Las Vegas'
Next Course

Having rid itself of its one-time reputation for cheap shrimp cocktails, ubiquitous buffets and prime rib specials, Las Vegas has matured into a robust foodie destination. Among its world-class casinos, resorts and nightclubs today are enviable dining venues featuring myriad cuisines, kitchen personalities and price points, both on the Strip and off.

Nine current restaurants have earned coveted Michelin stars, including Joel Robuchon at MGM Grand, Guy Savoy at Caesars Palace and Julian Serrano’s Picasso at the Bellagio. Celebrity chefs such as Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse, Nobuyuki “Nobu” Matsuhisa, Bobby Flay and Gordon Ramsay draw ardent fans, social media attention and generally excellent reviews.  

Off the Strip, Saipin Chutima’s Lotus of Siam has long been recognized as one of the country’s top Thai restaurants. Other out-of-the-way gems in Chinatown (on Spring Mountain Road just west of the Strip) and the eclectic downtown and Arts District are perpetuating the city’s reputation for fine cuisine.

Because Las Vegas is such a young, transient city compared with other renowned culinary destinations such as New Orleans, Chicago and San Francisco, no single dish or cuisine stands out as a specialty.

And no one voice of authority proclaims any city as a food destination. But Las Vegas consistently appears on the latest lists of top foodie destinations, including Wallet-Hub (No. 6), TripAdvisor (No. 10) and 24/7 Wall St. (No. 7).

“We’re in the middle of the high Mojave Desert here,” said John Curtas, author of “Eating Las Vegas 2020: The 52 Essential Restaurants.” “You drive 200 miles in any direction, and all you see is sand. There’s no chicken farms or asparagus fields or fish jumping out of the ocean a few miles away. Everything is flown in here, so we’re a restaurant town rather than a foodie town.”

Las Vegas draws 42 million visitors annually, creating economic muscle for the burgeoning culinary scene. Gaming is still the city’s bread and butter, and most people are not coming specifically for the food. But they have to eat when they’re not on the casino floors, attending a UFC event or seeing Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars and Christina Aguilera in concert. 

If just 10% want to eat really well, Curtas said, “you have a perfect petri dish to grow great restaurants.” 

The growth of McCarran Airport’s international nonstop service has helped kitchens’ efforts to acquire the freshest ingredients daily.

Don Contursi, owner of Lip Smacking Foodie Tours, said, “Some people joke about having sushi in the desert, but there’s a sushi restaurant that just opened in Chinatown, and they have stuff flown in from Japan every day. It’s the highest-quality sushi that I’ve ever experienced.”

Local chefs have built relationships with global food purveyors, and well-connected grocers such as Brett Ottolenghi of Artisanal Foods supply high-quality ingredients such as Iberico hams, foie gras and truffles to kitchens across the valley.

Curtas, who has written eight editions of “Eating Las Vegas” since 2011, said, “What makes Vegas unique is the breadth of restaurants, which I don’t think many other cities can compete with. Try finding a Joel Robuchon or a Le Cirque-type restaurant in Los Angeles or Atlanta. You can’t. A lot of these big towns are twice or three times the size of Las Vegas, but they don’t have this super high-end dining. [Vegas does] it as well as anybody on Earth.

“I go to Europe all the time, and the Guy Savoy in Caesars Palace might be just a tiny tick below the quality you get in Paris, but it’s a very small difference that most people wouldn’t even discern,” Curtas said.

Stature has been cooking for a while

Historically, casinos only added restaurants to retain hungry gamblers, said Tony Lucas, a professor of casino management at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV). A period of one-upmanship followed.

“Everybody has a restaurant in their casino, so we want to have a better one,” Lucas said. “And then we started to get into this idea where we use restaurants to draw people into the property, which is very different.”

Back in the day, Lucas said, restaurants were considered ancillary benefits for gamblers. Casinos provided complimentary meals (comps) for their big players and for a long time were willing to lose money with these efforts. That notion changed in the ’90s, when Strip operators vowed to win everywhere — food and beverage, entertainment and retail — not just in the casino and hotel rooms.

