EATING LAS VEGAS 2023 – The 52 Essential Restaurants

Image(Grumpy gastronome grades great and egregious grub)

Remember reading? When one had to digest actual words on a printed page (or screen) when researching restaurants? Nowadays, attention spans  are shorter than a housefly’s, and the written word is deader than Duncan Hines. 

Sad but true, and a reality it is time to face. So rather than crying in our Burgundy, we thought it better to go out in a blaze of glory….and by “blaze of glory” I mean a 7,300 word salad of salacious searching for serious sustenance to share with our fellow fressers.

As an aging boomer who doesn’t have the time, talent, or energy to concoct cheese-pull /butter-dunking videos for those infected with Tik Tok brain, I’ve persevered this year because I love the chefs and the restaurants, and because I wanted to take one last spin around my beat — territory I’ve covered since Bill Clinton was in his first term.

As always, the following represent what they have for twenty-eight years: my list of the most important and delicious restaurants in Las Vegas. The places that have left a mark; who do the finest cooking at the highest levels of their craft; and to which I would take a well-traveled epicurean, should one ever give me a month to feed them the best Las Vegas has to offer.

Most of them also represent my favorite places to eat, and since the older I get, the choosier I’ve become, the intersection of “the best”, favorites, and “essentials” has now merged from a Venn diagram into a single circle. Of course I do not confine my dining to only 52 restaurants, and for that reason, there is an “honorable mention” list of places where you’ll find me and The Food Gal® popping into throughout the year.

Agree or disagree, these are all the product of judgments based upon my repeated visits over years, even decades. And remember: everything comes with the #BeingJohnCurtas guarantee: All opinions valid or your money back!

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 00 Pie & PubMike Vakneen is a pizza savant and Chinatown is now his playground. The bar is too large (it dominates the narrow room), the chairs uncomfortable and the wine list woeful. But the wood-fired, spongy-soft/crusty-charred pies are nonpareil. And the apps alone are worth the price of admission.

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1228 MainIf Esther’s Kitchen ignited Main Street’s culinary revolution, 1228 Main legitimized it. Some have decried a celeb chef’s (Wolfgang Puck) corporation exploiting the organic, small-caliber, artisanal feel of the neighborhood, but at some point, the junk stores, muffler shops and tattoo parlors had to go, and what better replacement than a three-meal-a-day bakery/restaurant run by some of sharpest pros in the business.

Since Sébastien Polycarpe (second from left, above) was named Pastry Chef of the Year is this year’s Desert Companion Restaurant Awards, our staff thought you might enjoy the indelible prose (written by a master wordsmith) bestowing those accolades upon him:

Sébastien Polycarpe

PASTRY CHEF OF THE YEAR – SÉBASTIEN POLYCARPE

 It is the fate of the pastry chef to toil in obscurity while alchemizing carbohydrates into the things that most delight the human palate. Celebrity chefs may abound, but those laminating puff pastry or kneading dough in the wee hours largely go unnoticed by customers swooning over crispy baguettes, butter-rich croissants, and impeccably decorated fruit tarts. Sébastien Polycarpe is no stranger to both worlds – having worked below decks as executive pastry chef for Caesars Palace – as well as in the spotlight of such luminaries as Alain Ducasse and Guy Savoy. A native of southwest France, he spent ten years at Caesars before joining the Wolfgang Puck galaxy of pastry and savory superstars. He doesn’t think of himself as a revolutionary, but with the opening of 1228 Main earlier this year in downtown Las Vegas, he and his pastry team have transformed the Arts District into a mecca for lovers of all things buttered, caked and baked.

Having someone with Polycarpe’s resumė pushing out world-class pain au chocolat, cheese Danish, and cherry-walnut bread daily is one thing; having him and Puck Executive Chef Kamel Guechida (a former Pastry Chef of the Year) patrolling the ovens is like having your lemon-olive oil cake and eating it too. Between them, they’ve raised the pastry bar downtown, and there’s no going back. “We couldn’t have done something like this ten years ago,” he says, “but the local food scene has really changed for the best.” A decade ago, one couldn’t imagine a veteran of the world’s greatest French restaurants rolling out mille-feuille and spackling sumptuous cakes on Main Street, but there Polycarpe is every morning, plying his tradecraft in full view of appreciative, salivating customers, anonymous no more.

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8 oz Korean Steakhouse – Sometimes I think Chinatown is in danger of being overrun by conveyor belt sushi, cheap-ass pho parlors and ACYE Korean beef. 8 oz. bucks this trend and sets the standard with quality banchan and steaks worthy of any purveyor of prime. Unlike what some gwailos think: all Korean steakhouses are not created equal and 8 oz. is the exception that proves the rule.

Ada’s Food + WineThere are only three things that can get me into the depressing, soulless confines of Tivoli Village: Al Solito Posto, the wines of Kat Thomas and the cooking of Jackson Stamper. I also like the outdoor patio here, where (unlike its sister restaurant) I can drink and dine outside eyeshot of the godforsaken Echo & Rig, and its constant stream of fading MILFs, aging Boomers and desperate bachelorettes.

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Al Solito Posto – stands out in a crowded category as one of our best suburban Italians — challenged only by Osteria Fiorella for pasta supremacy. Also worth a bite: Milano, La Strega, D’Agostino’s, Aromi. We’re amazed Amalfi by Bobby FlayBalla and RPM still make a go of it amongst tough competition, but our meals there in the past year were quite satisfying, though not enough to make us scurry back.

Anima by Edo – The food, the wine, the service, the cocktails, the pasta, the tapas….there is nothing not to like about Anima except what a pain in the ass it is to get to (unless you live in the southwest part of the valley). Spanish food may have had its day in Vegas (both Pamplona and Jamon Jamon flamed out on west Sahara, despite paying almost nothing in rent), but both of Oscar Amador Edo’s restaurants (Anima and EDO -its smaller-bore/bigger sister) have kept the Iberian flame alive with some of the best cooking you’ll find, this side of Madrid.

Aroma Latin American Cocina  – Nueva Latina in Green Valley makes about as much sense as a salsa band at a Mormon social, but what Steve Kestler is doing here is remarkable — both for the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it location, and the array of flavors he packs into his menu. He’s kept the lights on for a couple of years now, and that alone is astonishing.

Azzura CucinaHenderson’s best Italian in a ship-snug setting, serving standards, but significantly stronger (in flavor and appearance) than anything Water Street has ever seen. This was Desert Companion’s Restaurant of the Year this year (in part for its bold move in gentrifying this moribund street), but breath is being held and fingers crossed until we see what lasting impact it might have.

Basilico Ristorante ItalianoItalian country cooking is an endlessly replicated genre, but a visit to Francisco Di Caudo’s grown-up dining room is an energizing reminder of how irresistible it can be when handled with focus and skill. Go for the slightly esoteric, perfectly made pastas, like dimpled foglie d’ulivo, perky malloreddus and slippery, thin-skinned plin dell’ alta langa, but don’t let it be at the expense of the olive oil-soaked focaccia, or the intensely flavored desserts and ice creams, like none other in town.

Bazaar Meat by José Andrés – I wish they’d change the menu at least a little bit, but BM still showcases some of the best beef in town, and suckling pig, and an Iberian-focused wine and cocktail program which is unbeatable. Spanish food may never supplant Italian in the hearts and stomachs of Americans, but Vegas can proudly say that it still has two of the best in our humble burg.

