What You’ll Be Having at SPARROW + WOLF

 Tomorrow it will have been open for two weeks. Every chef worth their Victorinox has already checked in, and industry types of all stripes are making a point of making a pilgrimage here to see what all the shoutin’s about.

We’ve been to SPARROW + WOLF twice, and plan a third visit before doing a formal review. But as a public service, we thought we’d post some tasty snaps of some of the more interesting dishes to give you, our loyal readers, an idea of what you’re in for when you check it out.

Two caveats: 1) when we say “the more interesting dishes” we basically mean most of the menu, which is nothing if not interesting, and 2) all judgments are reserved until said review, and nothing said herein should be seen as an endorsement of, or opprobrium for, any of the plates, food, drinks or service.

So, without further ado, here’s what you’ll be doing when you get there:

Cozy interior + Big window + Busy bartenders =

Wine refrigerator + Retail sales available + $20 corkage =

Wood + Wood smoke + Fragrant smell of burning wood (this is a good thing) =

Funny names +  Punny names + 5-ingredient cocktails =

Good stemware =

Good beers + Acceptable wines + Decent prices + New Mexican sparkler =

Fresh baked bread + Butter at the right temperature =

Oyster one way + Oyster another way + Oyster a third way =

Bento box + Charcuterie + Lamb tartare + Lump crab + Big shrimp =

Smoke + Burnt wood + Brown booze =

Beets! + The fact that chefs can’t stop serving me beets =

Oddly arranged artichokes + The fact that thistle lovers like alliteration =

Very Spring-y sweetbreads + Peas + Pea shoots + Bacon-wrapped cabbage + Seasonal eating =

Butcher wings + Burnt tomato + Ndjua vinaigrette =

Hamachi + Lychee + Rice cracker =

Maryland blue crab + Kimchee + Crabmeat + Egg =

Duck + Foie gras + Wood ear ‘shrooms + Salted cukes + Plum-duck broth =

Halibut + Alabama white bbq sauce + Citrus confit =

Dry-aged steak + Cephalopod =

Calamansi + Blueberry + Tart =

That’s enough to digest for one Tuesday morning. We’ll give chef Brian Howard and his crew another week or so to get their sea legs under them before we visit again.

In the meantime, just remember this equation: Sparrow + Wolf = unique gastropub.

SPARROW + WOLF

4480 Spring Mountain Road

Las Vegas, NV 89102

702.790.2147

http://sparrowandwolflv.com/

JAPANEIRO – Against All Odds

Kevin Chong’s Japañeiro is going on 3 years old now.

To be perfectly blunt, its survival has always been in doubt to us. Not because it isn’t exceptional, but because it is in an exceptionally difficult location — probably the worst in town for a place serving such fine food.

If you haven’t been, allow us to paint a picture for you. On a desolate corner in the southwest part of town there is a strip mall — one of those L-shaped jobs with spaces for maybe 10 tenants. Japañeiro occupies the corner space, while a few other renters hold on, as they weather the various stages of going into or out of business. There is a sad looking video poker bar on the corner pad, and a lot of depressing dust and emptiness on the other 3 corners of Warm Springs and Tenaya. If you were picking the worst place in town to create extraordinary meat and Asian seafood combinations — dishes that would make even the fussiest gourmand sit up and take notice — you couldn’t pick a more dire location.

But survive Chong has — against all odds. And how’s he’s done it is by bringing in everything from true Belon oysters, to live Japanese abalone to Kegani Hokkaido hairy crabs in season. He’s done it with technically precise combinations and point perfect cooking.

He’s done it by doing Asian fusion food as well or better than anyone on or off the Strip.

Chong previously worked at Nobu, and his facility with blending Japanese ideas with in-your-face seasonings shows his pedigree, and the influence of his sensei, Nobu Matsuhisa. You won’t find better kumamoto oysters with uni and foie gras anywhere — and that includes at Nobu. He toggles back and forth between Asia, France and the U.S.A. with equal aplomb — plating gorgeous escargot with the same flair he shows to giant Nigerian prawns doused with truffle butter, or the best beef gyoza in town:

Speaking of meat, there isn’t a better cut of beef in the ‘burbs than Chong’s 24 oz. dry-aged rib eye, sliced and cubed off the bone and served with an array of salts and dried garlic:

He also does top shelf sashimi:

….and a green tea tiramisu and fried bananas to beat the band:

Put it all together and you have one of our most unique, tastiest, chef-driven restaurants — the type of place foodies are always pining for, and that Las Vegas has precious few of.

