Free Man In Paris

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I was a free man in Paris

I felt unfettered and alive

There was nobody calling me up for favors

And no one’s future to decide Joni Mitchell

American writers have been rhapsodizing about Paris since Ben Franklin’s powdered wig was peeking down some bustier. There’s not much I can add — literary-wise — to the musings of everyone from Henry James to Ernest Hemingway, but I can share a few pointers on what to see and where to eat, along with some musings of my own about what makes the City of Light so compelling, one-hundred years after Ernest & Friends fell in love with it.

The culture of Paris insinuates itself into your soul if you let it. Americans love to talk of snooty Frenchmen and various un-pleasantries, but those are the carpings of the intentionally uncomfortable — the sorts who arrive in any foreign environment looking for something to bitch about.

All you have to do to enjoy yourself in Gay Paree is give in to the Parisian vibe (by turns energetic one minute, and insouciant the next). Leave your American expectations at home, relax, stroll around a bit, and say “bonjour!” and “s’il vous plait” about thirty times a day. Do that and they are almost as nice as Italians.

As I was somewhere over the Atlantic, coming back from ten days walking the streets and haunting cafes from Montparnasse to Montmartre, it occurred to me that this might be my writing future: travelogues for those who might wish to follow in my footsteps in the coming months/years. My covering the Las Vegas food scene has reached its natural end; there are no more mountains for me to climb here, and frankly, it’s more fun these days to see the world rather than wander around (again and again) in my own backyard.

(If you’re dying to hear my mellifluous tones pontificate on where best to exercise your palate in Sin City, tune in Fridays to What’s Right with Sam & Ash — where we whoop it up about food while recapping my eating week.)

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Unshackled by the bonds of servitude to Sin City, I am thus free to eat the world, where, quite frankly, the food, wine, and scenery are better (and often cheaper). Consider this a combination of food diary and love letter to my favorite city in the world, where the sights and smells never fail to astonish me, and where eating and drinking well is as easy as rolling out of bed.

But before you can embrace all the picturesque wonderfulness, you first have to get there, and sad to say, that will be more annoying than anything you encounter once you arrive.

News flash: Flying remains a pain in the ass.

Air France is a shell of its former self. A country’s airline — be it SwissAir, Lufthansa or whatever — used to tickle you with anticipation (“As soon as you board, you feel like you’re almost in the country,” I used to tell my kids.) Now you’re on an airbus in more ways than one. They throw some cardboard food at you a couple of times and wheel a shitty beverage cart up the isle twice (first, an hour into your eight-hour transatlantic haul; then again six hours later), and that’s it.

No cans of soda, no mixers, nothing but water, crappy coffee, tepid tea and supermarket wine. Pro tip: load up on snacks and beverages at the airport. What’s become an insult to passengers has been a boon to SmartWater and SlimJims. None of this applies if you fly business- or first-class, which we never do, preferring to save our $$$s for the food and wine which lie ahead.

Enough negativity, let’s get to the fun stuff.

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Traveling is living intensified. – Rick Steves

Paris the “Being John Curtas” way means you literally lose yourself there; park your worst instincts back home and drink it all in, every waking moment. I become more sanguine, taciturn even (about everything but the ubiquitous dog shit).

Every time I see Paris’s low profile and history-drenched boulevards, I feel like I’m an awestruck ten-year old seeing a big city for the first time. Rick Steves’ quote is no more true than on the streets of Paris, where your senses are excited on every block, and awesome architecture defines every corner.

The French invented blasé (the word and the mood), but no matter how many times I’m in the city (this last trip was my tenth), that’s the one feeling I never have. I’m too busy picking my jaw off the pavement…when I’m not using it.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. – Ernest Hemingway

Image(When I’m in Paris, I’m on a seafood diet: when I see food I eat it.)

The Food. The wine. The seafood! (sea above) The size of the brasseries and the sheer number of cafés means you’ll never go hungry, no matter what the hour.

It’s really one of the most impressive things about Paris: the mind-blowing number of places to feed and refresh yourself. They’ve always been in abundance, but the patisseries/boulangeries (technically not the same thing, but often combined) seem to have doubled in number over the past decade.

The Style: men in snappy coats and women being worn by heroic scarves.  No t-shirts or cargo shorts, please. Someone asked me what the French don’t like about Americans and the answer is simple and understandable: the way we dress.

Finally: awesome architecture and history envelops its iconic restaurants. The sheer beauty of them should not surprise (the French invented the modern restaurant, after all), but the stunning interiors (and how well they’ve aged) are still enough to take your breath away:

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If you can’t enjoy yourself walking around Paris, you need to have your pulse checked.

