Eating Las Vegas » The List

EATING LAS VEGAS Top 10 Announced

John Curtas — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:20:40 +0000

The Top 10 Restaurants in Las Vegas, according to EATING LAS VEGAS – The 50 Essential Restaurants are (in alphabetical order):

Bar Masa

CUT

Estiatorio Milos

Guy Savoy

Joel Robuchon

L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon

Le Cirque

Michael Mina

Picasso

Twist

The List

John Curtas — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:25:57 +0000

Being a restaurant critic is like being a horse put out to stud; it sounds like a good idea until you have to do it on command all the time. – Colman Andrews

Being a restaurant critic is like being a porn star; most schmucks think they would like it and could do it, but wouldn’t and can’t. – ELV

Here’s where we’ve eaten in the past two weeks:

Central (four times)

Giuseppe’s

J & J Szechuan

Flame Kabob

The Barrymore

Carnevino

P. J. Clarke’s

Yellowtail

Sirio

Island Sushi (twice)

Marche Bacchus

Sushi Fever

D.O.C.G.

Milos

Bouchon

Yasou!

Comme Ça

Mon Ami Gabi

The New York List

John Curtas — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:26:41 +0000

Where we ate in NYC… in order of awesomeness:

Food Network’s Kitchen Stadium

Amy’s Bread

Pizza Box

Esquire’s Best Restaurant Cities (Vegas is #6)

John Curtas — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 23:39:05 +0000

America’s Best Restaurant Cities: 2010 Edition

December 22, 2010 at 3:24PM by John Mariani

A decade ago it was easy enough to contend that if you wanted the best French food you’d go to France, the best Italian food you’d go to Italy, and the best Japanese food you’d go to Japan. But if the last ten years have shown gastronomes anything, it’s that food the equal of any in the world is now to be found in the USA. And not just in New York or San Francisco. Cities like Chicago, Houston, Washington, and Boston have enormous breadth and depth in many ethnic categories.

The fact is, you won’t find better French haute cuisine than you will at Le Bernardin in New York or better Italian food than at Spiaggia in Chicago or better sushi than at Urasawa in Beverly Hills. For seafood, Seattle is paradise; for vegetarian, head for Berkeley; and for the grandest deluxe, Las Vegas is an international contender.

So, what are America’s best restaurant cities — in order of excellence?

1. New York — No contest, really. With more than 20,000 restaurants and eateries — and an increasing number of really good food carts — NYC rules, not least because New Yorkers and 35 million visitors are willing to spend the money for the best and because expense-account breakfasts and lunches drive a phenomenal amount of restaurant business. It was at the Four Seasons, opened in 1959, that the term “power lunch” was coined by Esquire; the “power breakfast” started at the Regency Hotel. The tradition of great food (at sometimes-towering prices) continues with remarkable new openings including Osteria Morini, Lambs Club, Compose, Ciano, and ABC Kitchen (pictured above). Then there’s Eataly, the sprawling new food hall that draws daily crowds that rival those at MoMA or Yankee Stadium.

In downtown neighborhoods from Tribeca to Nolita and everywhere in between, there is hardly a block that doesn’t have two or three restaurants on it. The pizza, hamburger, pork, hot dog, and bao sandwich wars are real and raging, and the Jewish delis still pile phenomenally good pastrami on rye without let-up.

2. Chicago — Chicagoans love to eat with abandon and refuse to be gouged by the bill. So you almost always get a square meal for a square deal, now more than ever with the rise to eminence of the gastro-pubs like Longman & Eagle, the Purple Pig, Avec, the Girl & the Goat, and the Bristol, each with its own swagger and exaltation of charcuterie culture.

Chi-town’s historic restaurants, like Gene & Georgetti’s steak house, are now few in number, but waves of conventioneers keep longstanding classics like Charlie Trotter’s, Spiaggia, and Tru packed. There’s no better or more seminal Mexican restaurant anywhere than Topolobampo, and the city is America’s epicenter for avant-garde, molecular cuisine.

3. San Francisco — Even if you don’t accept San Franciscans’ insistence that the stellar restaurants of Napa and Sonoma Valleys are part of their gastronomic landscape, no city (except New Orleans, below) is more serious about its food and wine than San Francisco. It was here that the New American Cuisine movement was born at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, where Mediterranean was married to Northern California provender at places like Piperade, where Cal-Ital took flight at Oliveto and Quince, where vegetarian food was lifted beyond its polemics at Green’s, and where Asian cuisines have flourished ever since the Chinese emigrated here in the 19th century.

