ELV has been a pretty busy boy lately, whipping out articles left and right for a variety of traditional and on-line media. As we said in an earlier post, the national and international media has stopped assigning our dining scene to the warmed-over steam table, and everyone seems interested in Las Vegas again.

Click here to read our take on the current status of our dining scene — written for Real Eats, Barbara Fairchild’s newest, online food ‘zine.

Click here to read our most recent interview in Business Insider about Vegas’ top tables for high rollers and other well-heeled gourmands.

As our loyal readers know, we could’ve easily listed 50, but the author, Matthew Kassel, wanted to keep the list within the range of lucky dice rolls.

FYI: this is the fourth interview/article we’ve done in the past couple of months for a national or international ‘zine about the fine dining scene in our humble burg. Each of them, including The Guardian in the United Kingdom, have wanted to know where the best and most expensive tables in in town are. No one was asking such questions two years ago.

Does this portend a possible resurgence of our fine dining scene? Are better times ahead? Can ELV look forward to more food and wine bacchanalian nights in his future — in the manner to which he has become accustomed?

Hope springs eternal.

On the plate, it was a very good year. In revisiting their best bites of 2011, the Weekly food critics will get you salivating for 2012.

John Curtas

1. Oxtail Bucatini with Oxtail Sauce (Le Cirque, at Bellagio) This Gregory Pugin dish looks like a plain, savory custard but unspools to reveal bucatini strands hiding insanely rich braised oxtail. It’s a meat dish made by angels with a devilish calorie count, and it might be the biggest umami bomb of the year.

2. Roasted Sea Bass over Arugula (Due Forni, 3555 S. Town Center Dr.) Take a talented Italian chef (Carlos Buscaglia) and give him an 800 degree oven and a juicy piece of branzino—in a minute or two he can turn out a crispy, succulent seafood wonder, atop a bed of tangy arugula sprinkled with capers. The best off-Strip seafood dish I had this year.

3. Dover Sole Meuniere (Eiffel Tower Restaurant, at Paris Las Vegas) Simple and sublime fish, served with just the right crust and just a touch of lemon. Sure, it’s expensive ($69), but it’s also one of the best tasting fish in the world, and they don’t charge for the view.

4. Mascarpone Cheesecake (RM Seafood, at Mandalay Place) Theresa Gwizdalowski’s deceptively simple concoction of sublime sophistication performs the seemingly impossible feat of being both adult and childlike. It combines silky, grown-up cheesecake with three flavors (caramel sauce, bubble gum sorbet and malted milk foam) straight from the kiddie-pleasing playbook.

5. Cheddar Cheeseburger (P.J. Clarke’s, at the Forum Shops) Meyer Ranch beef, the perfect grind, seasoned right and cooked to medium rare—this is the gold standard of Strip burgers, for $5-$10 less than those at most steakhouses. The squishy bun is a plus and a must.

Photo: Beverly Poppe

At KoMex, you might get a dish named after you.

Jim Begley

1. Bulgogi-Fried Rice (KoMex Fusion Express, 633 N. Decatur Blvd.) KoMex’s menu is strewn with dishes requested by—and named for—its patrons. You can find this smoky, sweet offering under “Jim’s fried rice.”

2. Caramel Budino (D.O.C.G. Enoteca, at the Cosmopolitan) Sweet and salty? Yes and yes! The Italian pudding at Scott Conant’s casual Cosmo eatery comes adorned with sea salt for a simple flavor contrast in every spoonful.

3. Pad See-Yew (David Wong’s Pan Asian, 2980 S. Durango Dr.) David’s name is on the marquee, but his wife Lisa does the hard work, wok-frying this wide-noodle dish just long enough for perfect smokiness, caramelization and texture.

4. Oxtail Eggs Benedict (Comme Ça, at the Cosmopolitan) Chef Brian Howard’s maniacal mastery brings us braised oxtail, poached eggs and organic spinach atop a Gruyere and pepper pastry—all smothered in bone marrow and truffle Hollandaise sauce.

