Category: Chefs

EL SOMBRERO Has A New Sign

El Sombrero on Main Street (circa 1950) has a bright new sign painted on its exterior wall. This would hardly be news but for the fact that The Big Hat is Las Vegas’s oldest restaurant. It still has the same cheap prices though (pegged to 1980 these days instead of the We Like Ike era), plus some of the best salsas, chile colorado, chile verde, menudo, huevos con chorizo, service, sopapillas and smiling, satisfied customers in town.

And we’ve never noticed after eating here maybe a hundred times over the years, but apparently Chef Jose Aragon (a Vietnam vet who took over the restaurant in 1970) also used to be a bull fighter…or perhaps he just likes groovy old Spanish posters.

Larry Forgione Makes Vegas An American Place

He calls himself one of the Dirty Dozen — along with Jimmy Schmidt, Jeremiah Tower, Jonathan Waxman, Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Paul Prudhomme, Mark Miller, Bradley Ogden, Charley Trotter, Michel Richard, and last but not least Jean-Louis Palladin — chefs who forever changed America’s eating habits. In no small way, every time you pick up some fresh ginger root or raddichio at the supermarket, you owe a quiet ‘thank you’ to this group.

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BORDER GRILL

It may seem incongruous to some, but it’s pretty much a given that the two best Mexican restaurants In America are Topolobampo in Chicago (founded by chef/owner Rick Bayless — a guy from Oklahoma) and the Border Grill in Santa Monica (owned by a couple of gringo-white, California gals named Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken). Why more chefs/restaurateurs don’t try to duplicate the passion for authenticity found in these two places is a puzzlement to ELV, but we’re just glad someone in America has brought faithful renditions of this marvelous cuisine north of the border.

Added non-food-related bonus: Thanks to a groovy re-design by assemblageStudio, you can now enjoy all this organic, true-to-its-roots food amongst rammed earth subsoil paneling (whatever the hell that is.) ELV is no arch-i-teck, but assemblageStudio’s Eric Strain (an Official Friend of ELV) is, and if he tells us this textured decor method (?) dates to the days of the Anasazi, we believe him and assume this must be a good thing.

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