4. New Orleans — The standard greeting in New Orleans is, “Where’d you have lunch and where you going for dinner?” Which makes perfect sense because the city’s principal tourist attraction is its high-class Creole restaurants and lowdown Cajun eateries. Five years after Katrina and just months after the Gulf oil spill, the Crescent City is back on its feet, and its cooks are invigorated, shaken from their shock and stupor, so that old-timers like Brennan’s and Commander’s Palace are better and brighter than ever, newcomers like Stanley are making prole favorites like po’ boys into great dishes, and a veteran soul-food eatery like Willie Mae’s Scotch House is still doing their nonpareil fried chicken and red beans with rice. Life on the Mississippi is good again.

5. Los Angeles — Although L.A.’s most exciting, edgy decade was from 1985 to 1995, its restaurants’ showiness and celebrity idolatry have faded in favor of more solid innovation and honest cookery. Wolfgang Puck continues to surprise everyone, not only by keeping Spago at the glamorous top of its form but with a stunning morphing of the American steak house at Cut and, this past year, Chinese food at WP24. Piero Selvaggio’s Valentino in Santa Monica still ranks among the top five Italian restaurants in America, and the city’s Japanese food mavens are as manic about discovering great new restaurants as any sushi addict in Osaka. And, everywhere, restaurants are done with a whole lot of La-La-Land style.

6. Las Vegas — Say what you will about Sin City and its expensive tinsel, but developers like Steve Wynn and Carl Icahn have put their billions where their mouths are. Even if most of the marquee names like Joël Robuchon, Alain Ducasse, Guy Savoy, and Pierre Gagnaire are absentee chefs, there is no disputing the high quality of their restaurants, from décor and table settings to cuisine and wine lists. Those chefs who are in their kitchens, like Paul Bartolotta of Bartolotta Ristorante, Alessandro Stratta of Alex, and Julian Serrano of Picasso, have proven themselves among the very best anywhere. What Vegas lacks are the kinds of ethnic neighborhoods other great resto cities have, but that may come in time when the recession leaves town.

7. Houston — Solid, across the board, describes Houston’s food scene, from Goode Co. Barbecue to Hugo’s Mexican restaurant, from the New Texas Cuisine of Robert Del Grande’s RDG + Bar Annie to the opulently grand Italian food at Tony’s. Américas pioneered Nuevo Latino cuisine here, and the Vietnamese immigrants, who control the city’s seafood industry, have contributed enormously to Houston’s vitality.

8. Washington, D.C. — Money, lobbyists, and lawyers fuel the Capital’s dining scene, even if our stalwart legislators can’t accept dinner from BP, the NRA, the AMA, or the NFL. D.C., especially for its size, has the country’s best Spanish restaurant, Taberna Alabardera; its best Indian restaurant, Rasika; and an increasing number of first-rate Italian restaurants, like Bibiana downtown and Capri in nearby McLean, Virginia. And few would dispute that chef Michel Richard is not a national treasure and an inspiration for chefs everywhere, both at Citronelle in Georgetown and the brand-new Michel’s in Tyson’s Corner.

9. Boston — Boston long ago outlived its Beantown nickname (in fact, it’s tough to find baked beans anywhere in town these days), evolving into an East Coast version of San Francisco, where a 1980s generation of chefs including Lydia Shire, Ken Oringer, Jody Adams, Jasper White, and Gordon Hamersley took the New England cornucopia and exacted their own imaginations to create restaurants of refinement, innovation, and honest good taste. By the same token, its historic restaurants, like Durgin Park and Locke-Ober, shook off their rust and are no longer considered tourist traps, instead serving up true and traditional Boston fare with the kind of ingredients you can only find off its shores.

10. Seattle — Were it not for Pike Place Market, I’m not sure Seattle would be a great restaurant town, but its importance cannot be underestimated in a city so perfectly situated to take advantage of the bounty of the Northwest and the Pacific — not to mention access to terrific wines from local vineyards. The quality of the food at Pike Place Market challenges local chefs to do their best with the best, and to treat those ingredients with respect, not gimmickry. Well-established places like the always exciting Canlis and Tom Douglas’s Dahlia Lounge and Etta’s Seafood, and the well-positioned Ray’s Boathouse on Shilshole Bay, have been joined by wonderful, down-to-earth restaurants like Café Juanita, the always packed Salumi run by Mario Batali’s father Armandino, and Anchovies & Olives.