5. Pepperoni and Meatball Panzarotti (Papa Geo’s, 5597 S. Rainbow Blvd.) Mama Geo hand-prepares each wonderful pocket of joy. If you ask nicely, she’ll combine her housemade meatballs with some pepperoni for a cheesy, meaty extravaganza.

Photo: Christopher DeVargas

Scarpariello is Italian for delicious. Not really, but this Rao’s dish is.

Brock Radke

1. Zooza Benny (Zoozacrackers, at Wynn Las Vegas) Old-school deli gets decadent with chef Sammy Morse’s housemade pastrami and corned beef stacked on crisp potato latkes with poached eggs, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing. I just drooled on my keyboard.

2. Ricotta Ravioli with Smoked Salmon (Aureole, at Mandalay Bay) This incredibly refined starting dish—a smoky, creamy masterpiece augmented with baby artichokes, sugar snap peas and a lemon-thyme sauce—packs enough flavor for an entire meal.

3. Chicken Scarpariello (Rao’s, at Caesars Palace) Perfect poultry and spicy-sweet Italian sausage swim in a sea of vinegary peppers and garlicky butter sauce. It’s tough to pick a favorite dish at Rao’s; it’s even tougher not to order this one.

4. Maple Glazed Quail (Vic & Anthony’s, at Golden Nugget) The Nugget’s steakhouse is Downtown’s best restaurant overall because of inventive dishes like this, a beautifully caramelized bird that looks as good as it tastes.

5. Chips and Irish Curry Sauce (Rí Rá, at Mandalay Place) This is the guilty pleasure pick, full of simple savory goodness: crispy French fries (doesn’t matter what they call them across the pond) are drizzled with a powerful curry-ish gravy. Consider it Irish poutine.

Henderson, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the foodship Herrinterprise. Its ongoing mission: to explore strange new neighborhoods; to seek out new life-enhancing foods and civilized lunches; to boldly go where no sensible restaurant has gone before!

Exaggeration? Only slightly. What chef/owner Chris Herrin is pioneering on south Eastern Avenue may have astronomically great benefits for the denizens of Henderson. The area has been so quality-challenged for so long, decent eats are tougher to find there than on an Earth-bound asteroid. Lucky for southeasterners, the Herrinterprise is trying to change all that.

Photo: Beverly Poppe

Its formal name is Bread & Butter, and it has single-handedly been firing photon pastry torpedoes at the mediocrity that clings on (get it?) up and down this traffic spine—an area that assaults sensibilities and taste buds with chain link after chain link. But our depression has had some benefits. Because even an economic dark nebulae can have a silver lining. In Henderson’s case, it has come in the form of an abandoned bagel shop transformed into a bakery-cum-restaurant that buries any faux-folksy franchise in a dazzling meteor shower of great eats.

The space it occupies is rather generic (imagine that) in one of those strip malls that are so bland you can go three times (as we did) and still not remember which one it is on your fourth trip. Trip after trip, though, is what you’ll be making once you get a bite of Herrin’s superb baked goods—tempting you on the left from the moment you enter. So appetizing are these displays of sticky buns, cinnamon rolls, soft pretzels, cupcakes and muffins, their siren song will beckon you wickedly away from the savory stuff. Resist mightily, star voyager! For two savory sandwiches (alien only in their excellence) await your exploration. Herrin’s muffaletta first made its mark a year ago, traveling around town in the Lulu’s on the Move food truck. Just like the Louisiana original, it’s chock full of good salami, mortadella, ham and provolone—all sitting betwixt a big round bun, sliced horizontally and copiously dressed with a giardiniere of pickled vegetables. Just like the Central Grocery in N’Awlins (where it was invented), the circular sandwich is cut into fat, pie-like slices that easily feed two.

