I’ve spent the past several days in Las Vegas taking advantage of the status matching shenanigans that I wrote about here. Everything has gone as smoothly as expected thus far. On our first night, we stopped at the Wynn Rewards desk and matched from Caesars Diamond to Wynn Platinum. Then, a day or two later, we headed to Fontainebleau to match Wynn Platinum to Fontainebleau Gold. That status comes with a complimentary $150 dining credit and a $150 spa credit. I’ll cover using the spa credit in a different post, but in this post I wanted to share our experience activating Gold benefits and using the Gold dining credit. We used our credit at Mother Wolf at Fontainebleau and the food was terrific — and the service even better.
Activating Gold benefits
The match at Fontainebleau was quite easy. Fontainebleau matches Wynn Platinum members to Gold status, which comes with a $150 dining credit and $150 spa credit. As a reminder, Wynn’s match (through which you can match Caesars Diamond to Wynn Platinum only runs through 5/31/24. Without that, you’ll need higher status from MGM or Caesars than those provided through status matching without gambling.
At the Fontainebleau Rewards desk, I presented my driver’s license and Wynn Platinum card and said that I was interested in their match. Within a couple of minutes and after setting my players club card PIN, I had my Gold card (and the same was true for the rest of my party). The desk agent told me to be sure to put my card into a slot machine to activate my Gold status, which (I think) is important. Note that another family member wasn’t given that instruction, but I’m glad we were. We forgot to do that the day we matched, but when we arrived for our dinner reservation a day or two later, we stopped at a slot machine on the way to the restaurant and we each put our card in a machine. As soon as we put the card in the machine, we received a message confirming our Gold status and associated spa & dining credits.
We went directly from the slot machine to the restaurant and used our dining credits at the end of the meal a couple of hours later.
Quick review of Fontainebleau dining credit at Mother Wolf Las Vegas
Based on reader feedback and my wife’s research, we decided on using our dining credits at Mother Wolf.
We went all out since dishes are served sort of family-style for everyone to share and we ordered more than half of the menu. It was delicious. I would absolutely recommend eating there with your dining credit, particularly if you have a larger group. To be honest, I was skeptical about Italian because there is so much mediocre Italian food in the world. This was not that — it was excellent.
I should note that in discussing the use of the dining credit, my sister-in-law pointed out that maybe Mother Wolf would be less desirable if you’re dining as just a single couple because dishes are served sort of family style — portions weren’t huge, so we debated a bit how you might order if you were only two people with a single $150 dining credit. I don’t know the exact answer to that, but it’s a challenge I recommend taking up nonetheless. Part of the fun for us was certainly that we had a party of 6 adults and 2 kids (and four dining credits to use), so we ordered a lot — but I’d probably go back with just my wife for some of our favorites.
Unfortunately, none of us managed to take a picture of the menu with prices. Here’s the online version, sans prices.
Crowd favorites included the Rigatoni Alla Vaccinara, he Rigatoni Alla Carbonara, and all three of the “Secondi” dishes we ordered — the Tonno Alla Puttanesca, Saltimbocca di Vitello, and the Tagliata Di Manzo. If I were pressed to pick one of them, I guess I’d take the veal, but I’m glad I got to try all three because they were all quite good. I personally also loved the Linguine Al Limone, though my wife didn’t really care for it. The only miss for multiple people was the Tonnarelli Cacio e Pepe. We all agreed that we’ve had better Cacio e Pepe pasta before. But I’m leaving out plenty of other dishes here that we enjoyed. We didn’t order anything from Pe La Tavola and we only ordered 2 pizzas (margherita for my kids, which was excellent, and funghi for our friend, who is a mushroom forager type (which is to say that he is far more appreciative of a good fungus than I am) and he seemed quite impressed with the quality (and as I was typing this post, he messaged to tell me that he was eating the leftovers and he hadn’t realized how many different types of mushrooms were on it — including morels). We had a lot of the other items on the menu and nobody left hungry. In fact, I’m writing this post 21 hours after dinner started and I haven’t yet eaten another meal (though I certainly am getting hungry again at this point).
Cocktails were also reportedly quite good (I just had wine). My wife had some sort of lavender tequila drink that she loved. Overall, it was well worth a use of your Gold dining credit.
Using multiple Gold dining credits was no problem
My wife and I both did the match, as did her sister. We also had another friend in town with a dining credit. We ended up using all four $150 dining credits on a single check for 8 people. Our friends also had a room at the hotel and had an associated dining credit. It was no problem for us to use our four $150 dining credits for $600 off the bill, charge the right amount to his room to use his dining credit, and then put the remainder on a credit card (just remember that you’ll need to figure the original prices for the gratuity).
