Category: Chefs

HONEY SALT v. POPPY DEN – a Morton’s Fork?

There is no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either. – Robert Graves

[imagebrowser id=1826]

People keep asking me the same question.

They say “John?”

I say, “What?”

They say, “John, I’m going out tonight in Summerlin; should I go to Poppy Den or Honey Salt?”

To which I say: “Both are worthy of your hard earned dinero. But it’s a Morton’s fork, if you will, as both  impress and depress the hell out of me.”

Perhaps I should explain.

Continue reading “HONEY SALT v. POPPY DEN – a Morton’s Fork?”

It Was 20 Years Ago Today….Wolfgang Puck Taught Gourmets to Play

[imagebrowser id=1824]

ELV note: Spago Las Vegas turns 20 tomorrow.* In celebration of our most iconic restaurant (and the one that literally started the gourmet stampede to our humble burg), I thought not onre but TWO articles are in order. To read our paean to this auspicious event in this format, continue below, or pick up this month’s issue of VEGAS magazine — where it’s free and accompanied by lots of pretty pictures….including one of Jack Nicholson! And since our lamestream media has been typically negligent in commemorating this extraordinary event, we at ELV thought we’d publish an article from 6 years ago noting how seminal and sensational this restaurant has been for so many years.  To read it, continue after the jump.

THE RESTAURANT THAT STARTED IT ALL

“I never knew where to eat when I came here to watch the fights,” is how Wolfgang Puck describes why he decided to open a branch of Spago in Caesars Forum Shops, and thus boldly go where no great chef had gone before. The year was 1992. Puck had spent the previous dozen years taking California by storm and, in the process, redefining America’s notion of what a great restaurant could be. Still, the move was a bold one.  The success of the brand new mall was considered a long shot, and many a naysayer – including Puck himself – thought Las Vegas hardly ready to embrace his world-class, cutting-edge cooking, even in a restaurant as casual as his. “It was all steakhouses and “Continental” restaurants and it wasn’t that good,” is how he remembers our dining scene twenty years ago. “People would tell me how the casinos give away all these comp meals and how it wouldn’t work, but (Forum Shops developer) Sheldon Gordon told me, ‘Just you wait, thousands of people will come.’” Gordon may have been a prophet, but neither he nor Puck had the slightest inkling of the seismic shift they were about to cause. Because within two months of its opening, the rumblings of Spago Las Vegas’ success shook the gastronomic ground in the High Mojave Desert, and the whole world felt the shudder.

Spago Las Vegas officially opened on December 11, 1992, but at first, things were far from earth shaking. The first three weeks were very depressing,” Puck recalls. “The Review-Journal wrote a nice article (about our opening), and I thought we’d be turning people away, but that night only sixty people showed up.” Little did he know that the cavalry was about to show up in the guise of a rodeo. National Finals Rodeo cowboys to be precise, who jumped straight from their bucking broncs to the one restaurant in town with a national reputation. As grateful as he was to see all of those ten gallon hats, Puck quickly discovered that Las Vegas still had a ways to go in appreciating first class restaurants. He still chuckles remembering: “When they saw the open kitchen, they all thought it was a buffet and lined up and started ordering burgers and ribs.”

Within two months, everyone started breathing easier. By the end of 1993, locals had adopted it as the place to see and be scene, and A-list Hollywood celebrities (like Puck friend and fellow fight fan Jack Nicholson) started treating it as their home away from home. One Spago fan who didn’t have far to travel was Steve Wynn. “He used to come in all the time,” says Puck with a smile, “because apparently he didn’t have any place to eat (at the Mirage).”

What Wynn couldn’t get enough of was Puck’s (at the time) groundbreaking Cal-Ital-French cooking – that was as creative as it was toothsome. Twenty years on, the food is better than ever, and still true to Wolfgang’s vision. These days, top toque Eric Klein keeps the flame burning (and the standards as high) as any high volume gastronomic restaurant on earth. (On a busy weekend, Spago Las Vegas can serve 900 customers in a day.) Besides turning out the signature smoked salmon pizza and an array of seasonal specialties, Klein will feature an entire week of Spago’s original menu from twenty years ago (at 1992 prices!), including a glistening roast Cantonese duck, “Chinois Style” Colorado lamb chops, and a superior wild mushroom risotto. Pastry chef  Crystal Whitford joins the fun with a gorgeous Kaiserschmarm – sort of a light-as-air soufflé pancake — and a melting chocolate cake that was de rigueur on dessert menus way back when.

Puck and Spago literally changed the way all of us think about restaurants. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a non-traditional pizza or wondered why proteins are no longer smothered in sauces owes him a debt of gratitude. Every famous Las Vegas restaurant does as well. But for this gregarious Austrian, our hotels would never have seen that there’s gold in them thar gourmet hills – leading them to jump on the celebrity chef bandwagon that Vegas culture practically invented. Just ask Steve Wynn.