As satisfying as it is, Herrin’s muffaletta isn’t original. It’s more like an overstuffed homage to an icon of meat-between-bread meals. Not so his ham sandwich—the first treatment we’ve ever seen that puts ham and cheese between a sliced waffle and covers the whole enchilada in country milk gravy. Like the muffaletta, it’s so rib-sticking that one is enough for two, especially if you want to save room for dessert. Two minor quibbles: In the South, the gravy would be a tad thicker, and calling the lightly cured ham “country ham” is an insult to Alan Benton and Uncle Jim Newsom—not to mention the aged, salty, crimson-red meats they cure in Virginia, Kentucky and throughout the South.

Menu descriptors aside, the pastrami they serve here on a fresh-baked rye bun might be the last word in rye bread married with smoked meat. But if all of this feels a bit too meaty for you, the breakfast pizza (served at lunch as well) provides a nice, filling, easily-shared antidote without requiring the death of any animal. It starts with a slightly thicker crust—almost English muffin-like—topped with sliced redskin potatoes, green peppers and caramelized red onions. Then they pile on soft scrambled eggs, oozing with fresh mozz, and finish it with a generous sprinkle of Parmesan and thyme, the whole thing providing more umami satisfaction than should be legal before dark. Wash it down with something from their ever-expanding selection of artisanal root beers, and you have a breakfast (or lunch) of champions.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t spent any time waxing poetic about B & B’s pastries, it’s because I can sum them all up at once: ethereally, outstandingly, richly the best damned baked goods anywhere off the Strip. Or maybe even on. Herrin spent seven years baking at Bouchon, and anyone who can keep the notoriously finicky Thomas Keller happy can go baguette to baguette with any boulangerie—as one bite of his muffins, cookies or cakes will convince you.

Captain Chris has aimed his foodship for the caloric stars, and he is taking his voyagers on a trek that’s long overdue. Because of him, no longer will the words “good food” and “Henderson, Nevada” collide in the same sentence about as often as Halley’s Comet visits earth.

ELV note: The following article appears in the current issue of VEGAS magazine that hit newsstands and mailboxes on Friday. Click here to read it in its original format (where you’ll see more tasty snaps of the restaurants and the food), or continuing scrolling below.

	Circo’s Champagne raspberry zabaione is a holiday favorite
	Langoustines with osetra caviar and apple-vodka geleé at Le Cirque

When Sirio Maccioni and his sons, Mario, Marco, and Mauro, took Steve Wynn up on his offer to open at Bellagio in 1998, they chose the opposite route of other celebrity chefs.

Instead of exaggerated, overblown versions of the restaurants that made them famous, they went small. In the case of Le Cirque, they asked hospitality designer Adam Tihany to create a tranquil jewel box amidst the casino cacophony. With Circo, they wanted it to be festive and fun, but on a personal scale, and nothing like the boisterous behemoths that then and now characterize many a Strip dining room. What Tihany dialed up were two of his greatest designs ever: two restaurants that remain, 13 years later, the most convivial places in Las Vegas to celebrate the holidays… or any occasion.

You might say Circo and Le Cirque are two shows under the same big top. A large kitchen connects them, with the Italian half sitting side by side with the slightly smaller French batterie de cuisine. Peeking in during the dinner rush can be a feast for the senses, with the sights and smells of world-class food blurring with the studied freneticism of cooks and waitstaff performing at full bore—all of it spiced with verbal blizzards of Italian, Spanish, and French. Each side has its own rhythms and commanders, and each brings forth act after act of food as delectable spectacle, all punctuated by two of the best service staffs in the business, and all leading up to a crescendo of desserts.

As tremendous as the food is in both restaurants, they sparkle during the holidays (and the other 11 months of the year), for a very special but subtle reason: The staffs at both have remained almost constant since these places opened—an unheard-of level of loyalty and consistency in the restaurant world. At Le Cirque and Circo, you always feel like a party is going on, or about to start, and that everyone from the maître d’ to the busboys are there to make your meal a celebration of fine food and holidays, no matter the day.