My advice to anyone traveling to France or Italy is to always find a café to call your own, preferably close to your hotel. Stopping by every morning will start to make you feel like a local, and by your third visit, even the frostiest waiter will start to smile when he sees you.

 Walking, smelling, sitting, sipping cafe au lait. “Encore, s’il vous plait” we say.(“please bring another”)…and your favorite waiter will let you sit there all day, diddling your phone, reading a book, or planning where next to eat  — which is the surest way to make you feel like a Frenchman.

Amazingly though, we actually lose a few pounds on every visit. Five-to-ten miles of walking each day will do that, no matter how many baguettes or soufflés you inhale. Sage advice: use your mornings to plan your pre- and post-dejeuner walks.

If The Food Gal® is lucky, I occasionally agree to a little shopping, just to buy some marital harmony. (Poor thing has always operated under the illusion there is something to do in Paris other than eat and drink.)

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Breakfast, you ask? Fuggidabadit. In France, breakfast (aka “petit dejeuner”) is good for only one thing: thinking about lunch. Some coffee and a croissant is all you’ll need to fuel you for the first few hours of the day. From then on, it’s Katy bar the door/calories here we come, as temptations await on every block.

THE RESTAURANTS

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Straight off the plane, still groggy from jetting the ocean, we staggered into L’Ami Louis (above) perhaps the toughest bistro ticket in Paris. It was worth the wait, which for me had been twenty-five years — a quarter century of hearing about its allure to ex-pats, celebs, and galloping gourmands, followed by a revisionist decade of how gauche and “not worth it” it was. It is the one bistro critics love to hate. Especially British critics, as you’ll see below.

Founded in 1924, they only things that have changed in ninety-seven years are the prices and the dress of the patrons. Some have called its interior “museum-like”, others, like the late, great, splenetic A. A. Gill described it as a “painted, shiny distressed brown dung…set with labially pink cloths which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository.”

All nasty Brit-lit gymnastics aside, what you find when you enter is a classic, narrow, well-worn bistro that feels as comfortable as a pair of well-worn Wellingtons. Where Gill found “paunchy, combative, surly men” waiting tables, all we saw were affable-if-brusque, seen-it-all pros.

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Gill (who died in 2016, and whose hemorrhoids must’ve been acting up in ’11 when he wrote those words) also savaged the food. As much as we were a fan of his knives-out style, we found ourselves silently pleading with his ghost throughout our two-hour lunch. Au contraire, mon frere, we muttered continually. From an ethereally silky slab of foie gras to our deviled veal kidneys to the famous roast chicken (above), this was Parisian bistro cooking at its most elemental and satisfying. True, the recipes probably haven’t changed since Bogart was wooing Bergman, but that’s part of the charm. 

Where Gill found the foie to be “oleaginous and gross”, our bites were of the smoothest, purest duck liver. A mountain of shoestring fries came with our oversized bird, and better ones we had trouble remembering. Ditto the escargot, brimming with butter and electric green parsley — shot through with garlic in all the best ways.

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No fault could be found with the wine list either (pricey for a bistro, but not off-putting), or  a baba au rhum the size of a human head.

“Brits love to bag on the Frogs,” is what we thought as we were paying the bill and thanking the staff. The prices (for solids and liquids), are high but not enough to put you on our heels, especially if you’re used to Las Vegas. (Our lunch came to about 400 euros/couple, with about half being wine.) 

Gill concluded his hatchet job by calling L’Ami Louis the “worst restaurant in the world.” It may not be the best, old-fashioned bistro in Paris, but it’s a long way from deserving such opprobrium. I’d call it a must-stop for our next visit, for that terrine de foie gras alone:
 
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As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. – Ernest Hemingway

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Le Dôme remains le ultimate seafood brasserie in a neighborhood swimming with them. All gleaming glass and brass, it has become a de rigueur to stop for oysters whenever we get to town. Montparnasse is chock full of good restaurants, many of which, like Le Select (1925), La Rotonde (1911) and La Cloiserie des Lilas (1847), are haunted by the ghosts of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and Henry Miller.

These cafes formed the social hub of Roaring Twenties Paris, and, amazingly, continue to hold their own today, one-hundred years after they became American-famous.

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Like many of its equally famous neighbors, Le Dôme is huge, so don’t think twice about dropping in on a whim for a douziane plates and a glass of Sancerre.

