Carlos Buscaglia Is Leaving DUE FORNI

The pizza ovens will remain. The pastas will continue to be made. The uber-cool drinks, funky wine list and Neapolitan pies aren’t going anywhere.

But Due Forni is losing the man who (along with Alex Taylor) invented the concept and has kept it going for the past six years.

Yes, Carlos Buscaglia is moving on, going back to the Strip, and leaving his pizzeria progeny behind.

And suddenly, Las Vegas feels a little less artisanal, more by-the-numbers, and not quite as culinarily compelling.

Six years ago it was a match made in heaven. Six years ago, the Strip was in the doldrums, and chefs like Buscaglia, Howard Choi, and Daniel Ontiveros were looking to make their mark in the ‘burbs. One by one they sought to pioneer and present a better way of eating to the citizens of Las Vegas. One by one they tried to elevate our food scene, and one by one they (along with David Clawson, Bradley Ogden and others) have crashed upon the rocks of our insatiable addiction to prefabricated, freeze-dried and franchised food.

There have been some success stories, to be sure: Dan Krohmer’s Other Mama being the most notable of the bunch. But by and large we are a blue collar town who prefers the sanitized and safe to the original and thought-provoking.

“There’s too many chain restaurants and too many people who want to eat in them,” is how Carlos put it to me last night. “It can be very discouraging.”

Indeed it can. Every day at my office I’m confronted by staff and co-workers who prefer Jimmy John’s and Claim Jumper to something owned by a local. All they really know is that these places are safe and predictable, and that’s all they really want. Instinctively they know, what Buscaglia and I know: that it takes a certain leap of faith to put yourself in the hands of a local chef. Better by far to trust the judgment of thousands before you, and give yourself over to a formula that’s worked millions of times, be it in making a mediocre sandwich or a fried chicken chalupa.

That’s what Due Forni and Buscaglia have been up against from the get-go, and that’s what they’ve succeeded against, against all odds.

But, as he explained to me, it’s time to move on.

“Frankly, I’m tired of cooking everything in two ovens and in a 400 square foot kitchen with no stove. I’m looking forward to managing a big kitchen again.”

That shouldn’t be a problem where’s he’s going since HEXX (where he’ll be running the kitchen), is a multi-tiered, high-volume operation that will keep Carlos on his toes.

What they are gaining Due Forni will be losing: a chef with great taste, and serious cooking chops. Buscaglia has been on the Vegas food scene since the early 90s when he was slinging noodles at Pasta Mia. From there he worked his way up the kitchen ladder all the way to becoming top toque at Fiamma, before departing to pursue his dream of bringing great ingredients and great pizza to the neighborhoods.

He succeeded and Due Forni succeeded, but time marches on and new challenges must be faced. From the sound of things, new ownership is taking over DF and, for the time being, the template will remain in place. (It still does a bang-up business most nights of the week, despite being surrounded by shopping malls with loads of shitty dining options that the public can’t get enough of. I’m talking to you, Downtown Summerlin.)  It remains to be seen if they do Carlos’s legacy proud, but let’s keep our fingers crossed that the dough will be just as crispy-chewy, and the toppings just as top-shelf as ever.

Even if they do, however, not having Carlos Buscaglia cooking off the Strip just made eating off the Strip a little less tasty.

The Dirt on Dirty Dining

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People love to be grossed out. People also love to think that dark-skinned and strange-talking mom-and-pop restaurateurs are the only ones doing the grossing-out.

For those who live in fear of being served the unspeakable by the unsanitary, KNTV’s Darcy Spears and her weekly “Dirty Dining” feature are there to exploit those fears in the form of lazy racism disguised as consumer reporting.

It doesn’t take a sociologist to decipher what Spears and her shameless producers are up to. “Worms at Tacos El Gordo” the headline announces. “Roaches at Thai Street Cafe!” “Rat Droppings at Honey Pig!” “Raw Meat Issues at Korean Garden!” A quick look at the KNTV Home Page demonstrates that this “investigative reporter” makes a living from reading Southern Nevada Health District reports and then trolling Asian and Mexican restaurants in hopes of ambushing and embarrassing them.

More often than not that person is an Asian- or Mexican-American who looks like a deer caught in the headlights when Spears shows up at their front door.

“You know you have to be clean even when you’re really busy?” she asks with all the hard hitting chops of a weather girl wannabe.

Because of course, she proclaims with grave inflection, “…the onions themselves were not being washed.”

“That’s the head of a chicken…” she exclaims as if she didn’t know they ever had one. Then comes, “Tyler says they use them to cook broth,” her voice fading in quiet disbelief. Finally, dripping with false sincerity and classic intonations of self-seriousness, there’s: “…cut lettuce that was kept at room temperature.”  Quelle horreur!

She then proceeds to walk through the place, with the haughtiness of a third grade teacher, pointing out various things that she thinks need to be cleaned up.

