NERO’S STEAKHOUSE

I am a lover of beef, but I believe it does great harm to my wit. – Shakespeare

Once called the Spanish Steps, a steakhouse has been located on this corner of the sprawling Caesars casino as long as ELV can remember. For some reason (mainly having to do with his abhorrence of mediocrity), he had always avoided eating here.

But then he started hearing (first from uber-pr guy Ken Langdon, then from others), that this in-house operation was actually dry-aging its beef on the premises. “Really?” he thought to himself. “Actually hanging sides of beef and steaks in a refrigerated locker for weeks to allow natural evaporation and enzymes to work their magic on the meat, turning it from flabby steer muscle, into funky fabulousness?”

When these questions were confirmed in the affirmative, and all doubts quelled, he was in faster than you can say postmortem myofibrils proteolysis.

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VINTNER GRILL

Vintner Grill oenophile update: beginning this week (2.20.09), VG now features 50 wines for under $50 on its list. Bravo…and some of our criticism below should be (re)considered accordingly.

We like everything about the Vintner Grill except the wine list. To our oenophilic sensibilities, it’s unfocused and strangely priced, and there’s too much going on and not enough at the same time.

There’s lots of wine from lots of countries, but look on any single page you’ll find a few bargains, precious few bottles in the $50-80 range, and then a number of big hitters that’ll set you back a least a Benjamin.

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The Trouble With Encore

There are passion restaurants and there are money restaurants. Rarely do the twain ever meet, and asking them to do so in Las Vegas is like expecting a stripper to take a check.

A cynic would say all casino restaurants are only about numbers and cash, but Steve Wynn has tantalized us before with the prospect of great food, generated by a passionate chef, generating lots of dough in the High Mojave. For what was Alex Stratta’s Renoir in the Mirage but an attempt to blend haute cuisine with lowbrow gambling?

Then came the Bellagio in 1998 — a place that sold its soul to the celebrity chef devil (igniting that stampede in the process) — and which took a fair amount of heat from the national food press for pretending to be passionate about food even as its absentee chefs did little more than wave at their operations from 30,000 feet as they flew from coast to coast.

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