Classics like Breton lobster and Dover sole (above), are prepared so perfectly they remind you why these dishes became renowned in the first place, and if you want to hunker down for a full meal, LD dazzles with best of them. The freshness of its cooked seafood is legendary, even in a town known for legendary fresh fish and shellfish.

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For dessert: don’t miss the mille-feuille Napoleon (sliced from a pastry the size of a rugby football) — which elicits ohhs and aahs for both its appearance and taste.

A note about the supposed insufferable French: this was our third visit to Le Dôme in the past four years, but we are hardly “known” to the management. On each visit, whether as a walk-in solo or with reservations and guests, we have always received a friendly welcome from the solicitous staff — who couldn’t be more helpful in either guiding us to the best oysters of the day, or which wine to pair with them. You get out of restaurants what you put into them, and if you walk into Le Dôme with happy heart, it will only make you happier.

A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life. —Thomas Jefferson

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From Montparnasse one day, we trekked up the hill to Montmartre the next, to visit Le Coq et Fils (formerly Le Coq Rico) — Antoine Westermann’s paean to poultry.

Climbing up to Sacré Coeur and exploring the nooks and crannies of cobblestoned streets of this “village inside a city” puts you in a mood to take down an entire yardbird accompanied by a variety of other Westermann signatures like poultry broth “shots” (perhaps the most intense chicken soup ever made), duck rillettes, and egg mayonnaise “Westermann’s Way” (a gorgeous puck of the best egg salad ever tasted):

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But the undeniable stars of the show are the whole birds, and we opted for a four pound Bresse specimen of unsurpassed flavor:

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Image(Poulet de Bresse-my-soul)

From the crispness of the skin to the fineness of the grain to the richness of the flesh, these are flocks which put to shame the universal putdown of “tasting like chicken.” Of course the olive oil-drenched pommes puree and straight-from-the-fat frites don’t hurt your enjoyment of this beautiful bird, either.

The birds are sized and sold according to how many you want to feed (e.g. a guinea hen and smaller birds are sized for two). The wine list was modest in scope but interesting and reasonable, and the service couldn’t have been better.

For dessert we took down an Ile Flottante (“floating island”) — a lighter version of this classic — with a softball-sized meringue so airy it seemed to be floating above the creme Anglaise beneath it.

I have been in Paris for almost a week and I have not heard anyone say calories, or cholesterol, or even arterial plaque. The French do not season their food with regret. Mary-Lou Weisman

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Watching your calories is the last thing you want to do at L’Ami Jean — the au courant favorite of Parisian foodies  — a bistro which resists mightily the Brooklynization of casual Parisian dining

As with L’Ami Louis, its slightly older cousin across the Seine, you enter something of a time warp when you cross the threshold into a crowded, narrow room — whose general appearance hasn’t changed since Maurice Chevalier was breaking into talkies.

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Cheek-by-jowl everyone sits, the crowd being a mixture of internet-educated gastronauts and local trenchermen who’ve been expanding their ample bellies since the 70s. (From the vantage point of our sole, round six-top along the wall, the diners seemed to be running at about a 10-to-1 men-to-women.)

The effect is one of a raucous eating club in a cramped space where appreciating hearty, rustic food is the coin of the realm.

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Having taken serious umbrage to Gill’s evisceration of L’Ami Louis, I must raise an exception in the other direction  — in this case to the lavish praise universally heaped upon Stéphane Jégo’s ode to excess. We have nothing against wild boar stews and roasted pigeons drenched in wine. And we are hardly one to quibble with rough-hewn bricks of paté de campagne or nutty/puffy lobes of sweetbreads roasted with thyme. But when we considered our meals as a whole at this temple of bistronomy, what stuck with us was the textural, taste and visual sameness of our multiple courses — more  cuisine bourgeois-than restaurant cooking — finesse-free food heaped into bowls…which is probably the point. Nothing wrong with any of it, mind you, but no standouts, either.

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Service was the definition of “harried” but also almost preternaturally fast. They screwed up our white wine order, but brought the “wrong” bottle that happened to go beautifully with the food at the same price.

For dessert, get the signature rice pudding with caramel sauce, even if your ribs are pleading for something less to stick to them.

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria. – Benjamin Franklin

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If food is the body of good living, wine is the soul. – Clifton Fadiman

The same advice I gave about cafés above applies to wine bars. There is wine aplenty in the area — Juveniles, Le Rubis, A L’Heure du Vin — so calling the First Arrondissement a “target rich environment” for oenophiles is like referring to Le Louvre as a nice art gallery.