With all this in mind, you might be asking yourself, “Why isn’t there a line out the door for this food?”

The answer, of course, has something to do with the location, and a little more to do with the price point. This is not the place to come for bargain basement fusion food. It is the place to come for some of the most unique creations in Las Vegas, made by a chef who’s passionate about what he does. Chong, like Dan Krohmer at Other Mama, is sourcing Strip quality ingredients and giving them an East-meets-West spin that always maintains a delicate balance between creativity and understatement. Cooking this fine is worth the tariff, even if a tab for two can get to $150 very quickly — $75 being price of his multi-course omakase dinner. Ordering a la carte will  keep things right around a hundy for a couple.

Those who blanch at that tariff will be happy to know there’s a happy hour (where everything’s under five bucks), and that the (huge) rib eye (at $65) is a flat out steal.

Location or not, anyone interested in interesting food ought to be eating here.

ELV’s dinner for two with a bottle of $50 wine came to $200 and we left a $40 tip.

JAPAÑEIRO

7315 West Warm Springs Road

Las Vegas, NV 89113

702.260.8668

https://www.facebook.com/Japaneiro/

Enough Already – Chef Worship

Food & Wine: Noma Tulum

“He’s making his own rules,” is how a full-of-himself Yelper described Grant Achatz to me the other day. ” “[Alain Passard] is a culinary god, you know, most chefs are in awe of him,” is how another referred to the well-known French chef. ” L’Arpège is a temple; Noma is a “religious experience” that “changed everything,” according to Joshua David Stein (whoever he is). Osteria Francescana will “change your life with one bite.” Food is profound, and “beyond delicious.” Chefs are visionaries and the rest of us merely unworthy pilgrims begging to bask in the aura of their brilliance.

No, no, no, no, no, fuck no, and please just shut the fuck up.

We are talking about cooks here, ladies and gentlemen. People who take raw materials and apply heat (or not) to them to make them more palatable to eat. No one is curing cancer, creating masterpieces, or doing something heroic. Those being lionized have figured out a way to seduce an always-looking-for-the-next-big-thing food press so that they (the food press) can induce the more-money-than-brains crowd to slavishly worship at the alter of some friggin’ kitchen — a kitchen that excels in eliciting oohs and ahhs from gullible customers and separating rich show-offs from their cash.

It all started when Paul Bocuse became a celebrity in his own right. (This was back in the early 1970s.) “He got the chef out of the kitchen,” is how Pierre Troisgros put it to me when I interviewed him 18 years ago. (When he uttered the words, Troigros did so with a tone of both admiration and regret. He seemed in awe of Bocuse, but also wistful for a profession he knew was changing, and that he no longer understood.)

Chefs started to be a big deal in America in the 80s, but it wasn’t until Tom “Call Me Thomas” Keller hit big with the French Laundry in ’96-’97 that the cult of chef fetishization really took off over here. Concurrent with all the hyperventilating press Keller was getting, the rise of the Food Network in the late 90s gave restaurant cooking a cache previously reserved for musicians and bad boy actors.

By 2006, every working class kid in America suddenly had path to being idolized as a “bad ass,” or, even worse, a “misunderstood, passionate genius.” All the while, the media and the audience and the chefs themselves were losing sight of the big picture: restaurant cooking is a brutally hard, physically-taxing profession, that, at its core, is about as glamorous as window-washing.

The rise of the interwebs and social media over the past 10 years has turned what was once annoying into the sublimely ridiculous. Every chef now has to have a following, and every chef worshiper is hanging on whatever lavish food porn (e.g. the panting, hagiographic, hyper-absurd Chef’s Table) or Instagrammable dish or MAJOR AWARD has been handed out that week. (Cooking has thus become more about publicity and bragging rights than taste, and if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that you can’t taste publicity – or bragging rights.)

Who gives a flying fuck if Rene Redzepi is traveling the world with a pop-up restaurant reserved for the .00001% of the people able to actually eat there? Star-fucking doesn’t make anything taste any better, And as soon as a chef becomes a star, he pretty much quits cooking altogether….so what, exactly are we worshiping? I’m pleased for any chef who can parlay their skills into a brand or fame or some degree of celebrity, but when it comes to what I put in my mouth, the people I worship are the ones in the kitchen, sorting the vegetables, grilling the fish, and stirring the sauce. Mexicans, mostly.