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Bouchon – After spending weeks in France, this was our first meal upon returning. Although the oysters were a disappointment (hard to beat Ostrea edulis straight from the Cancale Basin), our meal checked most of the Gallic boxes for refined cooking, and flavor extraction.  The room (going on 20 years old) has held up well and the service is always good-to-great.  Everything from the roast chicken to super-focused sauces to the superb moules marinere are straight from Thomas Keller’s Left Bank playbook. It’s also the only place in Vegas where you can routinely find boudin blanc (above) and sweetbreads on the menu. Unlike its competition (Mon Ami Gabi and Brasserie Bardot) they actually offer seasonal specials here, and you don’t have to fight for a table with the slack-jawed cargo shorts crowd.

Brezza – They don’t call it an Italian steakhouse but that’s exactly what it is. Non-beef eaters will find plenty to like, too, including gutsy pastas, inventive apps, and a dream of an Italian wine list. All overseen by award-winning chef Nicole Brisson at prices which aren’t the hose job you’ll find at Carbone.

B.S. Taqueria at The Sundry- The B. S. stands for “Broken Spanish” and it’s the best Mexican food we had this year. With Viva! by Ray Garcia in Resorts World a close second. Same chef, terrific tortillas, serious south of the border stuff.

Cipriani – The classiest midday repast in all of Las Vegas, with also the best service of any uber-busy, upscale restaurant you’ve ever been to. In a town not known for lunching, it remains the best see-and-be-scene power lunch spot anywhere on the Strip. I am bored to the gills with most Italians, but still eat here at least three times a month. That should tell you something.

Chengdu Taste Zero atmosphere; incredible Szechuan food. Pro tip: go early (5:00 pm) for dinner or weekday lunch. Or be prepared to wait.

China Mama – After a fire, they relocated from one shopping center with terrible parking to another with even worse parking…and the food didn’t miss a beat. Regardless, you should persevere head straight to the “Pastry” section of the menu, where you’ll find the Steamed Juicy Pork Buns (aka xiao long bao), and Mama’s Special Pan Fried Pork Buns  — as essential to a meal here as chopsticks and hot tea.  Crispy duck, jumbo shrimp, and dry pepper chicken (festooned with an avalanche of them) hold their own with those dumplings, as does sliced-fish with pickled mustard. Other menu items – ranging from the simple (cucumber salad with mashed garlic, to the sublime “Awesome Meatball in Clay Pot” – are by turns gutsy and refined: all of them bursting with eastern Chinese pungency, not Americanized blandness. China Mama did for Chinese food what Raku did for Japanese — raise the bar and bring in line with what the better, specialized purveyors of these cuisines are doing in southern California.There’s no turning back, and the days of gloppy egg foo yung are deader than Mao Tse Tung.

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CUT – In a category with lots of serious competition, this place is a cut above (sorry) – mainly because Wolfgang Puck lets Matthew Hurley play with his food, which he does seasonally to great effect, refusing to rest on his sirloins. Nicole Erle’s desserts (above) are also a wonder of refinement not usually found in cheesecake/chocolate cake catechism of steakhouse sweets.

Delmonico  – Now one of the old guard of Vegas steakhouses but still one of the best. No one does a better Bearnaise….or creamed spinach. Don’t sleep on the gumbo or barbecue shrimp, either. They may have been on the menu since day one, but they’re still the closest you can come to a legitimate taste of N’Awlins in the High Mojave.

EDO Tapas & WineWhat can we say about Oscar Amador Edo’s hidden gem that we haven’t said a hundred times by now: the best, most inventive Spanish in Vegas. Blink and you’ll miss it amongst the lineup of karaoke bars and noodle parlors pinched into a narrow space in an overwhelmed-yet-underwhelming strip mall. But the food is the best Spanish you’ll find in a space that doesn’t have José Andrés’ name attached to it.

Elia Authentic Greek Taverna – Whole fish, supple octopus, gorgeous, oregano-dusted lamb chops, oven-roasted lemon potatoes, superb tomato salad, gigante beans, and the big 4 of savory dips (tzatziki, tarama, tyrokafteri, and skordalia), all pay homage to the kind of food that Greeks take for granted — be it at home or in the neighborhood taverna. The all-Greek wine list is well-priced, and the welcome makes you feel like you belong.

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Esther’s KitchenThe restaurant that saved Vegas. Or at least downtown Las Vegas. Until James Trees opened EK in late 2018, Main Street looked destined to become another urban failure, on par with the decade of misfires on East Fremont. But because of its success, the Arts District is now crawling with foodies and families most nights, and is now considered a target-rich environment by restaurateurs lusting to get in on the action. It’s only a matter of time before big money starts turning the area into a glorified outdoor mall, so revel in these days while you can legitimately say you had a front row seat to the progenitor that spawned a restaurant revolution.

James Trees in a white shirt and black apron

Since James Trees was named Chef of the Year in this year’s ‘s Desert Companion Restaurant Awards, our staff thought you might like to read the award-winning, deathless essay he received in recognition thereof (written by someone you know and love):

CHEF OF THE YEAR – JAMES TREES

There have been years when this category was hotly contested, but this time it was a no-brainer. No single chef has made a bigger impact on the local dining scene than James Trees. And no one is continuing to push the envelope like Las Vegas’s own prodigal chef, who returned to the fold, after decades of working in the world’s greatest kitchens, to kick-start downtown’s restaurant revolution. Not content with resting on his laurels after the success of the white-hot Esther’s Kitchen, he has continued to look for additional mountains to climb and, against all odds, conquered multiple challenges in the past few years, setting a new standard for excellence in the process.

Coming on the heels of Esther’s triumph (surviving, even thriving through Covid), many thought him foolish for taking his talents to Tivoli Village. But Al Solito Posto single-handedly resuscitated the dining scene in a shopping center previously known more for restaurant roulette than a proper cacio e pepe. Neck and neck with ASP’s accomplishments has been the resurgence of Ada’s Food & Wine – mere steps away, and an underrated restaurant in its own right — one oenophiles have taken to like a fat cat to a California cab. If these weren’t enough to keep him busy, his plate is also full with plans to open two new places in the Arts District (one a French bistro, the other concept still on the drawing boards, but certain to reset the paradigm for what it means to dine downtown). And did we mention all of this is taking place as Esther’s gets ready to move into bigger/better digs just a few feet from its current location?

Taken together, you have not only Las Vegas’s busiest but also its most influential chef. Not bad for a kid who started out as a teenager working in the Mirage Hotel before heading to the Culinary Institute of America, and then honing his craft under the tutelage of everyone from Heston Blumenthal to Michael Mina. In an industry fraught with failure, Trees stands as a testament to moving through the ranks until you have the chance to do things your way, and then making the most of it.

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Estiatorio MilosYou’ll pay through the nose, but you’ll also taste the freshest fish (and best Greek food) Las Vegas has to offer. Bargain hunters go for the lunch special, which still ain’t cheap ($30), but a far sight from a a five-pound, $400 Fagri, we recently landed, which, to be fair, fed six.

Ferraro’s RistoranteAs long as Gino Ferraro is still pouring wine from his excellent, all-Italian lista des vini, Ferraro’s (the godfather of Vegas’s upscale Italians – since 1985) will be an essential stop on any gastronomic tour.