PLUS: Esquire’s Best New Restaurants 2010 >>

ELV note: Let’s hope this puts to rest once and for all, all the p.r. whining about how “John Mariani hates Las Vegas.”

An Insider’s Guide to EATING LAS VEGAS – The 50 Essential Restaurants

John Curtas — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:58:49 +0000

Q&A: John Curtas, co-author of Las Vegas’ new restaurant guide

Spencer Patterson

Wed, Nov 17, 2010 (8:35 p.m.)

Illustration: Chris Morris

What happens when three food critics get together and try to pick the city’s 50 best restaurants? We ask the Weekly’s John Curtas, who teamed up with Max Jacobson and Al Mancini on Eating Las Vegas: The 50 Essential Restaurants, out this week on Huntington Press.

Did the three of you approach the project planning to include 50 restaurants, or did you arrive at that number once you evaluated Las Vegas’ food scene?

I think the 50 kind of evolved. My first top-50 list had 75 restaurants on it, but 50’s a good round number. Vegas probably doesn’t have enough of a broad-based culinary scene to do a top 100.

Eating Las Vegas’ top 10: • Alex (at Wynn); • Bartolotta Ristorante Di Mare (at Wynn); • Bar Masa (at Aria); • Cut (at the Palazzo); • Guy Savoy (at Caesars Palace); • Joel Robuchon (at MGM Grand); • L’atelier (at MGM Grand); • Picasso (at Bellagio); • RM Seafood (At Mandalay Place); • Twist (at Mandarin Oriental)

I’m guessing you guys agreed on 30 or 40 fairly easily. How tough was ironing out the rest?

Exactly. The first 35, maybe even 40, were fairly easy to come by. Those last 10 or 12 … we had several lunches … knives were drawn … forks and glasses were slammed down on tables … people got up and stormed away over a few. Then we just compromised. And at the end we all shook hands and remain friends. We still love to needle each other, but I think we have a lot of respect for each other, too.

How much did you guys consider variety—be it type of cuisine or neighborhood or price range—versus just picking the best food, period?

That’s where our personal prejudices really came into play. I’m more the persnickety foodie among the three of us, so I just wanted it to be the best 50 restaurants in town. I don’t care if all of them are located in one hotel (laughs). Max is enamored of all of these little Asian hole-in-the-walls and real particular restaurants that specialize in one dish or two. And Al is much more of an everyman. He was looking at the reading audience more, like, we should have something for the hip kids to go to, and mom and pop taking their kids out for dinner. We should have something for everybody.

Both of them were more savvy than me when it came to broadening the base of the book. I would have been just about the food. And I compromised and saw it their way. ’Cause I think on one level they’re right. If you’re gonna write a book that’s gonna sell a lot of copies and have a lot of people wanna read it, you can’t just have the top French restaurants and the top Italian restaurants in the hotels. That would be kinda boring after a while.

Were there times you guys simply couldn’t agree, and it came down to a straight vote?

We had two rules that are kind of contradictory. One was, two can always outvote the third. But the corollary to that was, each of us had absolute veto power. And somehow it worked. Sometimes, two of us said, “We want this one in,” and the odd man out would go, “Okay.” And sometimes, when the veto was strong enough, we would say, “He really doesn’t like that one. We can’t in good conscience put it in.”

Did you personally veto anything?

Yeah. We have a veto section in the book, which I think is the most interesting part. One of us will say why a restaurant deserves to be in the top 50, and then the person who vetoed it has to write an explanation of why they hated it. I think of the six I vetoed three.

Example?

Martorano’s [Cafe Martorano] in the Rio was the one I put a vehement veto on. I just think it’s a mediocre Italian restaurant. I’ve eaten there twice and didn’t like either one of them. But somehow Max and Al love it. They buy the hype or whatever. But I just put my foot down. I vetoed that and I vetoed Paymon’s [Mediterranean Cafe].

Any other Vegas institutions left out?

Andre Rochat’s restaurants [Alizé, Andre’s]. No one even had to veto them. All three of us said, you know, he’s gonna be apoplectic about it, but time has passed by his food. The kind of cooking you get in these big hotels now is way better than what he’s putting out. So he doesn’t get even a mention in the book.

