As near as we can tell, the whole “sushi burrito thing” started a few years ago. (Pardon us for not being more precise, but we give gimmicky food the same degree of attention we pay to another person’s hemorrhoids.)
Finding the Frauds – John Mariani on the Absurdity of the World’s 50 Best List
It’s that time of year again, when Restaurant magazine, an industry journal published out of London, names the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants,” an annual list so nonsensical as to make “Alice in Wonderland” seem like a serious guidebook.
Years ago I was invited to be one of the hundreds of judges for this awards program (and I was to pick the other North American judges), now made up of more than a thousand food writers, chefs and restaurateurs, and well-traveled gastronomes. Each judge casts seven votes, “three of which must apply toward restaurants outside of his or her home region. Voters must have dined at a restaurant within the past 18 months.” After that first year on the panel I realized the whole thing was a farce, for several reasons.
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Korean ‘Cue is Having a Moment
Korean BBQ is having a moment in Las Vegas right now.
What’s happening to it is similar to what sushi went through four years ago.
If you recall, shitty sushi was the rule, not the exception, until around 2012. That’s when Kabuto opened and made everyone sit up and take notice. Suddenly, serious sushi hounds had a place to call their own, and soon enough places like Yonaka, Fish N Bowl, Izakaya Go, Other Mama, Yui and others opened and upped everyone’s game. (Make no mistake, shitty sushi is still everywhere, but at least purists have other options these days.)
Now, the same thing is happening with these bastion of Korean beef eating. For years, decades really, we’ve been saddled with the usual suspects — Korean Garden BBQ, Mother’s Korean — and a few AYCE joints that didn’t exactly break a sweat when tossing the same old same old kalbi and bulgogi your way. As with AYCE sushi, these places stressed quantity over quality, and the cheapest ingredients were their profit path to the promised land. (Which, if you think about for a second, is behind every all-you-can-eat operation.)
But boy have things taken a turn for the better. In less than three months, this popular form of group dining has gone from standardized cheap eats to one with serious, big city cred. Three new Korean ‘cue restaurants have opened recently, and each of them leaves previous Korean ‘cue in their dust. “It’s very much in the LA-style,” one of ELV’s Korean friends remarked. And so they are.
And since Eating Las Vegas considers it its civic duty to test drive these joints for our loyal readers, we thought we’d share some preliminary impressions of the three newest contenders in the Las Vegas samgyeopsal sweepstakes.
