…and we’re not talking about Santa Claus. On January 3rd, we’ll be giving Steven A. Shaw aka The Fat Guy, a personal guided tour of our Asian restaurants up and down Spring Mountain Road.
Shaw (founder of, and top tamale at www.egullet.org) has just published Asian Dining Rules (Harper Collins 2008), and hasn’t been in Sin City in like….forever; so the pressure is on to show the big guy a good time.
Doc Sconz’s next-to-last post on his Vegas (eating) vacation, ends with him enjoying himself (sort of) at ALEX at the Wynn. His assessment of the meal isn’t as glowing as you might expect, but, as usual, is accompanied by a number of tasty snaps that had ELV salivating. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never attain his degree of food foto fabulousness, if for no other reason than we’d probably end up looking like this guy….making shooting our food more of a sport than it already is.
His last post, summarizes, we think, the best way to view our strange, sui generis city — if one hopes to take the best from it and filter out the rest.
Part Two of Doc Sconz’s look at the Wynn has him prowling around the baking ovens with Boris Villatte; the second half of the dynamic duo that makes the breads and pastries there so superb.
Villatte is such a master of his metier, we generally throw caution to the wind and ignore the age-old adage: “Don’t fill up on bread.” whenever we’re within a stone’s throw of any Wynn restaurant.
ELV attended a private tasting of Villatte’s work a couple of years ago, along with uber-chefs Philippe Rispoli and Laurent Tourondel. When we questioned them about how (and why) Villatte’s breads are so consistently excellent (and what about his talent makes them so), Tourondel remarked: “It’s his training. It is so tough; he doesn’t know how NOT to make them (so) good.”
And Villatte’s fellow French chefs were as in awe of his creations as we are….