Using all four credits at the same time was super simple. Before placing our order, I explained to Jason, our server, that a few of us had Gold status and were looking to use our Diamond credits and he said it would be no problem to run all of those with the check at the end, and it wasn’t.
Speaking of our server, service at Mother Wolf was impressively good. My wife and I have dined at some top Michelin-starred restaurants like The French Laundry in Napa Valley, Alinea in Chicago, and Eleven Madison Park in New York. Service at Mother Wolf was as on that level of professionalism. We had a large party with a lot of food and drinks to serve and they made it seem effortless and noticed when we needed something almost before we did. The flow of service also seemed very natural. I think we all had high hopes going in and still managed to walk out impressed with both the food and service.
The one fail: It is impossible to call the restaurant
While I’ve heaped some praise on Mother Wolf above, we had one major frustration, and it was pretty annoying.
My wife had originally made a reservation for six of us. When we found out that our friends were in town and interested in joining, she tried to amend the reservation online but couldn’t. When we matched, she inquired with the Rewards desk to ask about amending the reservation and they told her to call the phone number and mention that she was calling about VIP dining reservations and they should be able to take care of it.
She called shortly thereafter (around noon the day before our 5pm reservation) and the phone rang through to the concierge at Fontainebleau. She explained what she wanted to do and they recommended that she call back during restaurant hours. She then called during restaurant hours the day before our reservation, but the phone number for Mother Wolf does not ring through to the restaurant during restaurant hours either but rather always goes to the concierge at Fontainebleau.
That wouldn’t be the end of the world except for the fact that the concierge couldn’t reach anyone at the restaurant, either. My wife spent about 40 minutes on hold with them trying to reach someone at the restaurant and eventually she was told that we were all set for 8 people and at a new time (we wanted to push the reservation from 5pm to 5:30pm if possible).
Then, on the morning of the day we were due to dine, she received a text message confirming her reservation for 6 people at the original time. She called and explained the above and the concierge asked who she had spoken with. She didn’t know who had answered the phone, nor did she think to note their name when they told her the reservation was all set. The concierge team said that they had no access to the restaurant reservations system in their own hotel and that all they could do was email the restaurant manager. They said to expect a call back.
About 20 minutes to Mother Wolf’s opening time of 5pm, the concierge team called back and said that they hadn’t heard anything back from the restaurant. He said that he could see that management had seen his message, but they hadn’t responded and he explained that there was nothing more he could do since even if he tried to call the restaurant it would just ring back to the concierge desk.
At that point, we were all on our way into the hotel, so we just showed up when the restaurant opened at 5pm. They again asked for the name of the person with whom she spoke, which was mildly annoying since it didn’t really matter who told her it was confirmed at that point.
To their credit, they told us to wait for a few minutes while they sorted it out and they did indeed get us a table for eight people. The resolution worked, but the frustration in trying to get in touch with someone at the restaurant was memorable.
I should add that if this were the only hiccup in calling Fontainebleau, it might have only been an afterthought. However, my wife needed to inquire about her spa appointment the day before and she similarly had surprising difficulty. She spent so long on hold the first two times that she called that they told her that they could email the spa on her behalf or she should just call back later because nobody at the spa was picking up (during the middle of the day!). Then when she got through to someone, she got conflicting information on two different calls.
In all, between trying to amend our dining reservation and her spa reservation, she probably spent 2+ hours on the phone and couldn’t get through to anyone at the restaurant, nor at the spa a couple of times that she called. That’s just not the experience one would expect at resort trying to position itself at this level.
Bottom line
Overall, we really enjoyed Mother Wolf at Fontainebleau. Of course we enjoyed the fact that we were able to go all out on ordering a large meal thanks to our many dining credits from the status matching. It was as easy as one would hope to match, activate benefits, and use them. And food and service within the restaurant were excellent. We would go back.
I’m not sold on Fontainebleau itself. My wife reports that the spa was very good (more on that to come), but the difficulty in calling to speak with someone at the spa and restaurant were not reflective of the experience within the restaurant. In fairness, maybe that’s the case at other Vegas restaurants — I’ve not had to amend a dining reservation elsewhere in a long time. However, calling the spa at both Wynn and Encore was far easier by comparison.
Still, I’d go back to Mother Wolf even without the credit — I’ll just be sure to get a firm headcount before I make my reservation.
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