It’s all pretty craven and embarrassing (for the restaurant, for the viewer and for her – even if she’s clueless), but where she and her station really show their innate bigotry is a few minutes later in the same report.

The last minute of the February 15th segment is devoted to a raw sewage spill in Applebee’s. Seems like a toilet backed up and Applebee’s employees were walking through human waste in the restaurant. What is notable about this “reporting” is what it does not contain. There’s no ambush, no interview, no attempt to contact Mr. Applebee to inquire about the company policy for having cooks and waitresses walking through human shit. No attempt to ask customers what they think. No manager in the headlights. Just a few shots of a soap-sudded floor and the statement that it was eventually cleaned up.

And we’re talking human feces here folks, not a small splatter of chicken blood on the side of a refrigerator.*

So Applebee’s gets a pass and a family pho parlor gets the third degree. So it goes every week with this whole enterprise — a segment that’s selling sensationalism and stereotypes, not news you can use. (I don’t recall her ambushing anyone at Firefly after it poisoned hundreds of patrons four years ago, or more recently when it hosted a cockroach convention.)

To prove my thesis, I looked through 746 pages of Southern Nevada Health District restaurant reports, involving 14,778 inspections to see just how many larger operations Darcy “Chief Investigator” Spears actually “investigated.”

Aside from the casual mention that Appelbee’s got, the answer is bupkus. I could find no mention on the KNTV website of places like the California Hotel, Klondike Casino, or Emerald Island (all of whom, this year, received over 30 demerits from SNHD in its inspections). Even if Spears did call attention to these places, it’s dollars to doughnuts she didn’t show up on the hotel floor with her camera and a list of questions for the CEO.

No, she reserves that treatment for people who don’t push back. Look no further than the October, 13, 2016 report on Korean Garden BBQ. A raw onion sitting on a shelf appalls her. A food stain on stainless steel is cause for alarm.

“Not a sanitary condition to be defrosting meat,” she says like she knows anything about the subject. A few flies in the place (because the front door was open), also gives her much cause for faking some concern.

None of these are isolated incidents, all of them are business as usual when you’re in the business of harassing non-white people.

What Spears doesn’t tell you is that she is reading off preliminary health reports — most of which are followed up on within a matter of days to see if the operator has corrected the condition. Many, many restaurants get poor grades after random inspections. The Health District then follows up shortly thereafter to see if the corrections have been made. It is after THAT inspection that the restaurant gets a “final” grade.** Spears like to gloss over this fact by stating that she only goes after the places with the highest number of demerits — even when she knows they will soon be reevaluated with a second inspection. But, of course, that wouldn’t make good TV. Better by far to catch them with their pants down after that first score, play up all the disgusting things you can, and then casually mention at the end of the segment that the restaurant now has an “A.”

None of this would matter if there was any perspective being brought to bear. But in the Darcy Spears world, a dishtowel next to food is cause for the same alarm as expired spinach and cockroaches.

“Hopefully that knife tip didn’t come off in anyone’s food,” is said with a nervous giggle as she looks upon a stunted blade — just to give you something else to worry about.

Television “news” doesn’t get anymore craven than that. Not content with the information (and “gotcha” interview) she has at her disposal, she has to gin up another cause for alarm (all while pretending to be on the side of her subject), so you’ll keep paying attention.***

That’s where Dirty Dining really goes off the rails. Each segment elevates a bucket on the floor, or produce kept at an improper temperature, to the same sky-is-falling tragedy as rats in the rice bowl. Shaming the little guy is her mission statement, not educating the public.

There’s a public service to be offered here, but it’s too easy to pick the low hanging fruit and choose to intimidate our hard-working immigrant population and call it a day. The entire segment ought to be renamed “Fear and Loathing of Foreign Food.”

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* Spears is all over the guy at Thai Pepper about his overflowing toilet.

** No grades are ever “final,” the SNHD tells me; they always quickly reevaluate a place if they have a significant number of demerits. The grade you see see on the SNHD website is the one given after a follow-up inspection.

*** Which is why some people (and fans of certain restaurants) are starting to (literally) push back.

I Told You So – ANDRE’S BISTRO

“The food in Las Vegas is a lot better than it has to be.” So said John Mariani to me over a decade ago as we were touring the Strip.

These days, a case can be made that the same could be said about our suburbs.

Do the steaks at Andiron have to be so top shelf? Does the seafood at Other Mama or Japaneiro have to be so impeccable? Couldn’t Marche Bacchus get by with lousier pork?  The answers are: no, no and yes. Each of them could shave a buck or two on ingredients and it probably wouldn’t hurt them at all. No one would notice, except maybe a chef (or finicky critic), and their bottom line would be boosted in the process.

The point is they do care about quality, even if their customers can’t tell the difference. This makes them proud of the product they serve, and builds a level of trust between them and their clientele.

