![]() ![]() I went to thirteen restaurants in Vegas, and only three chefs were present: Paul Bartolotta of Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare in the Wynn Guy Savoy, in town for the opening of his restaurant at Caesars Palace and Tom Colicchio, who runs Craftsteak in the MGM Grand. This is occurring in the name of our two great American ambitions, making money and having fun.įundamental to the essential breakdown of the fine-dining experience is the nonappearance of famous chefs. Charlie Palmer, a chef with two Vegas restaurants, is planning a condo-hotel, the next (but surely not final) step in creating a comprehensive Charlie Palmer lifestyle. The culprit here is branding, which is mindless replication. (Guy Savoy in Vegas is indeed intended to be a culinary replica, but Boulud’s somewhat casual place in the Wynn differs considerably from the New York flagship.) To average Americans-absolutely satisfied with adaptations and too indifferent or too blasé to care about experiencing originals-Vegas has become the real thing. Visitors to Vegas believe that dining at chef Guy Savoy’s restaurant in Caesars Palace is no different from dining at his restaurant in Paris, and that dining at Daniel Boulud Brasserie in Vegas is the same as dining at Daniel in New York. America invented food standardization in order to sell fifteen-cent hamburgers, and now the monster is loose. Here’s the first troubling message: They’re being taught that a restaurant can be great even if it has no past, no personality, and no uniqueness. Their schoolrooms are restaurants geared to conventions, expense accounts, and blowout vacations, establishments without history or traditions, restaurants that didn’t exist ten years ago. Were they spending their money in San Francisco or New York, they might learn something different, but they aren’t going to those cities to become accomplished diners, not anymore. Inexperienced customers are finding out that luxurious restaurants offer sensory overindulgence combined with gastronomic uniformity. Vegas is now the template where lessons on eating well are being imprinted on the collective consciousness of America. Vegas is up to 40 million wide-eyed visitors per year, and their only mandatory recreational activity, besides acting silly, is eating. They are also changing fine dining in America. Here’s a bulletin: These new restaurants are not just changing the city. Restaurants not only have to be wide, they also need to be high-forty-two feet in the case of Aureole. Most customers plow through their tasting menus in ninety minutes, but all you have to do is ask and the food will come even faster. It’s about seating a lot of people and quickly moving them along to the casinos and the showrooms. ![]() It’s high-end corporate cuisine for the masses. It’s the curse of the overly affluent: There are just so many places a person with unlimited money can shop.įine dining in Vegas is about the glittery and the new. Still, when every restaurant costs $6 million to $10 million to build, similarities exceed distinctions. They have no significant differences except for their decorations, which can be pretty astonishing, everything from Limoges china to swan-filled lagoons. ![]() The hotel restaurants-nobody cares about the other kinds-are all the same, cavernous and expensive. If you’ve been to Vegas in the past few years, you probably think it has become a great restaurant city. They had wonderful names: Sultan’s Table at the Dunes the Regency Room at the Sands Palace Court at Caesars Palace House of Lords at the Sahara and the Candlelight Room at the Flamingo. The gourmet rooms generally featured the gaudiest possible gastronomy plus first-growth Bordeaux from bad years. Almost everybody was comped, a practice that held firm until the ’90s. The gourmet rooms were for high rollers-they weren’t called whales yet. Now showroom seating is almost always theater-style, and you won’t get a free performance with dinner unless you’re in the mood for jousting at King Arthur’s Arena (Invading armies! Dancing maidens!). They also provided regal dining (usually on prime rib) before Steve and Eydie took the stage. ![]() The casino showrooms weren’t just for ogling career girls gone astray. Afterward, his wife loaned me her pink Pontiac convertible to drive around town, and he loaned me a showgirl for when I wasn’t driving around town. He wanted to give me a nice send-off before I left for Vietnam, so he had a couple of tables pushed together, and I ate turkey and stuffing with his family. The best was at Caesars Palace, where I had Thanksgiving dinner in 1968 with the hotel’s head of gambling, an old family friend. The coffee shops were community centers, hubs of political, social, and sometimes even family life. ![]()
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