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Fine Company by Roy EllamarAnother home run from the Lev Group. Roy Ellamar knows breakfast like a Spaniard knows anchovies, and by the time you read this he will be open for dinner. Amidst the pre-fab mediocrity of downtown Summerlin (which is neither a town, nor down of a town, nor downtown of anything), this brightly lit spot shines like a beacon of chef-centric authenticity.

Golden SteerAn icon which came out of Covid smelling like a roast…of old school prime rib. Great steaks, béarnaise, tableside Caesars, and enough history to fill a Rat Pack museum. There are better steaks and sides to be found, but no one can match the vibe-i-est of old Vegas vibes. Haven’t been in six months, but the wine list falls woefully short of almost every other steakhouse in town. Belt down a few martinis and you won’t notice. No matter your state of sobriety, you’ll notice that scoring a table here is harder than finding an eight-ball at choir practice.

Guy Savoy  – We haven’t been since Covid, when service was strained, place settings wrapped in paper, and all the restrictions gave one of our most beautiful rooms all the charm of an emergency room. Even then, the cooking was well nigh perfect and the flavors so intense they practically jumped off the plate. Anyone who poo-poos French food has never had Savoy’s trademark artichoke soup, or “peas all around” — dishes that will make you rethink your relationship with vegetables. Truth be told (HUMBLE BRAG ALERT!) we’ve now been to Guy Savoy in Paris (three times in past two years) more often than the one in Caesars Palace. But for the closest facsimile of one of the best restaurants in the world, the Vegas version will do just fine, merci beaucoup.

Harlo Steakhouse – the best off-Strip steakhouse, period. But they know it and charge accordingly. And by “charge accordingly” we mean the same wallet-bending experience you find twelve miles to the east. The whole point of Harlo was to bring Strip-quality strips to Summerlin, knowing the well-heeled set wouldn’t balk at the prices. And they haven’t, but you might.

Hiroyoshi – Anyone who eats Japanese on the Strip is a fool. All the best stuff is in the ‘burbs, and this little gem is as obscure (and excellent) as they come. Good luck getting one of the 30 seats, though. Since the pandemic, this tucked-away joint on west Charleston as been busier than the Tsukiji market on a Thursday.

Izakaya Go – Raku has better yakitori; Monta has better ramen. Kabuto and Hiroyoshi do better sushi, and Toridorkoro Raku grills better chicken, but none of them put it all together at a better price point than IG. A solid, all-purpose Japanese restaurant so varied and friendly you can visit it weekly and never get bored (and we do).

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 Jaleo -The paella pit alone is worth the price of admission. On it lies a rectangular grill, fronted by several small bonfires that blaze away underneath pans the size of a manhole cover. In those pans are the purest, smokiest expression of Spain’s most iconic one-dish meal. If you’re the sort who gets excited by these things, you can stand and watch the flames lap up the sides of steel loaded with various proteins and veggies on their way to becoming the best paella in America.You can sit at the highboy tables beside the pit, or at the cocktail bar. Or hunker down in the large, low-ceiling room at one of low-slung banquettes, and pick from a variety of gin and tonics – practically the Spanish national cocktail. Weekend evenings should be avoided — when both food and service are stressed to the max, and large parties whooping it up all around makes serious menu contemplation impossible. Whenever you go, get a G&T, pile on the paella, and by all means, fill up on tomato bread.

Also worthy if you find yourself hankering for Spanish in the Aria and don’t want to fight through a phalanx of sloe-eyed bimbos posing at a selfie wall: Julian Serrano.

Joël RobuchonIt’s funny that the older I get, and the more financially comfortable I’ve become, the less I want to spend a car payment on dinner. Maybe it’s because dinner a deux at the late great JR’s will now set you back something closer to a house payment. Even though I haven’t been in over three years, it’s still one of the greatest restaurants in the world. I’d bet my house payment on it.

Kaiseki Yuzu – So fine, so personal, so much like the sort of Noren-draped spot you’d stumble upon in a Shibuya alleyway. It is prix fixe and intensely seasonal and simply the best Japanese experience in all of southern Nevada. For a quicker, more casual meal (primarily sushi/sashimi), book one of the six seats out front and prepare to be blown away.

Lotus of Siam – I like the old one. Not the really old one (the original one in Commercial Center, closed for years now), but the second oldest one on Flamingo Road. The one in Red Rock feels like a copy of a copy — too big and corporate for our tastes. Regardless,  the Riesling-heavy white wine list remains one of the best in America, and twenty four years on, the northern Thai specialties still can take your breath away and make your eyeballs sweat.

Main Street ProvisionsEverything about MSP is almost perfect: the long, comfy bar, hand-crafted cocktails, warm greeting, generous service, and a menu notable for its burly finesse — flawlessly executed veg and carefully chosen proteins, all packing a punch. Owner Kim Owens cut her teeth in the steakhouse trade and knows how to keep the carnivores as happy as the finicky hipster “foodies” and clueless tourists — the types who like the idea of good food more than the reality. The wine list is gently priced and perfectly fine — for the downtown crowd if not this persnickety critic.

Image (“The test of a chef is roast chicken.” – James Beard)

Marché BacchusWith Bradley Ogden at the helm, this wine bistro finally has the cuisine it deserves. Like the superb bird above.

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Matteo’s Ristorante Italiano – It has neither the pedigree of Cipriani, the ambition of Vetri, nor the flamboyance of Carbone. The design is comfortable but a bit cold. But don’t let any of that deter you. Tuck yourselves into one of the heavy chairs, leave your Italian preconceptions at the door, and experience the most interesting pastas in town, as well as a culinary tour of all Italy. The all-Italian wine list is priced to sell and almost as interesting as Eduardo Perez’s cooking. And by all means, take the cannoli. It is worth the price of admission, as are all the desserts, which put the sweets at most Italians to shame.

In any normal year the above overwhelming, breathless recognition graciously bestowed would be a feather in any restaurateur’s cap, but in 2023 Matteo’s took home the coveted, often-imitated-never-duplicated Desert Companion Strip Restaurant of the Year prize, so our staff thought even more of the unforgettable sentence stylings of a certain well-fed correspondent were worth your rapt attention:

STRIP RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR – MATTEO’S

Even with an impeccable pedigree, the success of Matteo’s was hardly assured. When it first opened on New Year’s Eve 2018, it was called The Factory Kitchen – after its namesake in southern California – a name compelling but confusing to anyone who didn’t live within a mile of downtown Los Angeles. Then co-owner Matteo Ferdinandi lent his name to the proceedings, and it came storming back as a contender for the best Italian in town, with a menu as bold and ambitious as any on the Strip. Four years on, it now thrives on Restaurant Row in the Venetian/Palazzo, pouring forth a culinary tour of Italy worthy of Stanley Tucci – a journey which will open your eyes to the possibilities of real Italian food.