We’re more Right Bank than Left Bank these days, so it’s a no-brainer to make Willi’s Wine Bar our home away from home.

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Oh Willi’s, how do we love thee? Let us count the ways:

Your wine (of course, specializing in Rhones both new and aged), either by the glass or bottle, always interesting at a fair price; the food (classic bistro fare but made with flair and good groceries by chef Francois Yon); excellent bread; exceptional cheese; and best of all, a friendly welcome (whether you are known or unknown).

English is freely spoken (it’s still owned by the Brit – Mark Williamson (below) – who founded it in 1980) and your staff is cheerful and knowledgeable, and their patience (with idiotic Americans who can’t decide what to order) is as long as the bar (above). 

And then, of course, there are those iconic posters: 

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And finally: the location — just a block from the Palais Royale — in the heart of where-it’s-happening Paris.

In other words, Willi’s is just about perfect, whether you’re hungry for a full meal, or seeking a simple sip. It’s as much restaurant as wine bar, but no matter what you’re looking for, it will send you away smiling.

Paris nourishes the soul, is how Victor Hugo put it, and Willi’s nourished us, in more ways than one on this trip.

We always returned to [Paris] no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. – Ernest Hemingway

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As the sunlight fades over the distance of the Left Bank, a Parisian day always seems to end quietly, but regretfully, like a sigh.

There are few magic spells left to be woven in the world and this city still weaves one of them. How many cities on earth can you say that about? 

When good Americans die, they go to Paris. – Oscar Wilde 

Something else occurred to me 36,000 feet over the Atlantic: I am my best self in Paris — engaged, entranced and relaxed like nowhere else on earth. Perhaps it will be where I end my days. Who knows? There are worse ways to go.

This is the first part of a two-part article. Next month we go big game hunting among the haute-est of the haute cuisine temples of French gastronomy. 🥂🍾🇫🇷

A Tale of Two Fishes

The critic’s job is to educate, not pander to the lowest common denominator.

I got into food writing to be a consumer advocate. It wasn’t to brag about my culinary adventures, or create a diary of my gastronomic life with pictures of every meal. I wasn’t interested in imposing my standards or condescending to those who didn’t measure up. As big a snob as I am (have become?), it wasn’t elitism that motivated me.

As a product of the 60s and 70s, I’ve always looked at consumer advocacy as a noble calling. As a serious restaurant-goer, I started thinking 30 years ago about a way to turn my obsession into something worthwhile for my fellow food lovers. (This was a good fifteen years before anyone used the term “foodie.”)

To put it simply, I wanted to use my experience and share my knowledge with others about where to find the “good stuff.” Still do.

In these days of Yelp, Instagram “influencers” and food blogging braggarts, it’s easy to forget the original reason behind restaurant reviewing; the raison d’être being simply to start a conversation about where best to spend your dining-out dollars.

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Without boring you with a history lesson, the first acknowledged “restaurant reviewer” was a fellow named Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière  (pictured above, usually abbreviated to Grimod de la Reynière or simply “Grimod”) — a rather weird chap* who compiled a list of restaurants in Napoleonic Paris, to help its burgeoning middle-class choose a place to dine, at a time when eating out in restaurants was first becoming the popular thing to do.

Grimod was also one of the first to popularize the terms “gourmet” and “gourmand.” He introduced the idea of food criticism as something that “reestablished order, hierarchy, and distinctions in the realm of good taste” through the publication of texts that helped define the French food scene, back when it was the only food scene worth defining.

(Grimod ate here…at Le Grand Véfour, in Paris, in 1803)

Put another way, Grimod pretty much invented the gastronomic guidebook. While hardly a saint, he is nevertheless the spiritual patron saint of restaurant critics — the person who first influenced the tastes and expectations of restaurant consumers, and inserted a third party between the chef and the diner.

I thought about all of this when I had two meals recently: one great and one horrid, at two ends of our restaurant spectrum.

The centerpiece of each meal was a piece of fish. A flat fish to be precise. To my surprise, the frozen Asian “sole” (at the top of the page) was the more satisfying of the two. The “fresh” Dover (or so it was called) sole was horrendous. A stale, fishy, musty-mushy abomination of seafood that only a landlubber sucker could love.

The frozen Asian fish cost $26. The “Dover” sole, $70.

The better fish dish was the culmination of a great meal at a relatively unsung neighborhood restaurant — Oh La La French Bistro. Its counter-part ended what was supposed to be a big deal meal at an “exclusive” Strip restaurant helmed by celebrity chef Michael Symon. (In reality, it’s a branding/management deal using the Symon name. The hotel owns and runs the restaurant.)