Circo-perlative
“It’s our most exciting time of the year,” says Maccioni, scion and oldest son Mario, of Osteria del Circo’s holiday traditions. “We always close for the first week in December because Vegas, unlike New York, is dead right after Thanksgiving. Then the big casino players start getting invited for the holidays, and by December 20, we’re working harder than ever.” Circo, the lighter and brighter of the Maccioni family’s two Bellagio restaurants, makes holiday decorations almost superfluous, but present they are as ornaments and garlands punctuate the festive atmosphere that also offers prime viewing of the Bellagio’s famed fountains.

The less formal of the two restaurants, Circo’s kitchen cartwheels are a bit more crowd-pleasing but no less fun, turning out highly regarded dishes inspired by the Tuscan heritage of Egidiana, Sirio Maccioni’s wife. Executive chef Michael Vitangeli inherited this kitchen last year from a long line of superb Italian chefs, and he keeps it humming along like a well-tuned Ferrari.

The pastas are justifiably famous and, in keeping with Italian tradition, seafood starches take center stage at holiday time. Whether it’s risotto sette mare or spaghetti con aragosta, you can be sure your impeccably cooked rice will be studded with frutti del mare, and your thick, house-made spaghetti will be over-the-top delicious, enhanced by chunks of sweet Maine lobster bathed in a piquant and sweet tomato-brandy sauce. For Christmas dinner, Vitangeli will roast a whole suckling pig and serve it with an apple and chestnut purée, roasted beets, and guanciale, the unsmoked pig’s-jowl bacon so prized by connoisseurs.

One amateur move while dining here during the holidays: not saving room for dessert. At Circo on Christmas Day, pastry chef Philippe Angibeau creates a classic bûche de Noel for feasting families—Genoise cake rolled and frosted with chocolate buttercream to resemble a log ready for the fire festival of the winter solstice. Like all of Circo’s desserts, it’s both dazzling and deeply satisfying.

La Pomme Verte is a delectable holiday dessert.

Le Cirque du Gourmet
It is the spectacle of Le Cirque, both in the design and on the plates, that makes it such a tough ticket during the holidays. Bold colors and circus motifs predominate—the restaurant is resplendent in dark woods, reds, muted yellows, and purples, and during the holiday season, it nearly bursts at the seams with Christmas trees, ornaments, and garlands aplenty for the crowds that start building right around mid-December.

“Everyone has higher expectations then,” says Ivo Angelov, general manager of Le Cirque since 2008. “There are white truffles galore, and some of our best customers from Asia come with entire families of dozens of people.” One such family, the Kweks of Singapore finance-dynasty fame, buys out Le Cirque for one night every holiday season, bringing up to 50 family members in for the best of executive chef Gregory Pugin’s luxurious French creations, such as sautéed foie gras with white chocolate and raisin brioche, langoustines with osetra caviar and apple-vodka gelée, or the impossibly rich (and intriguing) oxtail bucatini timbale with oxtail daube sauce.

This year on Christmas Day, the chef has put together a tasting menu for the senses: Options include sautéed foie gras with white chocolate and raisin brioche, butter-poached Maine lobster, and honey-glazed Barbary duck magret. An additional premium wine pairing is also offered, giving guests a luxurious guided tour through Le Cirque’s list of more than 900 international wines from France’s most renowned regions. Complete the meal with the extravagant chocolate towers for which Le Cirque has been famous for decades, and a blizzard of pastry chef Philippe Angibeau’s over-the-top desserts. But whether it’s an avant-garde tiramisu, a raspberry zabaglione, or textbook-perfect soufflés, there’s no denying their eye-popping appeal and drop-dead deliciousness—everything right at home among the festive surroundings.

Photo by Kevin Marple

Profanity? Violence? Bigotry? Pornographers? Drinking on the job? In restaurant kitchens?  This article in Dallas Magazine of a couple of months ago has it all, and paints John Tesar as a self-consumed chef with horns and a pitchfork, and  Anthony Boudain’s muse or bitch — depending on your perspective.

When he was manning the stoves as Rick Moonen’s #1 at RM Seafood between 2004-2006, we just thought of him as a soft-spoken guy who could cook the bejesus out of seafood.

