Category: Critics

“Crush” – Dave Matthews Band: The Restaurant

Ah, the dulcet tones, the violin solo, the sweet as hell music video of some Utopian jazz club.  I was very excited to see the new joint in the MGM (taking over the Nob Hill spot) is named after my favorite song from one of my favorite bands, Dave Matthews Band (I call them DMB).  “Crush” is a totally great song with good music in it, but will this tapas/wine bar be worth the square footage?

It’s a venture of Michael and Jenna Morton (of La Cave, La Comida, and the Morton Steakhouse Group [but only via familiar relation, not business]), but an interesting one.  The space itself is unusually cozy.  I was thinking it would be all bistro seats and techno music.  Yes friends, I am glad to tell you there is a semi-casual restaurant that isn’t pumping out Teen Disney or geriatric-core rock, but rather simple and soft jazz piano covers.

The interior here is cool, but cool in that way where you make a normal space and put a ton of vintage laboratory equipment in it to make it “hip”.  Like all darkened tapas/wine bars, it has already started to attract every lady over 30, probably by way of some kind of pheromone or emitting an extremely low frequency.

The menu, in a very uncharacteristic move for such concepts, is actually NOT a giant unfocused mess!  Twenty-three items are tapas (seven of which are pizzas, just thin enough to skirt the entree category), eight are “full-size” dishes.  More on the suspicious quotations around that term later in the article.

Some items, like the hamachi or the kale salad, are a bit phoned-in or could have benefited from some simple tweaks or additions.  These sour notes only punctuate an otherwise very unique menu.  The executive chef, William DeMarco, has taken the next logical step from his La Cave style with pizzas that leave his own flat breads in the dust.  The Thai coconut curry shrimp pizza, with asparagus and smoked bacon, is complexly spiced and surprisingly creative.

Continue reading ““Crush” – Dave Matthews Band: The Restaurant”

ELV Note

Despite what the marketers and free magazines are telling you, this is a very slack time in the Las Vegas restaurant world.

Until the SLS Hotel opens later in the year, or someone decides to open something other than a taco stand or pizza restaurant downtown, there is precious little ground to cover that we haven’t written about extensively over the past six years — to say nothing of what we’ve done over the past nineteen.

Accordingly, we’ll be posting a weekly article (usually around mid-week) on this site about one of our recent meals, but we’ll leave the fawning, fatuous coverage of Bobby Flay’s upcoming burger joint, and other sundry non-events to those who are trying to sell advertising.

As our loyal readers know, the only thing ELV is selling is your guide to better taste.

No Foodie Christmas Should Be Without It

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Looking for a last minute X-mas gift for the foodie in your life?

Then we at ELV suggest you hightail it to Sur La Table or Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy of John Mariani’s updated edition of The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink.

It’s been fourteen years since Mariani first published this seminal work, and no one can doubt there’s been a sea change in the way the world looks at food. Mariani puts it all in perspective with expanded entries on everything from the DIY movement to “molecular cuisine” – which Mariani accurately traces back to an Italian nut job named Filippo Marinetti: a cookbook author, poet and political rabble rouser who advocated eating things like pineapple and sardines while inhaling spritzes of cologne and gazing upon sculpted food to the noise of airplane engines….in 1932! Take that Grant Achatz!

The book is chock full of gems like that, and you’ll learn more about food and food history (and mind-blowing trivia*) in an hour of gazing at its pages than you will in a year of reading some blowhard food blog.

Despite what many think, the pleasures of flipping through pages as interesting as this will never go out of style.

The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink should be an essential part of every foodie’s library. For food professionals it is mandatory; for the casual food or restaurant reader, it will make you smarter and increase your food IQ,  in all sorts of delicious ways.

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* Who knew that a freed slave named Emmanuel “Manna” Bernoon opened an oyster and ale house in Providence, Rhode Island in 1736….90 years before the Union Oyster House opened its doors in Boston?