Before we address the failure of that fish, let us first sing the praises of Oh La La. Tucked into a corner of a strip mall smack in the middle of Summerlin, Richard Terzaghi’s ode to casual French cooking is a gem among the zircons of west Lake Mead Boulevard.

My contempt for Summerlin is well-known (it being the land of million dollar homes and ten cent taste buds), but there’s no disdain for the faithful French recreations put out by Terzaghi, at lunch and dinner, at very fair prices.

(Straight from Paris to Summerlin)

At Oh La La the service is always fast and friendly, the wine list simple, pure and approachable. The bread is good, the foie gras terrine even better. OLL might also have the best steak tartare (above) in town — its combo of gherkins, mustard and onions hits a flavor profile that takes me straight back to Le Train Bleu in the Gare Lyon.

Winners abound all over its menu: frisee salad “La Lyonnaise”, escargot, prawns “risotto” with Israeli couscous, steak frites, mussels, endive salad, great French fries and simple, satisfying desserts, all of them faithful to the homeland without a lot of fuss. And whenever they post a special — be it a seasonal soup or a lamb stew — I always get it and I’m never disappointed.

Contrast this to the “secret” hideaway that is Sara’s — a “curated dining experience” in a “luxurious secret room” where we were told more than once you had to make reservations weeks in advance. The entrance to it is behind a semi-hidden door at the end of the bar at Mabel’s BBQ.  I have no idea where all that “luxurious” curation occurs, but from my vantage point, it looked no fancier than a run-of-the-mill steakhouse. As for the meal being “curated” all I can say is, at this point in my life, when I hear words like that, I start looking for the Vaseline.

(Pro tip: Rather than buy into all the faux exclusivity, skip the secrecy and stay in Mabel’s for some smoked ribs. Your wallet will be heavier, and your tummy a lot happier.)

(Squint real hard and you’ll see the brown butter. Counting the capers is easy.)

The shittiness of the fish wouldn’t have bothered me so much if the rest of the meal at Sara’s had been up to snuff. But the menu was nothing more than one over-priced cliché after the other (caviar, “Truffle Fried Chicken”, lobster salad, duck fat fries, crispy Brussels sprouts, etc.) at least half of which wouldn’t pass muster at the Wynn buffet.

Truffles were MIA in the rudimentary fried chicken, the forlorn caviar presentation looked like it came from a restaurants 101 handbook, and the rubbery lobster salad tasted like it had been tossed with sawdust.

Memories are also vivid of gummy pasta with all the panache of wallpaper paste, and some heavily-breaded, by-the-numbers escargot.

That the joint considers it groovy (or oh-so celeb cheffy) to begin your meal with a giant crispy, smoked beef rib (as an appetizer no less) is also a testament to the “if it’s good for the ‘gram, it’s all good” mentality of this place. Appearances being everything these days, you know.

But when the fish hit the table, I hit the bricks. It may appear appetizing, but looks can be deceiving. It was bred for beauty not substance (that appearance thing again), and calling it simply “fishy” would be an understatement. It was either stale or freezer-burned (or both), and came with zero brown butter and exactly two capers atop it. It wasn’t overcooked but it should have been — a little more heat might’ve killed some of the smell. All this and less for $70…at a supposed “upscale, exclusive” dining enclave in the Palms.

“Who are they fooling with this shit,” was all I could think to myself.

After three straight awful dishes, I had had enough. “This place is terrible!”, I bellowed to all within earshot. I then threw my napkin down, and stormed out — the first time in this century I’ve done so. Being a keen observer of human nature, the solicitous manager sensed my displeasure and followed me outside. He couldn’t have been nicer or more professional, but the damage was done.

What ensued was a polite conversation best summarized thusly:

Me: Does anyone here actually taste this food, or are you just content to rip off tourists who’ll buy anything?

Him: Thank you for your concerns, sir, I’ll pass them along to the kitchen.

At first, I agonized about how to handle this abysmal experience: Give them another try? Rip them a new one on social media? Forget about it altogether?

Then, I remembered why I got into this business. It was for you, dear reader. To help you eat better, spend wiser, blow the trumpet for good places and expose the bad.

Just like good old Grimod.

For twenty-five years I have maintained a personal code that excludes the little guy from my withering gaze — but treats the big boys on the Strip as fair game.

Sara’s is fair game.

You have been warned.

(My meal at Oh La La was comped but we left a huge tip. A foodie friend picked up the tab (whatever it was) at Sara’s.)