Read the (long) article and decide for yourself — amidst the threats, tears and recriminations — just how bad a boy he is. You might also wonder about cooks and owners who get put off by ethnic slurs and cursing in kitchens (isn’t that par for the course?), and the ADD and self-destructiveness that drives so many people in the restaurant business.

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Merci beaucoup to www.egullet.org editor, regular Vegas visitor and Friend of ELV Jeff Meeker for sending us the article.

Hobnobbing with talented chefs and publishers of fancy food magazines is something ELV is uniquely suited for.

And by “uniquely suited” we mean  he’s very good at stuffing his pie hole with top flight food whilst feigning interest in the conversation.

It’s a talent many aspire to, but few attain.

Not that it’s that hard….especially if you’re chewing the fat with Eiffel Tower Restaurant’s Joung Sohn, Joel Robuchon’s Kamel Guechida and Sage’s Richard Camarota. And especially if that fat happens to include Sudtirol Speck from the Alto Adige (Al-toe Ah-DEE-jay) region of northern Italy, and copious amounts of Asiago Vecchio and Asiago Fresca cheese.

As good as they were, it was Camarota’s spring goat confit with preserved lemon gremolata that stole the show.

In fact, all of the food was so good — from the grilled mushroom salad with marina di chioggia squash and aged balsamico to the Asiago Fresca souffle — it made remember how long it had been since we last had a taste of Sage.

And bemoan why food like this isn’t available at lunch. But, as we all know, top flight food at lunch in this town is hard to come by. The millions who pack our town for vacations and conventions are usually thinking about things other than their stomachs in the middle of the day.

So, when one of our best opens for a midday meal — to highlight the pristine products of northern Italy and spread the word about PLATE magazine to our local chefs — ELV was there faster than you could say Teifenbrunner Castel Trumhof Gewurtztraminer.

PLATE is an industry ‘zine dedicated to creative chefs and better menus, but it’s website is painfully easy to subscribe to, and a must read by those in the biz or fascinated by it.

It also puts on one helluva plate lunch.

SAGE

In the Aria Hotel and Casino

3730 Las Vegas Blvd. South

Las Vegas, NV 89109

1.877.230.2742

Celebrity Chef Ted Allen Cooks His Favorite Pretentious Foodie Bullshit Meal

BTW: ELV loves some kind of stupid something or other with his expensive fish. And don’t forget the pureed baby turnips!

JUST DUCKY

Photo: Beverly Poppe

Thai restaurants in America too often come in a one-size-fits-all formula. One Panang curry or pad prik king can taste pretty much like any other, most curries all come from the same cans, and if you’ve had one larb you’ve had them all. Most Thai restaurateurs don’t deviate from these formulas – in fact they depend on them – because they know it is this familiarity that helps them capture the customers who crave the sweet-savory-spicy trifecta of flavors for which this cuisine is famous. So generic is Thai food in Las Vegas (with one exception – Lotus of Siam) that when a new one popped up a year ago on West Sahara, boasting a large, white on blue sign advertising a specific type of Thai food, aficionados took notice. This is not your same old, tedious Thai, the sign seemed to be saying, and within a few bites of larb ped (boneless ground duck in chili and lime) or Issan duck soup, you knew you were in the presence of something special. For special is exactly what Weera Thai is, and seekers of the unique in this cuisine finally have another option when they want to explore the fiery food of this country.

Weera is the first name of the chef/owner of the restaurant – Weera Thonguthaisiri – and Issan is the food referred to on the sign and on a special portion of the menu. Both the chef and the food come from this northeastern section of Thailand – a region known for its poverty but also for simple, incendiary cuisine. Issan food is less fussy than other Thai food, and favors Chinese-leaning noodles, lots of salads, and ground meats invariably tossed with lime juice, chilies and herbs.