Restaurants like the ones mentioned are few and far between in the ‘burbs, but they are slowly increasing in quantity (even in Henderson – thank you Standard & Pour), and we at ELV are glad that their number just increased by one.

André’s Bistro & Bar took over the old DW Bistro space a few months back and has been packing them in from day one. They’ve kept the same floor plan but lightened up the space, given it a serious bar (and interesting, well-priced wine list), and took to cooking real French bistro food with no compromises.

In other words, they finally took my advice and picked up the restaurant gauntlet I’ve been throwing down for this entire century.

To say I’m pleased by all of this is an understatement. French bistro food is the most comforting, eat-every-day restaurant fare in the world. Only true trattoria cooking comes close, but no one in Vegas has the guts to go the full Roman, so Italian authenticity always gets drowned in a sea of cheap cheese and pizza sauce. I’ll leave the I-told-you-sos for another time(?), but let’s just say they’ve taken a classic formula here and run with it. And the public is responding.

One of the reasons, of course, is that the Stacked Hospitality Group had the good sense to move to this area of town — southwest Las Vegas being so restaurant-starved it makes Downtown Las Vegas look like mid-town Manhattan. The other smart thing they’ve done is to put Joe Marsco and Mark Purdy in charge of things. Marsco is the business/front-of-the-house guy and Purdy the Executive Chef, and years of working at Andre’s in the Monte Carlo taught them both a thing or two about executing a menu of French classics.

French classics is what this menu is all about, no matter how many times they tell you that it’s “American Tavern Cuisine.” (For the record, we know that they have to use monikers like “American Tavern Cuisine” in order to appeal to the yokels who might be scared snail-less by an escargot, but make no mistake, this menu is as French as a sidewalk cafe.)

You don’t get much more French than foie gras, and you won’t get any better seared foie than this beauty sitting atop stewed apples and a caramel custard sauce:

Does it taste like an apple pie under that unctuous liver? Absolutely. Does that make it the most decadent starting course this side of Guy Savoy? “Mais oui!” as the French would say.

Speaking of frogs, you can get their legs here (although we haven’t tried them yet), along with a roasted vegetable terrine of concentrated tomato richness:

Just as good are the escargot (swimming in butter, garlic and parsley just the way they’re supposed to be), and moules frites that cede no ground to anything you’ll find at Bouchon, Mon Ami Gabi or Bardot Brasserie.

Of the salads tried, the Lyonnaise was proper in every way….if a bit uninspiring…and the beets with goat cheese were as beet-y as you could want them. (Chefs know I hate beets and are always torturing me with them, but if you like the taste of dirt, these are as tastily done and prettified as any gussied-up dirty root vegetable can be.)

Seafood continues to improve in the neighborhoods, helped along by a more knowledgeable public that now demands it. That explains the existence on the menu of this seafood risotto:

…as well as a textbook-perfect Dover sole “Veronique” that is old school French at its finest:

Neither of these items dishes would ever have come close to a local’s restaurant menu a decade ago, now everyone sees them and dives in. (I’m told the Dover sole sells out quickly on the nights it is offered, and one bite of the thick, sweet fish and you’ll know why.) Someone on my Facebook page said snarkily (when looking at the sole pictured above), “1985 called, they want their plating back.” Yes it’s as old fashioned as it gets, but it’s also as tasty a fish as you’ll find this far from the ocean.

None of this is ground-breaking cooking; all of it is grounded in good ingredients, treated with respect and proper (which is to say French) technique.

We also enjoyed the house-made sausages immensely — sitting as they are on top of some nice, sweet-sour Lyonnaise potato salad — as well as the nutty golden trout amandine:

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…lightly sautéed (not heavily coated and fried) and properly adorned with a nice, brown butter sauce.

Both the trout and the flat iron steak are about the best $22 entrees you can find off the Strip, and the $12 burger is quite a mouthful (for $12) as well.

On our two visits, things seemed to be running preternaturally smoothly for a brand new operation, which is, again, a testament to having grownup professionals in charge of things.

No doubt there are kinks to be worked out (the wine list is tough to read, both the sauce and maître d’hôtel butter for the steak were too cold, and the mason jar hot fudge sundae tastes better than it looks), but quibbles aside, this place hit the ground running and doesn’t look likely to stop.

One place you will want to stop and linger is the dessert menu. Tammy Alana’s creations are the best thing to hit the ‘burbs since free parking.

All of them are classics —  tarte tatin, chocolate walnut gateau, milkshakes (with malt!), Grand Marnier soufflé, lemon tart (pictured above) — all of them are made in-house, and all of them taste like you’re in the hands of a master.

Which you are.

Just like I told you you would be.

ANDRE’S BISTRO & BAR

6115 S. Fort Apache Rd.

Las Vegas, NV 89148

702.798.7151

https://www.andresbistroandbar.com/