Guiding you from Sicily to the Cinque Terre is a team of restaurant veterans who have been setting the standard for this cuisine for decades. Chef Angelo Auriana spent years helming the kitchen at Valentino in Santa Monica when it was widely considered the finest Italian restaurant in the country. He and Ferdinandi had the good sense to tap two Las Vegas virtuosos – Eduardo Pėrez and Paulo Duran – to manage the back and front of the house. Pėrez is a pasta master who had worked his way up from Guatemalan dishwasher to running the kitchens of Spago. (You might recognize him from a national Modelo beer commercial.) Duran has been charming Las Vegas customers since his days at B & B Ristorante. Put all four of them in the same room, and you have a powerhouse of talent presenting authentic, highly refined cooking, in a casual space, which is as far from chicken Parm as Naples is from Nashville. That they do so at a reasonable price point, in comfortable space (that feels cozier than its size belies), with a nice bar, and thoughtful, gently-priced wine list, is incredible. At a time when the Strip feels ever more corporate and unfeeling, Matteo’s represents something in short supply: a restaurant where Italian aficionados can feel right at home.

 

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Monzú – Gio Mauro is doing pizzas and pastas like no one else in Vegas. His rectangular Sicilian pies are strewn with top-shelf ingredients (and would cover a small desk), and his pastas as different from your standard Bolognese as Piacenza is from Peoria. We’re talking Carbonara with smoked goose guanciale, Paccheri alla Genovese swimming in stewed onions and braised veal, and Pisarei e faso (bread dumplings) thick with sausage and borlotti beans. One menu glance tells you this is not your mother’s Maggiano’s. Nor is it priced like a special occasion restaurant: the wine list (above) is an all-Italian dream come true, and the 32 oz. rib eye ($89) costs half of what it would on the Strip. Even with Gio’s success, this is still the great, unsung gem of local Italian ristorante.

Mott 32 -As slick as Peking duck skin and just as satisfying. A huge, expensive, well-financed chain of upscale Chinese eats, with a luxurious vibe and ingredient-forward cooking calculated to appeal to purists and tourists alike. The lighting is diffused and muted, but not too much, and the young women dotting the place are as sexy and shiny as a lacquered Chinese box. Dresses are short, black and tight, and the cleavage so profound, this joint’s nickname ought to be Mott 32D. But don’t let the comeliness fool you though, because the food is the tits as well — with a bases-covering menu of everything from Cantonese dim sum to hand-pulled noodles to Peking duck. That duck is the centerpiece of every meal here and it deserves to be — its bronzed, brittle, gleaming skin, precisely flensed from succulent muscle, and  having the bite-resistance of a thin potato chip, caresses perfectly-carved slices of deeply-flavored meat. Duck doesn’t get any duckier, nor Chinese any swankier.

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Naxos Greek Taverna – now competes with Elia as our best off-Strip Greek, simply on the strength of a more ambitious menu, bigger bucks behind it, and a slick casino location. Elia remains close to our hearts as a go-to taverna you can visit like an old friend and never tire of the conversation, but chef Mark Andelbradt (a very sad update: Chef Mark Andelbradt died of a sudden illness in early 2024) sends out some astonishing mezze, seafood and savories which its smaller competition doesn’t have the firepower to match. And you won’t find a better braised lamb shank (above) anywhere. Desert Companion’s New Restaurant of the Year 2023.

New Asian BBQSometimes you don’t want fancy. Sometimes it is not about new and exciting and more about the tried and true. Chinese comfort food fills this bill better than any — with the kind of cuisine that has been satisfying immigrants and Americans since the California Gold Rush. (Fun Fact: there are more independently-owned Chinese restaurants in America than there are all the KFCs, McDonald’s and Taco Bells combined.) Step into the narrow foyer of New Asian and you enter a world of shimmering, honey-glazed pork ribs, tea-smoked chickens and lacquered ducks, hanging from hooks and signalling food both soothing and familiar.  Service is perfunctory and punctual (as it is in thousands of restaurants like this around the globe), and no one lingers so turnover is fast. Solid dim sum, seven days a week and the best Peking duck deal on SMR road.

Oscar’s SteakhouseOscar’s hums with old school cool….right down to slugging martinis with our ex-mayor…who may be getting long in the tooth but whose steakhouse is even better than when it opened. Credit Ben Jenkin’s for bringing Oscar’s into the upper tier of beef emporiums, and for conjuring one of the great double cheeseburgers in the history of burgerdom.

Osteria FiorellaDespite a serious upswing in competition, still one of the best Italians in the ‘burbs. Marc Vetri rarely makes a menu misstep, and Vegas is lucky to have him and his crew at two hotels (Palms and Red Rock) elevating our taste-buds with tonnarelli caci e pepe, rigatoni with sausage ragu, and the best double-cut pork chop this side of the Schuykill.

Partage  – We love Partage even though we don’t go there anymore. The food is superb (if you can look past their affinity for smoking everything from the cocktails to ice cream); the wine list a French-filled winner; and the service always as smooth as Hollandaise on a halibut. But we have zero interest in “food as art” tasting menus anymore, so until Chef Yuri Szarzewski opens his more casual spot a couple of doors down, we’ll keep lauding this place and encouraging people to dine here…even if what we’re mostly craving is a simple steak frites and a profiterole.

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Peter LugerSee my review here, go order the steak for two (which actually feeds three), and thank me later. Awesome burger, too, and open for lunch, which is a YUGE plus for those craving a midday slab of sirloin.

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Just for strips and giggles, here’s our list of the best of the rest when it comes to premier purveyors of prime. Each is worthy in its own right, and would be the top steakhouse in town, almost anywhere else in America that isn’t New York, Chicago or California. So, even though we don’t consider them “essential” to the Vegas food scene. If you have a favorite, based upon atmosphere, service, or a particular cut or side dish, who are we to argue?

Barry’s Downtown Prime

Bavette’s

Carversteak

Gordon Ramsay Steak

Hank’s Fine Steaks

Jean-Georges Steakhouse

Ocean Prime

Prime

Strip House

Strip Steak

SW Steakhouse

Vic & Anthony’s

RakuJust slightly older than this website, Mitsuo Endo’s intimate izakaya sparked a revolution when it opened in January, 2008 — igniting a demand for sophisticated Japanese cooking on an avenue previously known for bubble tea, mochi, and moo goo gai pan. Over the years it has expanded slightly, but lost none of its charm or refinement.  It also spawned a number of competitors, none of which have managed to knock it off its crown as the Nipponese king of Spring Mountain.

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Scotch 80 PrimeIn my Bottom 10 (below) I write about how much better steakhouses have become in Las Vegas over the past ten years. Consider this a prime example. Marty Lopez’s food is as far from the dated steaks of THE Steakhouse as the rebooted Palms Hotel is from Circus Circus.

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SoulBelly BBQLas Vegas is no longer the barbecue wasteland it was a decade ago, but world class ‘cue is still rarer than pulled pork at a bar mitzvah.  Luckily we have SoulBelly to sooth our savage breast, with world-class brisket, hot links (above) and sides worthy of a Texas roadhouse. Also worth a taste: Wild Fig BBQ.

Shanghai TasteChina Mama is two doors down, and Xiao Long Dumpling is across the street, and the just opened (and excellent) Palette Tea Lounge also with walking distance. So why do we prefer Shanghai Taste? Because it is small, simple, brimming with buns, and loaded with the flavors of eastern China — all emanating from an open kitchen behind large glass windows adjacent to the cracker-box-sized dining room.  The turnover is fast and the service never fails. A picture menu also makes navigation easy for gwailos.  Like a lot of better spots up and down Chinatown, you’ll find the experience more enjoyable on weekdays, when you’re not competing with selfie-stick tourists, head-in-their-phones Asian teens, and the worst drivers on earth competing for a parking spot.

