For those of you who don’t get up with the pigs and chickens, but who require your Friday dose of The Food Man, here is our Restaurant of the Week segment on the Channel 8 Morning News with Denise Valdez and Dave McCann, featuring DAL TORO RISTORANTE in the Palazzo.
Please ignore my verbal gaffe at calling Mitsuo Endo a Chinese chef on last week’s ROTW segment! Quelle horreur! I hereby publicly beg his forgiveness and promise to commit seppuku if I ever do it again.
RAKU is so good it’s scary. Fresh, pristine, pure Japanese robatayaki cooking like Las Vegas has never seen, and fast becoming a foodie mecca like we’ve never had off the Strip.
Uber-seafood chef Paul Bartolotta told me he’s been twelve (12!) times in two months and still isn’t tired of it.
We (Food Man, #2 Son of Food Man, and The Food Gal) went last night and tried three desserts (after some pickled Bonito guts, beef liver, cold soba noodles et al), and found the melting chocolate cake to be possibly the best in town – ditto the watermelon grantinee (called sorbet on the menu).
Chef/owner Mitsuo Endo told us (through his interpreter – the adorable Risa) that he originally came here to cook in a restaurant in, of all places, Anthem – that bastion of bad taste in Henderson.* Anthem’s loss was the rest of the town’s gain.
And for the first time on TV, watch the world’s greatest restaurant critic** eat a pig’s ear on a morning news show.***
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* As in: houses (ginormous), cars (nothing but SUV’s), traffic (unbearable) and good restaurants (non-existent)
** Self-proclaimed
*** YouTube here I come.
Like most of the hoi polloi, the staff at ELV usually finds itself hunkering down with a bag of Cheetos and a cooler of PBR when the mercurey starts topping the century mark around here. Which is really a shame, since every restaurant from Guy Savoy on down starts slashing prices in July and August as shameless inducements to get us to alight from our palatial desert abodes into the super-cooled, oxygenated air of major Strip restaurants – whose prices we (usually) love to hate.
And with revenues down in all F&B outlets (Food and Beverage for you non-Vegas rubes out there) up and down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, this is the hottest time to dine in more ways than one.
Postrio is featuring a $45 tasting menu with a carafe of (decent) wine for two. I get it wrong on the video, but let’s face it: Who the hell watches TV at 6:45 AM anyway except shut ins, The Food Gal, and stipppers coming home from work?*
Spago has a six course tasting menu of Eric Klein’s tasty Alsace-goes-Californian cuisine for $65/per – a whopping 35% discount for the same grub served the other 10 months of the year. The co-joined fraternal restaurant twins Sushi-Roku/Boa Steakhouse – at the other end of the Forum Shops- simplify things by discounting their entire menus 20% until Labor Day.
And if you’re still stuck in Caesars with a hankerin’ for some down-home vittles like Mom used to make, the aforementioned Guy Savoy features a $90 three-course menu (more like 5 courses with an amuse here and a chef’s treat there), that is French perfection personified, and fully 50% less than you’ll pay the rest of the year.
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*Answer: Drug dealers still at work.