Resorts began leasing spaces to external restaurant owners. “We say. ‘You pay X dollars or 10% of your sales, whichever is greater, every month,’” Lucas said, describing the casino owners’ mindset. “So we are guaranteed to make money in food and beverage. That took over, and that’s still going pretty strong on the Strip today.”

Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in the new Forum Shops at Caesars in 1992 was transformative. Puck deftly elevated Las Vegas dining, and Spago was the place to be seen for power lunches and more, its patio projecting into foot traffic under the faux blue skies of the posh retail destination.

Al Mancini, a longtime food critic for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, called Spago “the watershed moment” for Las Vegas dining. 

“There was a lot of trepidation,” he said. “It was something new, and people didn’t know what to make of it.” 

Mancini recalled hearing a story that people lined up at the open kitchen in the back of Spago as if it were a buffet line. Spago moved last year to another iconic location, overlooking the Fountains of Bellagio.

In 1995, Lagasse, then on the ascent on the Food Network, opened Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House at MGM Grand. Mark Miller and Charlie Trotter soon joined its lineup.

Those were just tasty appetizers, though: Steve Wynn opened the Bellagio in 1998, with several star chefs running kitchens of lavishly appointed restaurants. They included Jean-Georges Vongerichten (Prime), Sirio Maccioni (Le Cirque) and Michael Mina (Aqua).

In Curtas’ view, “that was really when the whole world started to pay attention to Vegas.”

Vongerichten brought to Vegas Kerry Simon, dubbed the “Rock ’n’ Roll Chef” by Rolling Stone, to run Prime, which opened at the Bellagio in 1998. Simon opened his own place at the Hard Rock Hotel in 2002, a lively restaurant that attracted celebrities; Esquire named it one of America’s Best New Restaurants. His presence at the Palms later enhanced that property’s hipster reputation.

Simon, who died in 2015, helped conceive downtown’s Carson Kitchen, which continues to be known for elevating comfort food to delicious new heights.

UNLV’s Lucas said restaurants don’t mean a lot to the large casino-resorts’ bottom lines, but guests might decide where to stay based in part on the selection of flavors, kitchen personalities and dining room experiences.

“If those restaurants contribute to the property decision, then they have a really important indirect effect on the economics of that business, because now they’re getting gaming revenue that they might not have otherwise gotten and hotel revenue that they might not have otherwise gotten,” Lucas said.

Foodies seeking value, however, look beyond the Strip. Menu prices reflect the costs of leases and the resort’s prestige, resulting in higher markups than diners would see in other parts of Las Vegas, Mancini said.

Strip restaurants also cater to what Lucas calls the “price-insensitivity of the corporate consumer,” conventiongoers who charge meals to their employers instead of paying out of their own pockets.

Outside the tourist corridor and accompanying high rents and pressure to cater to the masses, chef owner/operators who are passionate about their product can afford to be more innovative and nimble. Several tours by the company Lip Smacking highlight smaller restaurants off the beaten path. 

Lip Smacking’s Contursi said that foodies, particularly younger ones, are seeking local character, authenticity and a unique story to tell about their experience, either on Instagram or when they get back home.

Eric Gladstone, a longtime marketing executive, said that along with tours such as Contursi’s, apps like Google Maps, Uber and Lyft make it easier than ever for tourists to explore. They can find more affordable choices without worrying about directions, parking and getting back to their resort.

Gladstone’s company, the Feast of Friends, produces food festivals and represents highly regarded off-Strip operations, such as Lotus of Siam and Esther’s Kitchen, which has become the Arts District’s hot spot since it opened two years ago.

“These apps have demystified the idea of getting off the Strip, because [tourists] can look at how much the steakhouse in their casino is going to charge them for dinner,” Gladstone said. “And then they can look on their phone and find out that they can take a cab ride or a Lyft to Esther’s or to Sparrow + Wolf or Other Mama.”