Sparrow + Wolf Sparrow + Wolf is sleek and small (60 seats) and smells of wood smoke — all indicia of the haute-eclectic-bistro cooking that has taken over America in the past decade. Gastronomades who wander the earth searching for oases of ingenious edibles have already pitched their tents here. Intrepid gastronauts, addicted to traveling where no man has gone before, have been here since day one.  Simple gastronomes who revel in chef-enhanced, high-quality ingredients will not be disappointed, either.   Chef Brian Howard specializes in high-wire cooking without a net, and when he pulls it off, the results are thrilling indeed. The wine list matches the menu and the crowd, even if it doesn’t match what a wine snob might want to drink.

Sushi Hiro – the best Japanese spot not on Spring Mountain Road, which entices sushi hounds from across the valley to make the trek to Henderson. The fact that it is on godforsaken Eastern Avenue causes The Food Gal and yours truly great distress when we are craving the cleanest fish, in a decent-sized restaurant, with accommodating chefs, which doesn’t require a second mortgage or a reservation weeks in advance to enjoy. But the trip is always worth it. Just let them know how much you want to eat and to spend and be prepared to be dazzled.

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Yummy Kitchen – CLOSED ;-(     They don’t get much more tucked away than Yummy Kitchen, tossing its chili crab and other Singaporean-Malaysian delights inside an Asian supermarket, far across a parking lot at Spring Mountain and Decatur. The crabs are still-moving fresh, and the garlic shrimp, roti, Hainanese chicken, and Malay curries will save you plane fare to Disneyland-with-the-death-penalty.

Chef Marc Vetri in the dining room of Vetri Las Vegas on the 56th floor of the Palms Casino Resort.

Vetri Cucina -Even at its most basic level, Italian food is soothing. Average Italian food satisfies the way pop music does: it is catchy and forgettable. Great Italian food, like great opera, will take your breath away. Vetri, if you let it, will take your breath away. The qualifier is important, because, splendid as it is, Vetri, like opera, isn’t for everyone. There are no easy answers here, toe-tapping is kept to a minimum, and crowd-pleasing isn’t in its vocabulary. But  like all great Italian food, it often accomplishes more with less. Consider the following: Clichés of all kinds have been canned. Pizzas are kaput. Soups and scampi have been scuttled. Meatballs are missing in action. Place settings are Spartan; Caesar is nowhere to be found. No giant hunks of cheese or curled ribbons of prosciutto will be ceremoniously brought to your table. The chicken Parm crowd is not welcomed.

But if you have the chops for a modern Italian food experience — like the best ristorante in Italy are putting forth these days — you’ll think you’ve died and gone to Bergamo. All of it served in a nonpareil setting — 56 floors up, overlooking the Strip – a location that puts to lie the old adage about the higher off the ground you get, the worse the food is. Your dinner here should start with foie gras pastrami with brioche and mostarda. From there, proceed to emerald green Swiss chard gnocchi with brown butter, tonnarelli grano arso (toasted wheat pasta, with seafood); and then dark, slightly gamy slices of roasted baby goat. For something lighter, dive into a squid and artichoke galette, raw fish crudo, and a pickled veggie/antipasti platter, followed by simple spaghetti, swirled with chunky San Marzano tomatoes and basil.

If you in the mood to dance with the big boys, then take down a compacted disc of veal tartare garnished with crisp sweetbreads, a sweet onion crepe (really more like a thick, sweet-savory, puck-sized tart) served with white truffle fondue, followed by either a whole roasted branzino, or a brontosaurian bistecca Fiorentina (also for two). Like the sea bass, it is enough to keep 3-4 trenchermen occupied. Mere plebes will be happy with a gorgeous stuffed guinea hen breast, thinly-sliced porchetta with tuna sauce, casoncelli alla bergamasca (Lombardy’s crinkled version of ravioli), and the cutest little bone marrow raviolini you’ve ever seen.

After that, you’ll want to navigate the wine list, which isn’t exactly chock full of bargains, but at least the prices don’t match the altitude — which means there’s plenty of drinkable stuff mere mortals can afford.

HONORABLE MENTION

Are any of these “essential”? Well, to our well-being they are. Although maybe less than iconic, most of these venues are places we couldn’t live without, i.e., they make our life in Vegas a much tastier place. Some we visit monthly; others maybe once a year. A select few we hardly ever get to (hello, Japaneiro!) but we love what they bring to the table.

Image(Thai roast duck at Lamoon)

Cafe Breizh

Good Pie (A serious oversight when I first published this a few days ago, now corrected with apologies to Vincent Rotolo.)

Lamoon

Legends Oyster Bar

Letty’s

Japaneiro

Joe’s Prime Steaks and Seafood

Kabuto

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PublicUs

Rainbow Kitchen

Rebellion Pizza

Rincon Buenos Aires

7th & Carson

Shang Artisan Noodle

Sin Fronteras Tacos

Trattoria Nakamura-Ya

Water Grill

Win Kee HK BBQ & Noodle

Yukon Pizza

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Yu-Or-Mi Sushi

Winnie and Ethel’s

And now, food fans, the one(s) you’ve been waiting for…the best of the worst…restaurants so rancid I wouldn’t eat there if the meal was comped and they were pouring DRC for free:

BOTTOM TEN

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Cathédrale – The only thing interesting about this Tao Group clone of a clone of a decent restaurant is the l’accent aigu over the “e”. The decor looks like a mash-up of every bad design idea currently in vogue (Hard surfaces! Giant lamps! Ginormous/pointless chandelier-thing!), and the food either by-the-numbers, all-over-the-map (Crudo! French! Pasta!) or downright felonious (20 second crepes Suzette – don’t ask). Be forewarned: no matter when you go, the joint will be crawling with women who’ve memorized the Vanderpump Rules.

Hasalon – The whole thing reeks of cynical corporate calculation and forced fun. Every night at 8 o’clock it turns into a disco for the party-as-a-verb crowd…because, you know, everyone loves partying on schedule, don’t they?  This buzzkill is proudly announced at the beginning of your meal, as if they expect everyone to be excited about choking down $47 hummus (with lamb ragu!) and farm-raised fish before the “fun” starts….EXACTLY AT 8 O’CLOCK! …which means that’s when you start shouting at each other over ear-splitting 80s rock. I didn’t think anything could make me hate Israeli-Mediterranean cooking, buy Hasalon did it in one, absurdly-priced meal. Strictly for showoffs and saps and those who think Adam Sandler is funny…but I repeat myself.

Lago – I know it’s been over a year, but I’m still recovering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Shitty Dinner syndrome) since our meal here. On the other hand, I should be grateful for the place, since it gives me somewhere to recommend when I want to visit revenge upon the chicken Parm crowd.

Michael’s – Michael’s charges $42 for this crab cake filled with more saltines than shellfish:

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The Steakhouse at Circus Circus –  charges $27 for a much better one:

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So why are they both “Bottom 10” material? Because the crab was the only decent thing we had at Circus Circus, and you have to endure the indignity of walking through a Wal-mart of a hotel (South Pointe) to get hosed by Michael’s. (Circus Circus is more akin to a trailer park filled with snotty kids and meth heads.) Both stand as testaments to a time when tourists would endure these insults because they were the only games in town. There is no longer a reason to subject yourself to such insults unless you’re the type who enjoys gargling with razor blades or taken to the cleaners by hotels who think you’re too stupid to notice the supermarket food they’re slinging at eye-watering prices.

