If DJT had had as many customers as it does people willing to write superlatives about it, it would still be in business. ELV was blown away by all the love and commentary generated by our simple post of last week that the fine dining concept was kaput after four months. But obviously, enough people received a taste of it to know why we were so disappointed.

For the last(?) words on the topic, I’ll leave you with this exchange between DJT’s (now departed) chef de cuisine David Varley and The World’s Greatest Restaurant Critic:*

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If you love strips of gelatinous, head-cheese-like substances and grayish-tan, pork liver-loaf-like lunch meat on your sandwiches - and let’s face it who doesn’t? - then you need to high tail it over to Nhu Lan Restaurant and Karaoke Bar on Spring Mountain Road.

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As much as ELV would like you to think that we are the ne plus ultra of food writers, possessing that essential je ne sais quois,* in moments of certain humility,** we’ve been known to recognize the superiority of other journalists.*** One such bloke is Edward Behr, a fellow who I imagine looks a lot like his name as he pecks away in upper Vermont churning out the Art of Eating four times a year for the food cognescenti**** in America.

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I heart New York. I really do. I travel there at least twice a year and used to live within an hour of Restaurant Row (just off of Times Square) on West 46th Street.

And nobody, outside of a native, loves New York restaurants more than I do. I can wax poetic about Big Apple eateries from Gray’s Papaya to Patsy’s Pizzeria; wd-50 to Le Bernadin; BLT Fish to Bar Boulud. But it’s become increasingly evident that the New York food scene, cutting edge though it may be, is also capable of shamelessly imitating what’s already happened in Vegas, and claiming it as its own.

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A poll was taken among the staff at ELV, and it was unanimous that OSTERIA DEL CIRCO in the Bellagio is our favorite Italian restaurant. CIRCO (pronounced: CHEER-ko) has been dazzling us for ten years, and its most recent chef, Vincenzo Scarmiglia is one our favorite Italian toques (along with Luciano Pelligrini and Paul Bartolotta) and one of the big reasons Circo has ruled the roost of Tuscan restaurants in Las Vegas since it opened.

The son of a Tuscan fisherman, Scarmiglia hails from Orbetello, Italy. His first restaurant job was as a line cook at the esteemed IL GAMBERO ROSSO in Porto Ercole. From there he worked his way through many prestigious Italian kitchens before landing at VALENTINO in the Venetian, which he helped Pelligrini open in 1999. From there it was a short hop to BARTOLOTTA as Assistant Chef, and then to the now defunct Terrazza in Caesars, before taking over the kitchen at Circo.

He makes this dish with fresh, egg tagliolini (a smaller version of tagliatelle), but told me dried works just as well (with just about any pasta dish except ravioli - that Scarmiglia insists must always be fresh). But there’s nothing quite like watching an Italian chef work three simple ingredients: eggs, semolina and all-purpose flour, into something so toothsome. Making pasta looks remarkably easy when he does it, but neophyte home cooks would be well advised to stick with store-bought.

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LOTUS OF SIAM needs another good review like ELV needs another ex-wife. But as a public service, and because there don’t seem to be any out there, we thought we’d feature some tasty snaps of the food, wine list and menu pages for your perusal.

Calling LOS a great Thai restaurant is like calling Tiger Woods (who is 1/4 Thai) a great golfer. It’s probably the most authentic, fiery, interesting and pure Thai restaurant in the country. And like Eldrick “Call Me Tiger” Woods, it is rarely off its game. Saipin Chutima is a self-taught chef who brings the pure, clean snap of heat, sour and sweet to her Northern and Central Thai dishes, and husband Bill has built up a German wine list that Robert Parker has called the best in the country.

It couldn’t be in a worse location, and some of the food is not for the timid, but if you keep your mind and palate open for adventure (and you’re prepared to drink a lot of water) you’ll have the Thai-m of your life.

Click here for my first review of Lotus of Siam and here for my Critique of Pure Riesling (with apologies to Immanuel Kant) on Nevada Public Radio.

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LOTUS OF SIAM

953 East Sahara Ave.

Las Vegas, NV 89104

702.735.3033

For those of you who don’t get up with the pigs and chickens, but who require your Friday dose of The Food Man, here is our Restaurant of the Week segment on the Channel 8 Morning News with Denise Valdez and Dave McCann, featuring DAL TORO RISTORANTE in the Palazzo.

Please ignore my verbal gaffe at calling Mitsuo Endo a Chinese chef on last week’s ROTW segment! Quelle horreur! I hereby publicly beg his forgiveness and promise to commit seppuku if I ever do it again.

It was the gourmet food store I had been waiting for, for twenty years. It remains, two years after opening, the only purveyor of quality fromage in the entire valley.

The first time I walked into this modest storefront, I started to weep silently to myself with joy. Because laid before me, in its medium sized refrigerated case, were wheels (not pre-cut packages) of Colston Bassett Stilton, cave-aged Taleggio, true Camembert, cloth-bound Vermont cheddar, and dozens of others of the world’s finest (and hard to find) cheeses.

Behind the counter that fateful day were Kristin Sande and Bob Howald - a couple who met at a cheese convention…I mean how cheesy is that! They were and are there every day to discuss levels of ripeness, serving suggestions and wine pairings from their selection of esoteric (and extremely well-priced) wines of the world.

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You heard it here first: Adam Sobel has officially departed Bradley Ogden. Todd Williams, formerly sous chef under Bryan Ogden, has taken over as top toque. Bryan Ogden continues to be associated with BO, but only in a capacity as consultant chef. Meaning: he flies in once a month to check on things….kinda like his dad.

Alfred Portale, the man behind the venerable Gotham Bar and Grill in New York, and the popularizer of vertical food (an idea whose time has toppled) has signed on with the Fontainbleau Hotel project to bring an outpost of GB&G to Vegas.

Larry Forgione is hard at work at the restaurant soon to be formerly known as Tableau in the Wynn. He is slowly revamping Mark LoRusso’s menu and making it an updated version of his venerable An American Place in St. Louis; a place that was formerly Forgione’s signature restaurant of the same name in Gotham - only without any vertical food. Got that?

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This Labor Day weekend, the Slow Food Movement, that began in Bra, Italy in 1986, will invade San Francisco for three days of ponderous preaching, locavore lectures, esoteric eating, and sustainable agriculture.

It couldn’t have picked a better place than that bastion of food snobbery and imperious attitudes about all things culinary. While the Slow Food Movement pretends to be about getting back to the land and savoring life, it’s pretty much been adopted by elite restaurateurs and purveyors of expensive vittles as a way to strut their stuff.

Our buddy, Steven “The Fat Guy” Shaw. founder of www.egullet.org, perfectly encapsulates the criticisms of this “movement” when he equates people who attend Slow Food events with “…the guys in college who go to protests just to meet girls. They couldn’t care less about the ideology.”

Guilty as charged.* What’s your point Steven? I mean if you get that many food snobs in one place, something tasty is bound to happen, right?

Read more about this future weekend of dilettante delights in this New York Times article.

As for me, I subscribed to the Slow Food Journal a few years ago, and decided the whole concept was just about trying to make rich white people feel good about themselves (sorta like Whole Foods, only with denser prose.)

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* On both counts. Attending anti-war protests in the early ’70’s was my standard MO to meet hot, hippie chicks…although my chinos, Topsiders, and polo shirts (not to mention the Nixon/Agnew button I proudly sported) usually made them less than enthusiastic about having casual sex with me.