Was there a place you adamantly championed—and successfully persuaded the others to include?

Mario Batali’s Carnevino. Max and Al thought there were too many steakhouses in the book already—we had Cut in the top 10 and three or four more in the top 50—but I think Carnevino is one of the best steakhouses in America. Batali’s a great chef, and we already had B&B [Ristorante] in, but I went to bat for Carnevino.

What’s one inclusion that might surprise readers?

Los Antojos. It’s a complete hole-in-the-wall, but all of us went there multiple times and the food is just fantastic. Probably the best fresh-made Mexican food in town.

What’s the rough Strip/off-Strip breakdown?

Two-thirds Strip restaurants, maybe even 70 percent Strip. We wanted to give a lot of love to the neighborhoods, but even somebody like Al, who really likes to go out in the neighborhoods and try all these little places, had to admit that the world-class cooking is taking place on the Strip. It’s hard to deny that.

Obviously, chefs and restaurants in Vegas come and go constantly. Do you guys plan to update the list from time to time?

We hope so. The idea is for this to be a franchise. We’ve already got a whole list of things we want to improve and expand for next year. And the pre-sales have been phenomenal. The idea is for this to go on for years and become the go-to guide for Vegas restaurants.

Eating Las Vegas is also the name of your blog. How’d you get the others to agree to title the book that?

Back in May or June we had a meeting about the title. I always thought Eating Las Vegas should be the name, but for the first time in my life I didn’t say a word. And finally, [publisher] Anthony Curtis—no relation—said to me, “You know the name I like?” And I said, “Eating Las Vegas?” And he went, “Yeah.” And it took about 30 seconds for everybody to say that should be it.

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ELV note: Many thanks to Spencer Patterson and the LVWeekly for the interview. Below are some more inside tidbits that might interest you.

Top 10 (in alphabetical order, because if we had to rank #’s 3-10, we’d still be arguing and the book would’ve never gotten published):

ALEX

BAR MASA

Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare

CUT

Joël Robuchon

L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon

Picasso

Restaurant Guy Savoy

RM Upstairs

Twist by Pierre Gagnaire

Number of meals (mostly lunches) it took to hash out the final 50:

Best lunch of the bunch:

Border Grill

Number of nasty, insulting, petulant e-mails exchanged:

At least one for every restaurant in the book (i.e. well over 50)

Number of times food was actually thrown across the table in disgust:

Twice

Who did the throwing:

Mancini and ELV

Foodstuffs thrown:

Shrimp and a small, tasty baguette

Number of times someone stormed out of a restaurant:

Once

Who did the storming:

ELV

Biggest debate amongst the authors:

Leaving Raku out of the Top 10 (some of us believe it belongs there, but who would we bump?)

Second biggest debate(s) amongst the authors:

See the veto section

Celebrity chef who didn’t even rate a debate:

Emeril Lagasse

Celebrity chef we all wished was in the book (sigh):

Daniel Boulud

Chefs/owners with more than one restaurant in the Final 50:

Julian Serrano, Mario Batali, Wolfgang Puck, Joel Robuchon, Michael Mina, the Maccioni family.

Humblest restaurants in the Final 50:

Settebello, Monta, M&M Soul Food Cafe, Los Antojos, China MaMa

Biggest hope for the next issue:

That we expand the neighborhood and Chinatown sections, and that Jacobson and Mancini put their forks down (and shut their pie holes) long enough to bask in (and absorb) all of ELV’s brilliance.

Best place to buy the book right now (before it hits all the bookstores):

http://www.shoplva.com/products/eating-las-vegas

The List

John Curtas — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:20:08 +0000

A list, in order of excellence, of the places at which we’ve eaten in the past week (without commentary):

Valentino

Bartolotta

David Burke

Mon Ami Gabi

Simon

Marche Bacchus

Carnevino

Ocha Thai

Krung Thai

Lagasse Stadium

Emeril’s Fish House

Nozomi

Grind

The List

John Curtas — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:18:35 +0000

A weekly update of where ELV has eaten in the past week (in descending order of quality):

Bouchon (twice)

Lotus of Siam

Postrio

Stratta

Taqueria Canonita

Kabob Palace

Pho Kim Long

Lola’s Louisiana Kitchen

The Hot Dog Guy

Terra Rossa

Carl’s Jr.

Wendy’s

Pink’s