Majordomo (CLOSED!) – You’ve got to be one whale of an arrogant idiot to fail with a steakhouse in Las Vegas. Paging David Chang….

M.Y. Asia (CLOSED!)

The Bedford by Martha Stewart

Martin Yan’s cash-grab disaster didn’t last five months. Martha Stewart’s shameless brand-whoring will probably still be with us when they implode the Fountainebleau. But count her (and him) as the last of the breed: long past their prime “names” with enough clout to pull the last of the Baby Boomers into an eatery by promising nothing more than a familiar face fronting predictable mediocrity. Together with Chang’s flame-out, they represent the final phase of Vegas’s celeb chef obsession. Going forward, educated palates are more excited about Evan Funke bringing Mother Wolf here from SoCal, than whatever crap Guy Fieri is slinging. Look closely and you’ll see that neither the Fountainebleau nor Durango Station is hyping anything more than really good cooking from highly competent chefs — the polar opposite of Bobby Flay, Gordon Ramsay and Giada slapping their names on a door and laughing all the way to the bank. Celebrity chefs may have put Las Vegas on the map, but it’s time we put them out to pasture in favor of those who are actually at the stoves.

Vic’s – So bad we thought we were being punked. Then we looked at all the gray hairs waiting to sway to the song stylings of someone who hasn’t had a hit record since 1977 (or some Disney-fied musical), and everything made sense.  Strictly for the not-quite-yet-in-a-wheelchair crowd, who’ve thrown on the good golf shirt just for the occasion.

Viet Noodle Cafe – Worst meat we’ve had on Spring Mountain Road in a decade. Cheap ingredients, poorly cooked, slung at people who are only there for the price. We normally leave small Asian purveyors alone, but this gristle-fest was a new low.

Final Thoughts…

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When I started writing about food back in the Stone Age, the Monte Carlo Restaurant in the Desert Inn (above) was the ne plus ultra of Vegas dining Now we’re overloaded with French chefs from France, impeccable Italians, and Asian credentials only exceeded by the SoCal food scene. Right along side them are neighborhood joints springing forth to feed an ever-surging appetite for their cooking. With all of this in front of us, and decades of drum-thumping behind me, it’s tempting to say, “My work is done here,” and ride into the sunset.

I am not retiring, just dialing it back to a more rational level — as in 3-4 restaurants a week instead of the 8-10 I’ve averaged over the past thirty years. But my compulsion to eat myself silly all over Las Vegas is just not there anymore. And writing is hard, a real pain in the brain (ask any writer), so I’m dialing that back, too, and this will be my last Essential 52 list.

To come full circle from the beginning of this piece, writing is also not the reward it used to be. Reading these words, you’re probably among a thousand or two hungry souls. A dozen years ago, our audience was ten times that. Some months, a hundred times. Thus do I often feel like a musician who once had a much bigger stage, and now plays in local cafes to a few fans. Gratifying, but often not worth the work.

But I’ll continue to file things on these pages whenever the muse strikes.

In the meantime, follow me on “X”, Instagram, and Tik Tok (yes, I’m on Tik Tok, as absurd as that sounds, and is!), and tune into our podcast (Eat. Talk. Repeat.) weekly to get the scoops on my gastronomic gallivanting. Between them, you can expect me to stay in the game, in some manner,  until they pry this keyboard from my cold, dead fingers.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, and Happy New Year, from all of us at #BeingJohnCurtas:

drunk baby drinking GIF

The Best Restaurant(s) in the World

Image(Restaurant Guy Savoy, Paris)
If you take it as a given that French restaurants are the best in the world, it only stands to reason that the best restaurant in the world will be in France.
Don’t get your panties in a bunch, I’m not here to dismiss the cuisines of entire countries — only to point out that, like sushi, Mexican street food, and pasta, the places where some food was invented are generally where you will find the highest elevation of the art. And Paris, in case you’ve forgotten, is where the modern restaurant was born in the latter half of the 18th Century.

Of course, the “best” of anything is a conceit and highly subjective. Measuring a “winner” or “the best” of anything — from wine to women — is a nice parlor game, but ultimately a waste of time unless there’s a stopwatch involved.

Whoever wins these accolades usually comes down to who got fawned over the most in a few influential publications — not who objectively gives diners the best food, drink, and experience. Anyone who thinks the several hundred voters who weigh in on these awards have actually eaten at the places they vote for as “the best restaurant in the world” (as opposed to forming their opinions based upon reading accounts of the few who have), has rocks in their head.

“Awards” of this sort are simply a way to give a deceptively false measuring stick to those who don’t know much about a subject. Subjectivity disguised as objectivity, all in the name of marketing to the wealthy with more money than taste. Same as with wine scores and Oscar nominations. The rich need these adjudications to convince themselves they’re doing the right thing, and “The “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” is there for them. As Hemingway puts it in “A Moveable Feast”:

The rich came led by the pilot fish. A year earlier they never would have come. There was no certainty then.

Back when El Bulli was garnering these awards (and I was voting on them), I heard from several colleagues who ate there, and what they described was more of a soul-deadening food slog (an edible marathon, if you will) than an actual pleasant experience.

A close friend (who also happens to be a chef) told me he stopped counting after 40(?) courses of (often) indecipherable eats, and was looking for the door two hours before the ordeal ended. (The trouble was, he said, there was literally no place to go — El Bulli being, literally, in the middle of nowhere.)

But Feran Adrià (like Thomas Keller before him and Grant Achatz and René Redzepi after), was anointed because, as in Hollywood, a few influential folks decided they were to be christened the au courant  bucket list-of-the-moment, and woe be to anyone in the hustings to question these lordly judgments. In the cosseted world of gastronomic beneficence (and the slaves to food fashion who follow them) this would be akin to a local seamstress suggesting Anna Wintour adjust her hemline.

Because of this nonsense, we’ve been saddled with the tyranny of the tasting menu for twenty-five years (Keller, Achatz, et al), disguised foods and tasteless foams (Adria), and edible vegetation (Redzepi) designed more for ground cover than actual eating.

As far as I can tell, neither molecular cuisine nor eating tree bark and live ants has caught on in  the real world — beyond trophy-hunting gastronauts, who swoon for the “next big thing” the way the fashion press promotes outlandish threads to grab attention.

Which brings us back to France. More particularly, French restaurants and what makes them so special. Let’s begin with food that looks like real food:

Image(Surf & Turf: Langoustines au Truffes La Tour D’Argent)

….not someone’s idea of playing with their food, or trying to turn it into something it isn’t. This cooking philosophy alone separates fine French cuisine from the pretenders, and gives it a confidence few restaurants in the world ever approach.

For one, there’s a naturalness to restaurants in France that comes from the French having invented the game. Unlike many who play for the “world’s best” stakes, nothing about them ever feels forced, least of all the cooking.  With four-hundred years to get it right, and French restaurants display everything from the napery to the stemware with an insouciant aplomb that is the gold standard.

