Viral Doesn’t Always Mean Good – Chamon Las Vegas Disappoints

Chamon is a Japanese restaurant located on the amazing Spring Mountain Road in Las Vegas. The road is basically the “Chinatown” of Vegas and if you haven’t been, you are missing out. The street is packed with tons of Asian dining options. Chamon specializes in two main types of Japanese food – onigiri and tempura rice bowls.

The place is small and super popular. I counted 13 seats for dine in. They open at noon, and I went around 11:20AM, and there were already 5 people ahead of me in the line. A few minutes later, the line behind us grew. Just before noon, they opened the doors. At the entrance was a beautiful selection of onigiris:

I chose two types – eel and spam/egg, and then sat down (they will ask if you just want onigiri to go or eat in; we told them both). The onigiri live up to the hype. Both were really delicious:

Here are the menus for the rice bowls:

I ordered the ikura, uni and snow crab negitoro bowl and the snow crab tempura bowl. Lets start with the negitoro. First, the miso soup it came with was not hot by the time it was served. Next, I don’t believe they were using real wasabi. For this price point and quality of ingredients, this is not good. The seafood itself was pretty good, but the rice could use some work. Overall, this was just ok.

Regarding the tempura bowl, I was not impressed with the sauce, rice and there was the same issue with the miso soup temp. Chamon claims to be the first place in Vegas to specialize in tempura bowls so hopefully, it will improve in the future with more competition. I’ve had some amazing rice bowls in Vancouver (from places originating in Japan) and Japan, and these are my benchmarks for this type of dish.

Overall, given the price point and the fact that you will likely have to wait or go early, I don’t think this place is worth it. I would not return or recommend. I would say that it is worth going if you want to just buy some onigiri and take it to go (I don’t know if you can skip the line if you are JUST doing this, if so then it would make sense to go; if not, then not worth it).