ELV Readers: Almost on cue, this e-mail popped up in our mailbox this morning (11.17.08). It perfectly illustrates the phenomenon we commented on last week (and offers some tasty bargains at the MGM — if you, as a local, are willing to go there).
If you haven’t heard or seen for yourself, the restaurants of Las Vegas are hurtin’ critters. Click here to hear ELV expound upon this unfortunate fact in the indelible intonations for which he is known, or continue reading if that’s how you prefer to educate yourself on this weighty matter:
Belt-Tightening Time
Louis Osteen threw in the towel for good two weeks ago, Andre’s downtown is history as of New Year’s Day, and Joseph Keller’s Bistro Zinc quietly shuttered last month.
Expect more of the same in the coming months (including some high profile closings in The Palazzo) as the boom-boom restaurant years die a slow and noisy death.
Other signs abound that our restaurant industry is in crisis…for example:
Check out menus in all of the big hotels. If you’re a student of these things, you’ll notice prices have been quietly cut between five and ten percent across the board. That overpriced steak for two that started out at $165 when Carnevino first opened, was first reduced to a buck forty-five, and now can be had for a hundred and thirty-five samolians. Shibuya in the MGM (and dozens of others of eateries in all the hotels) now has an early bird special menu for well under a hundred dollars a person, when two years ago, you couldn’t get out of there for less than three-hundy a couple.
Whether this is a correction or a permanent re-alignment is hard to say. I’ve been carping about our tourist-gouging, outrageous pricing for years – but as long as those conventioneers kept comin’, and corporate America kept paying for them, the forty-five dollar entrée was a beautiful thing for the bottom line. Now that communal belt-tightening is upon us, prices, staffs, and portion sizes will all be cut if the existing stores are to survive….
Some other predictions:
> Splashy, new restaurants with name brand chefs are deader than Julius Caesar….investment banking, and my last diet. The expense of opening multi-million dollar temples to the Food Network Gods can no longer be justified, and unless it’s a sandwich shop, a burger joint or a pizzeria, don’t expect any new openings for a couple of years. Also look forward to:
> Wine prices are receding. Again, restaurants won’t be publicizing it, for fear of a consumer backlash, as in: “You mean that glass you were getting $18 bucks for last year is now $15? So why were you ripping me off then?” — but restaurants from top to bottom are overstocked with overpriced product, have no appetite or budget to buy anything new, and need to move inventory. So rejoice wine drinkers and raise a glass.
>As mentioned: expect smaller plates, smaller portions, and lots more grazing menus.
> Along those same lines, expect chefs to get much more creative with vegetables, grains and legumes.
> Also, you’ll be hearing about winery and restaurant closings across the nation in the months to come. It may not be as bad as the French Revolution, but there’s going to be a lot of unemployed cooks wandering the streets soon.
> And finally, maybe, just maybe, this recession will kill the celebrity chef phenomenon once and for all….so who says something good won’t come of this?