The Maple Tree Countryside Kitchen is a breakfast and lunch eatery based on the sugarhouse restaurant concept often found in the Northeastern parts of the country.
Sugarhouse restaurants are generally found where maple trees are plentiful. Since maple trees aren't indigenous to the Las Vegas Valley, the recently opened Maple Tree is a rarity, pushing the sugarhouse concept in the desert.
Sugarhouses are the sites where sap is turned into syrup. So sugarhouse restaurants are in business to sell maple syrup, whether it's in a jug, in candies, on pancakes or ham or in your coffee. The same could be said of the Maple Tree, 6000 W. Spring Mountain Road, co-owner John Striegel said.
"We knew we were going to have 100 percent maple syrup and we were looking for different ways to expand on that idea," he said. "We were staying away from the egg theme, and we decided to go with the sugarhouse, New England idea, and we offer New England sugarhouse food on the menu."
The menu includes standard breakfast staples such as eggs and meat, omelets, waffles and pancakes. And then there are the not so ordinary dishes including the New England Benny, crab cakes served on English muffin halves topped with poached eggs and hollandaise sauce, and maple glazed baby back ribs and eggs. Lunch menu items include basic burgers, sandwiches, Yankee pot roast, herb-roasted chicken and crispy beer-battered fish and chips, which can be accompanied by clam chowder on Fridays.
"Everything here is made fresh and right," Striegel said. "We use real butter and real maple syrup and we make our own corned beef hash and waffle batter, everything. And our sausage is real sausage, a two-ounce real sausage. It's all good. It's like it finally tastes like what it should, like how you imagined it should taste."
Striegel said the restaurant only serves breakfast and lunch for two reasons -- so the owners, Striegel, his wife, Odette, and Odette's parents, Bob and Kathy Fisher, can have lives outside of work, and so they can focus on the two meals and make them the best they can.
The check average is between $6 and $6.50 without drinks, Striegel said. There are also daily specials between 7 and 9 a.m.
The restaurant does embrace the homey countryside feeling. The carpet, tables and wall decorations all invoke New England spirit. One of the more unique wall decorations is a maple tree wall mural. There is a frame built around it and a miniature sap spout and bucket sticking out from its trunk.
"This is my first venture into the world of restaurant ownership," Striegel, 45, said. "But I've been in the food and beverage business for 28 years. I know food."
At the Maple Tree you can find maple syrup as your standard topping on muffins, as a ham and rib glaze, in the maple baked beans, in coffee and even in the form of a maple frappe. And you can take it home in the form of syrup, candy, jams, preserves or as granulated sugar.
"We plan to get a gift basket operation going, too," Striegel, a native Las Vegan, said. "It's a new concept here, the sugarhouse, a New England country-backwoods feel. We're proud of it."
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