OH LA LA FRENCH BISTRO

2120 N. Rampart Blvd. #150

Las Vegas, NV 89128

702.222.3522

https://www.ohlalafrenchbistro.com/

SARA’S

Palms Hotel – Inside Mabel’s BBQ

702.944.5941

https://web.palms.com/saras.html

<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>

* Grimod once faked his own death and threw a funeral party for himself to see who would show up. On another occasion, he dressed up a dead pig as a person and sat it at the head of a table at a fancy banquet he was throwing. His used a mechanical prosthesis to eat and write because, depending upon who you believe, he was either born with deformed hands or (as he liked to explain), pigs chewed off his fingers as a young child.

(The world’s first restaurant guide)

 

 

CIPRIANI

I liked the location at once because it was at the end of a dead-end street….This meant that the customers would have to come there on purpose and couldn’t just stop in as they were passing by. That is the way I wanted it. To this day people have to come to Harry’s Bar on purpose. – Giuseppe Cipriani (1900-1980)

You go to Cipriani on purpose. You don’t go because there’s some hot new chef at the stoves. You aren’t there for pirouettes on the plate or cartwheels in the kitchen. You didn’t just stumble by the place on your way to somewhere else (the pool, a nightclub, blackjack, etc.), and cutting-edge is not in your cuisine vocabulary. The reasons you walk through the door say more about you than the restaurant. You are there because you can’t find this experience anywhere else but here or in Italy. (Venetian cuisine being perhaps the least-traveled of all regional Italian foods.)

The restaurant is there to serve you, but it has nothing to prove. It knows itself like a high soprano knows the aria from Madame Butterfly. It’s been doing the same thing, in the same way, successfully since 1931. There is no need for it to change. All that is left is for you to submit to its charms and history, and discover that, through decades of refinement, it serves a menu of subtle perfection like you’ve probably never tasted before.

If you resist this submission you will be disappointed. If your idea of Italian food is Tuscan meatiness, Neapolitan flamboyance, Calabrian heat or Emilia-Romagna-Sicilian-Roman largesse, you may look at your plate and wonder what all the shouting is about. But if you’re open to experiencing the deceptively simple yet hyper-delicious food of the Veneto —  — you will be transported to a cuisine both rustic and refined.

Image result for Ernest Hemingway at Harry's Bar(Ernest Hemingway and Giuseppe Cipriani prepare for their hangovers, Venice, 1950)

Before we get to that food, a little history is in order. Cipriani Las Vegas (pronounced chip-ree-AH-NEE LAS VAY-gus) is the latest in a chain of Italian restaurants that trace their lineage to Harry’s Bar in Venice (Italy, not California). Harry’s Bar was founded in 1931 by Giuseppe Cipriani — the grandfather of the founding family — and became famous as a watering hole/restaurant for European nobility, the carriage trade, celebs and American literati in the 1940s and 50s. (Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway were constant habitués, even though they hated each other, and once almost came to blows in the place. Orson Welles and Truman Capote were also regulars, and also hated each other, but the only punches they landed had rum in them.)

Being something of a louche, café society lover myself, I consider it my home away from home whenever I’m in Venice. (Unlike Hemingway, however, I find myself constitutionally incapable of parking six bottles of Amarone in my liver (as he did) every night before bedtime.)

Nevertheless, hanging out at Harry’s Bar has been de rigueur when I’m in town, perhaps in hopes of absorbing a bit of Ernest’s mojo. (In case you’re ever there, the first seat at the bar, by the cash register, is the one with my name on it.) So far, it hasn’t worked — I am also constitutionally incapable of writing short, declarative sentences —  but it’s made me more than a little acquainted with the bottom of a Bellini glass, and what constitutes a definitive seppie in tecia (cuttlefish served in its own ink).

When Arrigo Cipriani (Giuseppe’s son) answered the siren song of expanding and branding Harry’s Bar to other locales in 1989, he chose New York City  – specifically a space on the ground floor of the Sherry Netherland hotel. Then and now, the family considers the name “Harry’s Bar” to be sacrosanct, and chose their last name as the brand for their empire. (Arrigo originally wanted the first Harry’s Bar clone to be called “The Copy” but thankfully someone talked him out of it — no doubt because “Let’s meet at Cipriani” has a much more musical ring to it than “Let’s go grab some ‘Copy’ for lunch.”)