You don’t have to instruct the French how to run a restaurant any more than you have to teach a fish how to swim. Or at least that’s how it appears when you’re in the midst of one of these unforgettable meals, because, to repeat, they’ve been perfecting things for four hundred years. Everything from the amuse bouche to the petit fours have been carefully honed to put you at ease with with being your best self at the table.

Image(Gruyère gougeres have been around longer than America)

Having been at this gig for a while, I’m perfectly aware that the death of fine French dining, and intensive care service accompanying it, has been announced about every third year for the past thirty.

I’m not buying any of it. When you go to France (be it Paris or out in the provinces), the food is just as glorified, the service rituals just as precise, and the pomp and circumstance just as beautifully choreographed as it was fifty years ago. The fact that younger diners/writers see this form of civilized dining as a hidebound, time-warp does not detract from its prominence in the country that invented it.

Whether you’re in Tokyo or Copenhagen, the style and performative aspects of big deal meals still takes their cues from the French. Only elaborate Mandarin banquets or the hyper-seasonality of a kaiseki dinner  match the formality and structure of haute cuisine.

These forms of highly stylized dining follow a path straight up the food chain. There are rules and they are there for a reason, usually having to do with how you will taste and digest what is placed before you. Light before heavy; raw before cooked; simple before complex — you get the picture
You usually begin with something fished directly from the sea. Oysters and other shellfish are a natural match, as is a shrimp cocktail. (A good old-fashioned American steakhouse has more in common, with high falutin’ French than people realize.)  Their natural salinity stimulates the appetite without weighing you down.
Man’s evolution into a more cultivated forms of eating is represented by bread, as is the domestication of animals by the butter slathered upon it. (If you want to stretch the symbolism even further, look at olive oil and the fermentation of wine and beer as representing mankind’s earliest bending of agriculture to his edible wants and needs.)
Image(Early man struggled with the whole pommes soufflé-thing)
From there things get more elaborate, depending on whether you want to go the seafood, wild game, or domesticated fowl route. Vegetables get their intermezzo by using salad greens as a scrub for the stomach to help digest everything that precedes them. (The French think eating a salad at the start of a meal is stupid, and it is.) You finish of course with cheese (“milk’s leap toward immortality” – Clifton Fadiman), and then with the most refined of all foods: sugar and flour and all the wonderful things that can be done with them. A great French meal is thus every bit the homage to nature as Japanese kaiseki, albeit with a lot more wine and creme brûlée.
As I’ve written before, French food is about the extraction and intensification of flavor. Unlike Italians and Japanese, a French cook looks at an ingredient (be it asparagus, seafood, or meat) and asks himself: “Self, how can I make this thing taste more like itself.” All the simmering, searing, pressing, and sieving in a French kitchen is as far a cry from leaving nature well enough alone as an opera is from the warble of a songbird.

With this in mind, we set our sights on two iconic Parisian restaurants: one, as old-fashioned as you can get, and the other a more modern take on the cuisine, by one of its most celebrated chefs. Together, they represent the apotheosis of the restaurant arts. They also signify why, no matter what some critics say, the French still rule the roost. Blessedly, there is no chance of encountering Finnish reindeer moss at either of them.

LA TOUR D’ARGENT

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If experience is any measure of perfection, then The Tower of Money should win “best restaurant in the world” every year, because no one has been serving food this fine, for this long, in this grand a setting.

A restaurant in one form or another has been going on at this location since before the Three Musketeers were swashing their buckles. What began as an elegant inn near the wine docks of Paris in 1582 soon enough was playing host to everyone from royalty to Cardinal Richelieu. It is claimed that the use of the fork in France began in the late 1500s at an early incarnation of “The Tower of Silver”, with Henry IV adopting the utensil to keep his cuffs clean.

Apocryphal or not,  what is certainly true is that Good King Hank (1553-1610) bestowed upon the La Tour its crest which still symbolizes it today:

History, of course, provides the foundation, and the setting continues to provides a “wow” factor unmatched by all but a handful of restaurants in the world. No place but here can you dine with the ghosts of Louis XIV, Winston Churchill and Sarah Bernhardt, all while seeming to float above Paris on this open door to the city’s past — all of it available to anyone with the argent to book a table.
But the proof is in the cooking — that has been, on our last two visits, as awesome as the view. It’s no secret that the glory had started to fade twenty years ago, and that Michelin — the arbiter of all things important in the French food world — had taken notice, and not in a good way.
A reboot of sorts was announced over five years ago, and by the time we visited in 2019, the kitchen was performing at a Michelin two-star level at the very least. Independent of the view, the service, and the iconic wine program, the cooking (and presentation) was well-nigh perfect. It was all you want from this cuisine: focused, intense flavors put together with impeccable technique and an almost scientific attention to detail.
When we returned this past winter, things seemed be have gotten even better. This time we showed up with a party of six. It was a busy lunch, filled with local gourmets and some obvious big business types, but also a smattering of tourists who (like us) had to keep picking their jaws up off the table as spectacle of Paris and its finest French food was spread before them.
I have never been to La Tour at night, but for my money, lunch is the way to go. The food is unchanged (lunch specials are offered, but you can order off the dinner menu and we did), and the sight of the Seine River stretching beneath you and Notre Dame and the Ile de la Cite in the distance are worth the admission all by themselves.
I suppose the ideal time to dine here would be arranging for a table at dusk, so you could see the lights of Paris come alive in all their blazing glory. But as I’ve argued before, lunch has always been the ticket for us when we want to eat and drink ourselves silly in a fine French restaurant.
There’s nothing silly, of course, about the food. This is serious stuff, but there’s nothing stuffy about it, despite its pedigree — French service having retired the snootiness thing decades ago. Meaning: if you show up and are well-behaved, they are friendly to a fault.
(Canard au sang with a side of burns, coming right up)
Credit for that has to lie with owner André Terrail, the third generation of the family to be at the helm. (The Terrails have owned the restaurant since 1911.) Since taking over a few years before his father Claude’s death in ‘o6, Terrail has kept all the historical provenance of his venerated birthright intact — upgrading the cuisine while still managing to keep the whole operation true to its roots. No easy feat that. We don’t know what the problems were twenty years ago, but on our last two visits, we didn’t see any missteps, either on the plate or in the service. And what appeared before us was every bit as stunning as any Michelin 3-starr meal we’ve had…in Paris or elsewhere.
You take good bread for granted in Paris, but even by those lofty standards, this small baguette was a stunner:

Image(Face it: you knead this)

Perfect in every respect: a twisted baguette of indelible yeastiness — perfumed with evidence of deep fermentation — the outer crunch giving way to ivory-pale, naturally sweet dough within that  fought back with just the perfect amount of chew. It (and the butter) were show-stoppers in their own right, and for a brief minute, they competed with the view for our attention. We could’ve eaten four of them (and they were offered throughout the meal), but resisted temptation in light of the feast that lay ahead.

Soon thereafter, these scoops of truffle-studded foie gras appeared, deserving of another ovation:

Image(Home cooking this is not)

From there on, the hits just kept on coming: a classic quenelles de brochet (good luck finding them anywhere but France these days), Then, a slim, firm rectangle of turbot in a syrupy beurre blanc, or the more elaborate sole Cardinale:

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….followed by a cheese cart commensurate with this country’s reputation.

