to seat us, most of the tables were empty! One angry customer kept asking how many empty tables they needed before they’d finally seat someone. The poor hostess said they told her not to seat people for some reason, and she was just following orders. Also, people kept asking why they had two bars — there’s a bar at the Cooker and Ernie’s bar next door. Everyone was confused. After our meal we discovered there’s a little deli hidden on the side of the building, near the back. I guess it’s a secret deli. Again, very, very confusing concept. Once the initial rush of curious locals dies down, I doubt this place will last a month without some serious re-​tooling. Las Vegas is a very competitive food city, and it’s no place for a mediocre restaurant that can’t get its act together.