When I was frequenting New York in the early 90s, I found myself perched there many a time, too, although in 1992 I remember the prices to be cripplingly expensive. Now they don’t bother me at all — 30 years of “Eating Las Vegas” having immunized me from all restaurant sticker shock.

Las Vegas is now the 19th Cipriani in the world. They stretch from London to Singapore (New York currently has three), and the business is still family-owned. This alone probably explains why the quality remains high, and why the food in Las Vegas may be as close to the original as one could ever hope for.

Image result for Ernest Hemingway at Harry's Bar(Harry’s Bar)
(Cipriani Las Vegas)

First timers may find those low tables take a little getting used to, but they are a definitive part of Harry’s/Cipriani brand, so get used to them you will.

Arrigo Cipriani, in his written history of Harry’s Bar,  explains their design as reminiscent of the low tables he sat at as a child, where he always had more fun than at the taller, stuffier “grown up” tavola. Sit at them for a few minutes (they and the chairs are about 3″ lower than standard height) and you will see how they promote a certain intimacy among your table-mates. For larger folk, there are a number of plush booths (also lower) where you can spread out with lots of comfy pillows.

Eighty-seven years on, the details still matter, whether you’re in Las Vegas or one of the other Ciprianis around the world. Those tables will always be covered in starched white linens, the flatware is modestly-sized (Arrigo hates big, clunky knives and forks), and the staff is one of the most smartly outfitted in the business. Liquids are served in short, stout glasses (even the wine), and the sleek and sexy decor — all polished woods and gleaming brass — makes everyone feel like they’re in a Cary Grant movie.

And then there is the food. It’s the real deal, not an Americanized version of the idiosyncratic cuisine of Venice, but as pitch perfect as you could hope for thousands of miles from its homeland.

Before you get to it, you will first have a Bellini: a small glass of Prosecco and white peach juice invented because Giuseppe looked around one day in the summer of 1948 and said, “What the hell am I going to do with all of these white peaches?” Purée them and add the sparkling wine was the answer. He then named it after a 15th Century Venetian painter — Giovanni Bellini — and the world, literally, started beating a path to his bar.

The good news is that those Bellinis are cheaper here! They cost $17.00 in Vegas, and 30 euros in Venice, so have two! (They’re pretty small.)

(A proper carpaccio)

After the Bellini, you’ll have the carpaccio: the other world famous invention of Giuseppe Cipriani. Only slightly younger than the Bellini, its invention (in 1950) stemmed from some “ravishing countess” telling Giuseppe that she couldn’t eat cooked meat. “No problemo, segnora,” was his reply, “I’ll just pound a raw filet paper thin and dress it with a white, mustard/mayonnaise sauce.” He could have called it anything he liked, but the Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio happened to be hanging about Venice at the time (his paintings, at least). Giuseppe loved his bold red and white colors, so “carpaccio” it was, and every raw, flattened piece of food ever since has been stuck with the name.

As with the Bellini, a proper carpaccio couldn’t be any simpler, but as with all unadorned, exquisite things, there is no room for error. The raw ingredients must be impeccable, and their treatment must be precise, the better to let the result transcend the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, as with the martini, bourbon, pizza, sushi, etc., the letter and spirit of the original is honored more in the breach these days.

With those preliminaries out of the way, you will be free to peruse the wine list as you nibble on addictive short grissini (breadsticks), or some rather forgettable bread. (Don’t despair, the bread at Harry’s Bar is pretty forgettable, too.)

You’ll find the wine list of modest length and actually rather approachable, with plenty of decent choices of Italian white wines from multiple regions in the $65-$100 range. Maybe it’s the water of the Venetian Lagoon, or it’s famous fish, but I’ve always found white wines go best with this cuisine…even the meat dishes.

By now, it will be time to dive in. Certain dishes separate the men from the boys as it were, when it comes to the food of the Veneto: polenta, salt cod, cuttlefish, veal with tuna sauce, and most of all, calf’s liver “alla Veneziana”. None of these are what spring to mind when most Americans think “Italian food”.

Venetians love their fine white cornmeal (from the Friuli region) and serve it with everything but pasta and gelato. Good polenta — and at Cipriani it is always good — is much more than mere mush. It stands alone, like great pasta, for its elemental purity and strong sweet flavors of the earth. Polenta is as Venetian as a gondolier and learning to love it is your first step in obtaining your Venetian food diploma.

(Baby artichokes alla Romana)

Of things not to be missed (after that carpaccio) should be an order of baby artichokes “alla Romana” and Bacalà Mantecato (whipped salt cod, served with fried polenta).

