Tag: Pinot Brasserie

Eric L’huillier Needs to Stay in Vegas

We’ve just had our 3rd outstanding meal in less than a year at Pinot Brasserie — Las Vegas’s most underrated restaurant.

Over the past year or so, we’ve taken to calling PB an under-appreciated jewel in our crown of restaurant gems, and nothing we’ve tasted lately has dissuaded us from trumpeting the excellence of the cooking on display here.

We also know this Joachim Spichal mainstay is not long for the Vegas restaurant world. (Sources have been telling us for months that the Venetian has tried to buy out Splichal’s lease, but he’s not budging until it expires sometime in the next year.)

Be that as it may, the Executive Chef at PB — Eric L’huillier — the man who has churned out precise and drop-your-fork-delicious versions of French bistro food here for the past seven years — is soon to be out of a job through no fault of his own. (ELV feels L’huillier’s pain, as he has been out-0f-a-job many times in his life, although always through some fault of his own.)

Eating Las Vegas thinks L’huillier (pronounced Loo-WEE-lee-ay) would be a perfect fit at a place like Tableau in the Wynn or Marche Bacchus — places in need of some real talent (and stability) in the kitchen.

Of course, they’d have to pay him a boatload of money.

But he would be worth it.

Because the man knows French cooking like I know alimony.

PINOT BRASSERIE

In the Venetian Hotel and Casino

3355 Las Vegas Blvd. South

Las Vegas, NV 89109

702.414.8888

www.patinagroup.com/restaurant.php?restaurants_id=26

PINOT Envy Times Deux 2: a Good Day to DEUX

An interesting idea, credited to the Keeper of the Keys to this blog – Mr. John Curtas- is two critics taking in the same meal, writing a couple articles blind of each other’s impressions, and seeing where that leaves them.  This was doubly fortuitous, as in the making I learned of a crazy-good restaurant, easily overlooked for lack of PR, Pinot Brasserie.  Judging by our overlapping cares and qualms with the Franco-foods, it makes for an interesting look at things.

Pinot Brasserie, perhaps the most overlooked restaurant on the strip, has been punching out what can only be called “some seriously good food”.  Now I am generally loath to talk about food in the way people usually describe a burger stuffed bacon and hair gel, but the dishes coming from the hands of Chefs Eric Lhuiller and John Courtney are definitely -seriously- serious.  The menu has a ton of old-school French staples, from escargot to lobster bisque, precicely what you’d expect from a Brasserie but missing the specter of pomp and pernicious hoity-toity-isms so often looming in even the most traditionally casual French concepts.  A “bouchon” is no longer synonymous with friendly home-spun Lyonnaise sausage-huts, and a “bistro” is anything but modest or moderate, but a brasserie still clings to it’s roots as relaxed.

Chefs Eric and John. Dang, them CHOPS!

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