Continue reading “It Was 20 Years Ago Today….Wolfgang Puck Taught Gourmets to Play”

Breaking: ELV Continues to Make TV. Blogging Must Wait.

[imagebrowser id=1822]

Good morning food fans!

It’s been awhile hasn’t it. Yes, I know. Many of you have wondered (muttered) when yours truly will get back to blogging; the truth is: no time in the immediate future.

It seems our production schedule: Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, LA, Seattle, San Diego, New Orleans, more trips to LA and then to parts unknown, leaves little time for exploring the Las Vegas food scene.

Truth be told, there isn’t much to explore these days. No offense intended to Meat & Three, View Wine Bar & Kitchen and Honey & Salt, but cutting edge they ain’t. Two of the three appear to be attempts to establish a template for future franchises…so excited we aren’t.

Regardless, producing a television travel show is a ton of fun (especially when you get to jet around the country on the Travel Channel’s dime), but also real work. As in twelve hour shooting days, having to be “on” on cue, and being a prisoner to the shooting schedule.

The whole enterprise has given us a new appreciation for the hard work that goes into any reality or travel show. The crew works non-stop (their days routinely run to 14-16 hours long), the glamour is non-existent, and exhaustion is the rule by sunset — when usually there’s  still another few hours of work to do. The closest thing I can relate it to in my experience is being in a jury trial (as a lawyer). There’s no heavy lifting involved, but your brain is worn out by the end of the day, and all you can do is grab whatever sleep your furtive, whirring mind will allow before the whole process starts over again the next morning.

Believe me, once you’ve done even one show, you have a brand new, begrudging respeck for everyone from Andrew Zimmern to Honey Boo Boo to Hillbilly Handfishin’.

Before we leave you with a wonderful quote from a fabulous book given to us by Metro Pizza’s John Arena, a few notes are in order.

Kudo’s to Max Jacobson for the richly deserved beat down he delivered to Javier’s. Piling on? We don’t think so. As Slapsie Maxie says in his review: “What were they thinking?” Any overblown testament to Mexican mediocrity like Javier’s deserves all the opprobrium it gets, and it’s very existence makes us question the good taste of the heretofore admired F&B team at Aria. All that being said, it will probably make a ton of money (and that’s all these casinos really care about) because, despite the best efforts of Mary Sue Milliken, Susan Feniger and Rick Bayless, Americans love their shitty Mexican food.

We’re not allowed to discuss the contents of what we are filming for our (yet to be named) Travel Channel show, but we can tell you that if you’re an oyster lover, the Pacific Northwest is in a class by itself. Only in Brittany, France have we had shellfish that tasted as sweet and briny as what you get in the average restaurant here, and if you’re planning a trip to Seattle anytime soon, a stop at Taylor Shellfish Farms

near the Melrose Market, is de rigueur. The picture at the top of the page is of an Olympia taken from one of their oysters tanks — and it packs as much saline, metallic punch into a small pouch of pure protein as anything we’ve ever eaten. Olympias are one of the last remaining native shellfish to the Northwest, and a taste of one is as close to a true Belon as you’ll ever get without a trip across the pond.

Speaking of the miniscule-yet-mighty Olympia, here is a fun and fascinating rumination on these most remarkable bivalves….done by Linda Miller Nicholson on her Salty Seattle blog.

We’ll leave you now with an extended passage from John Dickie’s Delizia! – The Epic History of Italians and Their Food (Free Press 2008).

It is a book that anyone serious about food, Italian food or food writing should read (preferably with a nice glass of Barbaresco at their side):

To the Italian palate, the American way of eating is a cornucopia of horrors. The gastronomic culture clash begins over breakfast. In the morning, the Italians gently coax their metabolism into activity over coffee and a delicate pastry. The very notion of frying anything so early in the day is enough to make their stomachs turn. So the classic American breakfast is an outrage; among its most nauseating features are sausage patties and those mattresslike omelets into which the entire contents of a refrigerator have been emptied. Grits defy belief. And anyone in Italy who tried serving a steak before the early afternoon would be disowned by their family.

Such crimes are compounded by another national pathology: the compulsive need to have everything on the same plate. Bacon with hash browns. And pancakes with maple syrup and cherry topping. And applesauce. And eggs. And a salad garnish. Why not — it might occur to an Italian to ask — serve it all in a bucket and pour some of your edifying cereal in milk over the top, too?

A people like the Italians, brought up to savor the way antipasto, primo, secondo, contorno, and dolce make for an evolving pattern of distinct tastes and textures, experience shock and pity when confronted with brunch (Editors note: ELV hates brunch). The Americans can only have invented it to allow their lust for mutually contaminating tastes to descend into savagery.

FYI: The whole point behind ELV’s/John Curtas’ ascent into the world of reality television is to forestall/inhibit/discourage/dissuade/deter the American public’s relentless descent into savagery.

We’ll see you on the air in April….if not before.