The first will be the best artichokes you have ever eaten — soft, small and delicate — so unlike the woody, giant, indigestible globe artichokes we are stuck with in America.

Americans resist mightily the allure of the second dish, even though salt cod is no fishier than a tuna sandwich), but serious foodies love its airy, whipped refinement, which echoes the sea without bathing you in it.

Tuna of a more refined sort makes an appearance in a mayonnaise-like emulsion covering thin slices of cold veal — another exquisite recipe of extreme foreignness to American palates. Vitello tonnato appears on menus from Turin to Trieste, and is an umami-rich, meat-sea antipasti, much beloved by Italians in the summer.

(Seppie in tecia)

Salads of endive and radicchio and lobster with avocado are offered, and they’re perfectly fine (if a bit boring), so you’ll want to lean more towards the prosciutto and bresaola, which are top shelf and sliced right.  Seafood lovers are equally well-served by the plump shards of sweet-sour anchovies, and the seppie in tecia — a real test of your Venetian food chops — it being a thick, black stew of ink enveloping tender cuttlefish strands that’s as far from fried calamari as foie gras is from a chicken salad sandwich.

It would be nice if they could offer some of the bounty of the Adriatic Sea/Venetian Lagoon here (moeche, canoce, barboni, etc.), but a 6,000 distance makes seafood a secondary protein on this menu, rather than its focus. You’ll forget all about the fish, however, as soon as you dive into the pastas.

(Baked tagliatelle with ham)

Pastas are where things get heftier. But the portions easily feed two, and are so good they should come with a warning label that repeated exposure to any of them could become habit forming.

It’s doubtful you’ve ever had a veal ragú as light as the one dressing thick strands of tagliardi, and you’ll wonder if cream, ham, peas and cheese have ever matched better with tortellini, or baked more beautifully as a crust for thin, egg-y tagliatelle — the latter being another must-try signature dish. Knuckle-sized gnocchi come dressed with tomato cream one day, Gorgonzola cream the next, and are surprisingly light despite their weighty descriptions.

They do a beautiful Dover sole “alla Mugnaia” (a.k.a. a la meuniere) here, wonderful langoustines “al forno” and a rib-sticking braised short rib (again, all easily feed two), but if you really want to eat like the Doge of Venice, tuck into the calf’s liver “alla Veneziana”:

(Fegato alla Veneziana – liver and onions, Venetian-style)

The Venetians claim to have invented the dish, but as Waverly Root wrote in his The Food of Italy, “…it seems so natural a combination that it need hardly be pinned down to any single point of origin. It is true, however, that nobody does it better.” And nobody does it better in Las Vegas than Cipriani. Even if you think you hate liver, you should give it a try.

Pizza makes an appearance (just to appease knuckle-dragging Americans) —  but going to Cipriani for a pizza is like going to La Scala to see the “Book of Mormon.”

Something called “YOTTO Japanese Cuisine” is also on the menu, presumably because when people go to an Italian restaurant, what they really want is some Japanese food.

Desserts are remarkably light and white: Dolce Vanilla Meringue Cake, a Napoleon with vanilla cream, vanilla panna cotta, and the thickest, creamiest, silkiest and most vanilla-i-est gelato you have ever tasted. No foolin’….it is truly extraordinary gelato, worth a special trip all by itself.

(Best. Gelato. Ever.)

Cipriani is neither crowd-pleasing nor horde-imploring. Some people won’t “get it” in the same way people don’t “get” classical music, haiku poetry, new wave cinema, or the lines of a simple black dress. Cipriani is a state of mind. The ease and grace with which it displays its good taste is something new here — refinement and subtlety being to Las Vegas what strippers are to the Piazza San Marco. But there is a seductive reassuring quality to its flavors and its atmosphere. Nothing overpowers, but each bite beckons another; every visit inspires a return. The cuisine is born of nuance, and the service has been honed by almost a century of tradition. Cipriani is not for everyone. It is for the cognoscenti. You have to go there on purpose.

(Cipriani is open for lunch and dinner, seven days a week, with the same menu for both. Most dishes are easily split between two people with apps and pastas running $15-$30, and mains in the $30-$50 range, meaning: a modest lunch or dinner for two can run well under a hundy, or a more extravagant one about $150, excluding booze. My first meal here was comped, my next three have run $72, $200, and $163. They also validate your parking. Anyone who orders “nigiri sushi” here should be (figuratively) shot.)

CIPRIANI LAS VEGAS

Wynn Hotel and Casino

702.770.7390

http://www.cipriani.com/restaurant/?loc=las-vegas