Suggestions for ‘black-belt foodies’

Exemplifying what Vegas offers are restaurants to which Curtas directs clients he calls “black-belt foodies.” Among them:

• Vetri Cucina, atop the Palms since 2018, is an offshoot of Marc Vetri’s restaurant in Philadelphia, which Time Out called the best Italian restaurant in America in 2015. “It’s very upscale, creative Italian food,” Curtas said. “It’s the kind of Italian food that the gourmets in Milan are eating these days.”
• Yui Edomae Sushi, in an obscure location in Chinatown just off Spring Mountain Road, features traditional Japanese omotenashi service by Tokyo native Gen Mizoguchi. “It reminds you of sushi bars in Tokyo, where you have to go down alleyways.” Curtas said. “There’s no signage, and you just have to know it’s there. But it’s classic sushi, super-upscale sushi. They get all their fish from California, the Pacific Northwest or Japan. And it’s wonderful.”
• Esther’s Kitchen, an Arts District Italian trattoria featuring seasonal ingredients, is run by James Trees, a Culinary Institute of America-trained chef who has worked for Ramsay, Mina, Eric Ripert and Ray Garcia.
• For steak lovers, Bazaar Meat by Jose Andres in Sahara Las Vegas and Cut by Wolfgang Puck in the Palazzo are “as good as any steakhouse in the country,” Curtas said.
• Cipriani at the Wynn Las Vegas “brought northern Italian elegance [and fabulous pastas] back to the Strip,” he said.
• EDO Gastro Tapas & Wine off-Strip is a “hyperfocused, modern Spanish foodie favorite.”

What’s next

Combining food and a show is nothing new, but Vegas is reimagining the classic supper club experience of the 1950s. 

Rose Rabbit Lie at the Cosmopolitan opened in 2015 with reinvented American classic dishes and spirited entertainment. Mayfair Supper Club in the Bellagio opened last month with increasingly immersive performances throughout the evening. Delilah Supper Club, set to open this spring at the Wynn Las Vegas, promises a 1920s Hollywood theme.

Curtas said he has reservations about the trend. 

“It’s really easy to dismiss it because I’m a food writer, which means I’m a food critic, which means I’m a food snob, and I’m just about the restaurants and the quality of the cooking,” he said. “I don’t want to see a juggler beside my table while I’m trying to enjoy my steak Diane.”

Contursi said supper clubs are introducing younger diners to classic dishes such as chateaubriand, beef Wellington and baked Alaska. 

“There are going to be people who have seen this done before,” he said. “But guess what? The new generation didn’t have that experience. That was the experience then, and now it’s not the same. It’s done to a whole other 2020 level.”

Local observers of the Vegas culinary scene agree that emerging local chef talent is gaining loyalty, something attained only after decades at the stoves. 

Esther’s Kitchen’s Trees, a Las Vegas native who also opened Ada’s in the suburbs, “is an inspiration for local chefs looking to strike out on their own,” Curtas said. 

Another native, Josh Smith, executive chef of Bardot Brasserie at the Aria, is known for his attention to detail in serving French classics.

A self-taught Strip veteran, Natalie Young has developed a following through several locations and concepts, including American comfort food at Eat downtown and Old Soul in World Market Center. 

Jamie Tran (The Black Sheep), Nicole Brisson (Locale) and Gina Marinelli (La Strega) are among those resetting the paradigm for off-Strip women chefs, Curtas said.

“We’re developing local [chefs] who are brought up in Las Vegas and working on them becoming the big names,” Contursi said. “It’s very early on. I wouldn’t say we’re there, but there’s a lot of support in the community for local talent and getting them to that next level, rather than being behind the scenes. … Maybe it’s their turn, maybe it’s their moment. 

While Vegas cannot boast chicken farms or asparagus fields or fish jumping out of the ocean, it is cultivating chefs to complement the always glamorous, frequently indulgent Strip.

“Vegas as a foodie destination is maturing into not just this kind of Disneyland idea of here’s all the famous chefs you saw on TV,” Gladstone said. “It’s moving on from that to forging its own identity as a foodie destination, actually taking that idea seriously and creating its own chefs.”