Sensory 3
The cacophony on the floor of Presque Isle Downs recedes when the door to the casino’s newest restaurant softly closes behind us.
But the senses are assaulted here as well: Savory smells and softly pulsing music and lights instantly transport us from the noisy, crowded casino to an upscale, trendy restaurant and lounge.
Sensory 3 opened in March at Presque Isle Downs in Erie, Pa. It replaced La Bonne Vie, which had been known as the best steakhouse in the region since the casino opened four years ago. But while the restaurant had a great reputation, it failed to attract people outside of conventional dinner hours.
“After 9 p.m., this would be a dead spot in the casino,” says Michael Davis, the head sous chef at Sensory 3. “The idea was that this would be both the hot dinner spot and transform into an upscale lounge at a certain hour.”
What that means is that as the night goes on, the music and the lights pump up, and the menu changes from an upscale entrée menu to an upscale tapas menu, affordably priced from $8 to $22. The tapas menu is available after 9 p.m.
As a nod to La Bonne Vie’s success, many of the restaurant’s core menu items remain featured on Sensory 3’s menu, including incredible cuts of steak.
We arrive for dinner and are seated at a sleek black leather booth. The 10 flat-screen televisions mounted on the walls flash rotating images of a wide-ranging subject matter — from close-ups of green olives to shots of nuclear reactors, giving us plenty to look at and talk about. On the ceiling, pulsing purple lights bloom and move in time to the club music.
This is not, if you haven’t figured it out yet, a place to bring kids. In fact, you can’t. You have to be over 21 to get in the casino, and the only way into the restaurant is through the slots and table action. So while children can watch the horse races out back and visit the more casual restaurant upstairs, they are not allowed at Sensory 3.
We start our meal with a toast to our little one at home, but quickly move on to discuss the menu and decide to start with a bento box appetizer. Our waiter instructs us to choose three small appetizers from 12 different offerings, while the chef gets the choice on how to fill the last spot in the box.
We go for the seared tenderloin, blackened ahi tuna and Thai chili lump crab cake. The chef adds jumbo shrimp cocktail to our order, which comes prettily arranged in a square dish, along with a variety of sauces.
Each, without exception, is delicious — the tenderloin melts in our mouths, the tuna is perfectly cooked and the crab cake is flaky and thick.
We also make short order of the bread and biscuits that come to our table, along with the roasted-red-pepper-and-basil butter and honey-and-cinnamon mascarpone it’s served with.
The interesting menu makes it hard to choose our entrées, so we opt to split two. Mark settles on a 12-ounce filet mignon, with a buttermilk bleu cheese crust and sides of green beans and baby potatoes.
I choose the lobster macaroni and cheese — generous portions of grilled cold-water lobster tail and sauteed gnocchi in a five-cheese Mornay sauce topped with shaved winter truffles.
It is as rich as it sounds, and I don’t even manage to finish my half before I give up and ask for a box. Mark’s steak, which he orders medium-rare, is perfectly cooked and incredibly tender. His steamed green beans offer a yummy crunch, while his tiny potatoes are crisp on the outside and soft on the inside.
Delicious.
We are here celebrating a special occasion, which the waiter picks up on after overhearing some of our conversation. As congratulation, he offers us a free dessert, and we choose the vanilla bean crème brûlée — a lovely light end to our decadent meal.
We reemerge into the happy noise of the casino and make our way past the slot machines to the table games. We end up at a craps table and feel lucky enough after our fabulous dinner to take a chance. Or two. And then three.
We definitely rolled the dice right on this night.