KLAS TV Channel 8 (CBS) – Restaurant of the Week – RAKU Japanese Charcoal Grill

RAKU is so good it’s scary. Fresh, pristine, pure Japanese robatayaki cooking like Las Vegas has never seen, and fast becoming a foodie mecca like we’ve never had off the Strip.

Uber-seafood chef Paul Bartolotta told me he’s been twelve (12!) times in two months and still isn’t tired of it.

We (Food Man, #2 Son of Food Man, and The Food Gal) went last night and tried three desserts (after some pickled Bonito guts, beef liver, cold soba noodles et al), and found the melting chocolate cake to be possibly the best in town – ditto the watermelon grantinee (called sorbet on the menu).

Chef/owner Mitsuo Endo told us (through his interpreter – the adorable Risa) that he originally came here to cook in a restaurant in, of all places, Anthem – that bastion of bad taste in Henderson.* Anthem’s loss was the rest of the town’s gain.

And for the first time on TV, watch the world’s greatest restaurant critic** eat a pig’s ear on a morning news show.***

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* As in: houses (ginormous), cars (nothing but SUV’s), traffic (unbearable) and good restaurants (non-existent)

** Self-proclaimed

*** YouTube here I come.

You heard it here first….Gagnaire and Brennan coming to Vegas

Shhhhhh…Don’t tell anyone (let’s just keep this a secret between ourselves shall we?), but two mega-fabulouso chefs are coming to Las Vegas.

Pierre Gagnaire is close to (or has) inked a contract with MGM-Mirage’s CityCenter to open an outpost in the Mandarin Oriental slated to open there next year. Gagnaire is the chef-owner of his eponymous, Michelin 3-star restaurant on the Rue Balzac in Gay* Paree. He also runs outposts in Tokyo and Hong Kong where late last year he fed us the most expensive lunch we’ve ever had atop the Mandarin Oriental in that amazing city….a place where the name just seems to fit a bit better, wouldn’t you agree?

Terrance Brennan of Picholine and Artisanal fame (two of our faves in NYC), will be coming to the Echelon project – probably the Shangri-La.** Brennan has been instrumental in the resurgence of artisanal cheeses in America, and Picholine (as in olive), his Michelin-starred restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan has been a foodie mecca since the mid-90’s.

In honor of these announcements, this might be a good time to explicate on what makes Gagnaire’s food so fabulous. Click here for my article – written for www.JohnMariani.com – on my meal at Pierre TT (don’t ask me what that funky TT means – a “P”? Pi? A pie? – but’s it’s on all the matchbooks) in Hong Kong. The article is also Part Three of a travelogue I did on my memorable meals in that strange and wonderful city.

Click here and here for Parts One and Two of Eating Hong Kong.

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* As in: excited with merriment and delight

** All prophesies made by ELV come with the Easterbrook Guaruntee: All predictions true or your money back!

Budweiser goes Belgian – true beer lovers rejoice

The beer true suds lovers love to hate isn’t really going anywhere, but Anheuser-Busch has just been bought by Belgium’s brewing giant InBev, basically because it’s been hemorrhaging profits like a busted keg for ten years. And it couldn’t have happened to a lamer, more insipid product.

In case you don’t get the point, we’ve always hated Budweiser (although we must confess in the past to having a certain fondness for Michelob). Here’s why we’ve disdained it so for years, concisely summarized in a Salon.com piece that traces the rise and fall of our least favorite beer.

Although it did inspire the only two beer jokes we know:

Joke #1: Drunk to  drunk: “Does beer make you smart?” Drunk back to drunk: “Well it made Bud-wiser.”

Joke #2: How is drinking Budweiser like making love in a canoe? Answer: Because it’s f*cking close to water.

Writer Edward McClelland gets around to that last joke, at the very end of the article, and he bids a not-so-fond farewell to what’s been a blight on the American beer landscape for over a hundred years.

Fun Food Fact #1: early taste tests among St. Louis drinkers found them spitting Budweiser back at the bartender.

Fun Food Fact #2: founder Aldolphus Busch called his infamous brew “dot schlop” and drank wine instead.

Twenty years ago, Budweiser sold more beer in a day than all the craft beers in America did in a year!  McClelland also quotes another of our favorite beer statistics: in 1980 (the year yours truly discovered those fabulous elixirs known as Anchor Steam and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) there were but eight craft brewers in America. Today there are more than 1,300.

So raise a glass (of Rogue Porter, Fat Tire Amber, Abita lager, Stone IPA, Hennepin Farmhouse Saison et al ) to the McDonald’s of breweries, and let’s hope those fer-in-ners (who know a thing or two about the art and craft of beers), will improve things….or permanently relegate “Bud” to the back shelves of 7-11’s everywhere, where it belongs.