Our word for today, dear readers, is simulacrum. I know, I know. It’s a fancy-pants term. But it’s useful — and instructive — when thinking about my latest dining destination: the Venetian Resort, on the Strip, amidst the twinkle and glare of the desert oasis known as Las Vegas.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a simulacrum is a “thing having the appearance but not the substance or proper qualities of something; a deceptive imitation or substitute; a pretence.” That nails the Venetian. But I’m not taking the easy route and trashing the place. I love the Venetian — in the same way I love spaghetti westerns, those late 1960s cowboy shoot-’em-ups filmed on Italian back lots.

In Venice, shopping is an obsession for the multitude of tourists. Murano glass galleries, their ceilings dripping with chandeliers, their shelves stocked with starburst vases, occupy every other corner. Ditto gimcrack stands selling all manner of scoop-neck T-shirts and multicolored carnival masks. And, if my memory serves, lots of shoe stores.

The Venetian offers a wink-and-nod recognition of a shared obsession with commerce. “Take home the treasures of Venice,” reads a poster in the Grand Canal Shoppes. Beneath a barrel-vaulted ceiling, frescoed with sun-dappled clouds, the enumeration of those riches — Jimmy Choo, Movado, Kenneth Cole — plays like a punch line.

All the differences are not diminutions. The music is better at the Venetian. Far better. When my wife and I were in the real Venice, Air Supply and Foreigner were in heavy rotation. At the luxe Hotel Danieli near San Zaccaria, we cocooned in butterfly-back club chairs and drank Prosecco while a bad cover band sang Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind.” At the Venetian, however, Vivaldi plays day and night. Step on the elevator, bound for your oversized, split-level suite in the Venezia Tower, and, no matter the season, you’ll hear “Four Seasons.”

But you want to know about the food.

The Venetian’s Italian restaurants leave me wanting. The Grill at Valentino, their high-concept palace, has all the curb appeal of a midwestern bank. And Valentino is the best of the lot. To eat well at the Venetian, you have to engage in a bit of intercontinental travel and fix your sights — and palate — on France.

Sitting at the scarred wooden table on a red leather stool, I twist my body so that the souvenir shop doesn’t even register on my periphery. Between bites of crisp-skinned chicken, after each pull from a glass of Burgundy, but before I finish my flute of garlic-perfumed fries, I convince myself that I’ve left the casino bling and blang behind. And if I crane my neck and squint, I can almost spy the grand swooping buttress of Notre Dame.

It’s all a conceit, of course. Going to restaurants relies upon conceits. Setting the scene is the most obvious slight of hand. But it’s not the only one. When a waiter emerges from the kitchen with a “little something for you, from the chef, to whet your appetite,” we all know that pike quenelles in cucumber foam will grace every table that night. But we love the benign trickery.

The most pleasant conceit on display at the Venetian is not offered by Pinot Brasserie. But it is offered by a restaurant. More beautiful than the frescoes above the registration desk, more graceful than the polished concrete Bacchus flanked by a brace of shopping mall fountains, is Bouchon.

Bouchon does not pretend to be in Lyon. But it does get the details right: a zinc bar stocked with various apéritifs and a cellar full of crisp white wines. Maroon velvet banquettes. Mosaic-tiled floors. Oysters in repose on a bed of crushed ice. Country-style pâté with watercress, cornichons, and mustard. Pan-roasted trout with almonds.

The look and feel in Vegas is much the same. There are, of course, concessions to the market. Do the bistros of Lyon pour espresso martinis? Of course they don’t. And neither does Bouchon in Yountville. But should you follow in my footsteps and book a Franco-Italian meal at the Venetian Bouchon, you will forgive this misstep, for Bouchon Las Vegas serves one of America’s best breakfasts.

That’s not an option at Bouchon in Yountville. More to the point, it was the missing meal during our time in the real Venice. I recall lots of rolls and lots of cappuccino in the real Venice. I recall oftentimes waiting until lunch to eat. But here, on the tenth floor of a Las Vegas hotel, opposite an interior courtyard accented by Roman-style bathing grottos, it is possible to sit down to a feast of scrambled eggs and boudin blanc, napped with a brown-butter sauce that tastes of hazelnut and pecan, of butter’s better self.

Or, should veal sausage not be your ideal top-of-the-morning feed, you can indulge in an over-the-top take on that ersatz American dish, French toast. As served at the Venetian Bouchon, it’s a custard, really, a layering of brioche, apples, and eggs, drizzled with maple syrup. And, like every dish to emerge from the kitchen, it owes little debt to Italy or France.

That’s the beauty of a breakfast at Bouchon. After a couple of bites, you quit wondering whether the Venetian’s oil paintings are air-brushed, whether the gondoliers are Italian-born. You forget about conceits. You just revel in the play of brown butter sauce and soft-scrambled eggs and accept that, sometimes, a simulacrum suits.