Before you get to them, though, an order of crab stick is mandatory. Crab meat mixed with cream cheese is wrapped in pencil-sized rice paper sticks and deep-fried in sort of an elongated crab Rangoon, served with a house made plum sauce. These will disappear quickly, and their textural perfection signals someone in the kitchen understands how to balance and deep fry an appetizer. You’ll then be tempted to dive into a definitive duck curry or that duck bone soup (containing as it does half a duck carcass) , but not so fast pilgrim. Surely you’ve had dadd deaw (beef or pork jerky) dozens of times before, but most assuredly, you’ve never had it like this – dried, tender and deeply flavorful – not like a piece of saddle leather requiring endless mastication.

Photo: Beverly Poppe

Having polished off those appetizers, the salads will tempt you next. After repeated trips here, you learn that mincing and mashing are the watchwords of many a dish, so you order crispy catfish salad (expecting deep fried chunks of the fish). What arrives is something that challenges your understanding of what a salad is, as golden brown, crispy ornaments of catfish lace arrive – the effect achieved by making a paste of the fish before frying it —  garnished with julienned  apples and a peppery apple dressing. Surprises like this continue throughout the menu. Larb plar (ground fish with spices) isn’t very common anywhere but northeastern Thailand, but isn’t any less delicious for it. Likewise, ped nom tok (boneless roasted duck with chilies) is quite a treat – both because of its extraordinary flavor, and the way everyone’s face lights up after every bite.

Whole fish are given the full, deep-fried and festooned treatment (every bit as tasty as Lotus’ versions), but those in your crowd who don’t like picking around bones will find the spicy sea bass hot pot deeply sour and satisfying – as the fish comes in beautifully filleted, snow white squares. If fish and fowl aren’t their things, direct them straight to the khor moo yang (marinated barbecued pork with house made spicy tamarind sauce) – a new take on ‘cue that shows the Chinese influence on this cuisine.

Surprises like these abound on the menu, and will make you a repeat customer in no time. Weera is anything but your typical Thai, and the Thonguthaisiri’s have taken the time and money to refurbish this store make it warm and comfortable, and definitely the class act in a small strip mall known for its stiletto shops. In that sense it’s a lot like Lotus: a gastronomic gem sitting amidst low end retail joints that have seen better days. For Vegas’ Thai food lovers, though, it’s just the opposite. Because of Weera’s arrival, things have never been better, and lovers of this cuisine should duck in soon.

If you saw Al Mancini’s review of Cafe de Japon in CityLife last week, you read his tepid, if generally positive review of this unique Japanese cafe. Al is not known for for his superlatives (especially when it comes to Asian cuisines he has no interest in learning about), so ELV thought he’d ladle on a few.

The filter coffee is as rich and smooth as any we’ve ever had…and worth a special trip all by itself…as is the house-made yuzu soda.

That toronin (also called omurice) omelet which perplexed Mad Man Mancini is a common breakfast, lunch, kid and hangover food in Japan. It goes great with the aforementioned coffee and is served with a rich, red tomato sauce (or ketchup if you will) — something everyone on earth except (apparently) good ole Al has done before.

Despite its intense deliciousness, all he could do in the review was “…admit it was an interesting flavor combination.” Never had ketchup with eggs before Al? What food universe were you raised in?

Our mentaiko (spicy cod roe) pasta was perfectly al dente, and rich with fish eggs and spice — as warming a dish as you could ask for on a cold night. Even better were the garlic green beans with waving bonito flakes (aka okonomiyaki) — food that’s fun to watch as well as eat.

Al also found the mayonnaise dressing on a side salad “boring and unnecessary,” again because he didn’t bother to learn how much the Japanese like the condiment. The house-made mocha roll cake tasted of green tea cream filling and  fresh sponge cake, and wasn’t nearly as sweet as Americans like their desserts, something a critic who doesn’t do their homework might mark against it — even though those traits signify its adherence to classic Japanese kisatten (coffee house) cuisine. On the whole though, we’ve gotta give the Al’ster props for hitting something outside his wheelhouse, and for recognizing the tiny, cultural gem this place could soon become.

Our dinner for two came to $56 including tip.

CAFE DE JAPON

5300 Spring Mountain Road #101

Las Vegas, NV 89146

702.431.8038