The star of the show has been, since the 1890s, the world-famous pressed duck (Caneton Challandais) — served in two courses, the first of which (below) had the deepest-colored Bèarnaise we’ve ever seen; the second helping bathed in the richest, midnight-brown, duck blood-wine blanket imaginable. Neither sauce did anything to mitigate the richness of the fowl, which is, of course, gilding the lily and the whole point.

Image(You can never be too rich or have too much Béarnaise)

We could go on and on about how fabulous our meal was, but our raves would only serve to make you ravenous for something you cannot have, not for the next ten months, anyway.

Yes, the bad news is the restaurant will be closing today, April 30, 2022 for almost a year — until February 2023 — for renovations. This saddens us, but not too much, since we don’t have plans to return until about that time next year. In the meantime, the entry foyer probably could use some sprucing up (since it looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1953), and we have confidence Terrail won’t monkey with the sixth floor view, or this skinny little pamphlet he keeps on hand for the casual wine drinker:

Image(Not found: 2-Buck Chuck)

If the measure of a great restaurant is how much it makes you want to return, then La Tour D’Argent has ruled the roost for two hundred years. (Only a masochist ever left El Bulli saying to himself, “I sure can’t wait to get back here!”) Some things never go out of style and La Tour is one of them. We expect it to stay that way for another century.

À Bientôt!

RESTAURANT GUY SAVOY

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If La Tour represents the old guard of Parisian dining at its finest, then Guy Savoy — both the man and his restaurant — provides the connective tissue between haute cuisine’s past, present, and a future where new chefs will take up this mantle and teach the world what elegant dining is about.

The Adam Platts of the world may decry the “irrelevance” of the “old gourmet model”, but I stand with Steve Cuozzo in maintaining that the call for luxury and refinement in how we eat (admittedly at rarefied levels of expense), will never go completely out of fashion. Quoting our friend Alan Richman, Cuozzo writes:

As critic Alan Richman eloquently expressed it in the Robb Report a few years ago, fine dining is more than “a demonstration of wealth and privilege . . . It is an expression of culture, the most enlightened and elegant form of nourishment ever devised. Without it we will slowly regress into the dining habits of cave people, squatting before a campfire, gnawing on the haunch of a bar.”

All I can say to the Adam Platts of the world (and younger food writers who echo the same sentiments) is: If you think “the old gourmet model” is dead or dying, plan a trip to France, where formal restaurants are poised to come roaring back, indeed if they haven’t already done so.

Put another way: get your goddamned head out of that bowl of ramen or whatever Nigerian/Uzbekistani food truck you’re fond of these days and wake up and smell the Sauvignon Blanc.

Or just go to Guy Savoy.

(Savoy at his stoves)

If the world’s best restaurant can’t change your mind, nothing will. Before you accuse me of bandwagon-ing, let me remind you that I’ve been singing the praises of Savoy’s cuisine since 2006, and have even gone so far as to travel between Vegas and Paris to compare his American outpost with the original. Back then (2009), the flagship got the nod, but not by much.

Since its move to the Monnaie de Paris (the old Parisian Mint) in 2015, Savoy’s cuisine and reputation have attained a new level of preeminence (which is all the more incredible when you consider he has held three Michelin stars since 1980).

With mentors like Joël Robuchon and Paul Bocuse having departed to that great stock pot in the sky, and Alain Ducasse having spread himself thinner than a sheet of mille-feuille, Savoy now rules the French gastronomic firmament as a revered elder statesman. The difference being that he and his restaurants haven’t rested on their laurels, but are every bit as harmonious with the times as they were thirty years ago. To eat at Guy Savoy overlooking the banks of the Seine from a former bank window, is to experience the best French cooking from the best French chefs performing at the top of their game. There is something both elemental and exciting about his cooking that keeps it as current as he was as the new kid on the Michelin block back in the 80s.

Dining in the dead of winter can have its challenges. Greenery is months  away, so chefs go all-in on all things rooted in the soil. The good news is black truffles are in abundance; the bad news is you better like beets.

The great news is: in the hands of Savoy and his cooks, even jellied beets achieve an elegance unheard of from this usually humble taproot:

Image(Savoy heard we hated beets, so he tried to hide them from us)

As mentioned earlier, a French chef respects an ingredient by looking at it as a blank canvas to be improved upon. Look no further than this beet hash (Truffes et oefus de caille, la terre autour) lying beneath a quail egg and a shower of tuber melanosporum, both shaved and minced:

Image(Beet-i-ful)

Neither of these would I choose for my last meal on earth. Both gave me new respect for how the French can turn the prosaic into the ethereal –food transcending itself into something beautiful.

Which, of course, is what Savoy did with the lowly artichoke so many years ago, when he combined it with Parmesan cheese and black truffles and turned it into the world’s most famous soup.

There’s no escaping this soup at Guy Savoy, nor should you want to. Regardless of season, it encapsulates everything about the Savoy oeuvre: penetrating flavor from a surprisingly light dish, by turns both classic and contemporary:

Image(Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen)

We may have come for the truffles, but we stayed for the filet of veal en croute (below), once again lined with, you guessed it, more black truffles.

Image(Filet de veau et truffes cuits en croûte is French for: the most delicious meat dish in the history of the world)

From there we progressed through a salad of roasted potatoes and truffles, a bouillon of truffles served like coffee in a French press, then a melted cheese fondue over a whole truffle:

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…and even something that looked like a huge black truffle but which, upon being nudged with a fork, revealed itself to be a chocolate mousse. All of it served by a staff that looked like teenagers and acted like twenty-year veterans.

Suffice it to say the wine pairings were as outstanding as the food, all of it meshing into a seamless meld of appetite and pleasure — the pinnacle of epicurean bliss — high amplitude cooking where every element converges into a single gestalt.

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We then went nuts with multiple desserts, including a clafoutis (above) and the petit fours carte (like we always do), and rolled away thinking we wouldn’t be eating again for two days. This being Paris, we were at it again later that night, taking down some steak frites at Willi’s Wine Bar

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I write these words not to convince you that Guy Savoy is the greatest restaurant in the world, or even that such a thing exists, but rather to persuade you of the transcendent gustatory experiences you can have at places like it. Until I’ve been to every restaurant in the world, I won’t be able to proclaim one of them “the best.” Even then, the best would only be what best fit my mood, my likes and my expectations at the very moment I was there.

Adam Platt was right about one thing: “the best restaurant in the world” doesn’t have to be fancy. The best restaurant in the world can be something as simple as a plat du jour of boeuf bourguignon , studded with lardons and button mushrooms in a run-down bistro smelling of wine sauces and culinary history. It can be at a tiny trattoria on the Amalfi Coast or a local diner where everyone knows your name, or that little joint where you first discovered a dish, a wine, or someone to love. But your favorite restaurant, no matter where or what it is, owes an homage to the place where it all started.

Emile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” describes the markets of Les Halles as “…some huge central organ pumping blood into every vein of the city.” Those markets may be gone, but their soul lives on in the form of Parisian restaurants, which remain, one hundred a fifty years later, its beating heart. To eat in the great restaurants of Paris is to be inside the lifeblood of a great city, communing with something far bigger than yourself. To be in them is to be at the epicenter of the culinary universe and the evolution of human gastronomy — where the sights and smells of the food, and the way it is served, reflect the entire history of modern dining.