Viva Las Vegas! - hotel review - Review

Cheers, April, 2000 by Jack Robertiello

It's arguably the hottest drinking and dining city in North America. Here's why.

"Can you top this?"

It seems to be the Las Vegas mantra, and in every outrageously opulent new hotel and casino, the world's biggest gaming companies have engaged in a pot-busting stakeraising to out-do each other with glitz, glamour and sheer chutzpah. in a city where nothing seems impossible.

Once confined to the world of lounge singers, animal trainers and over-the-top stage extravaganzas like Nudes on Ice, the non-gambling attractions that generate the most buzz in Las Vegas today are those on the knife-point of contemporary cutting-edge destination dining and drinking. An amalgam of eatertainment philosophy, celebrity chef-oriented concepts and Disneyland decor, Las Vegas-style restaurants must offer the best--or the most--of everything in order to compete.

Every big-name chef seems to be involved in one or more operations, either as an owner or advisor. Yet big name chefs are no longer enough to generate the needed media buzz and customer attention in such a booming market. Some of the new Vegas restaurants now boast about offering not only great food but also push their great wine programs and offer extraordinary wine lists with such scope and completeness that their globe-ranging like are rarely seen outside New York. In fact, Vegas today can claim eight master sommeliers, about 20% of those working in the US.

And no matter how many new hotels and restaurants open, the belief in Las Vegas is that there's always room for more. Hotel occupancy continues at a record pace, with new mega-room edifices filling up as soon as they open, and as the buzz radiates nation-wide each time a well-known chef lends his expertise to another opulent playground, a new must-dine restaurant is born. Reservations at prime time for Picasso, Aureole and other fine-dining spots are as hard to get as a seat at the $5 tables.

DRINKING ON THE STRIP

While Las Vegas has become an adult playground of international reputation, a prejudice still lingers among many fine dining and drinking observers. That's too bad, because the best Vegas offers today obliterates the lingering Mega-Strawberry-Daiquiri-in-a-plastic-cup reputation that's been generated since the demise of the Rat Pack.

Take a look at just a few of the highlights:

* The wine cellar at the Rio Suite (winner of the 1999 Cheers Award for Hotel Beverage Excellence) aggregates 125,000 bottles in a $6 million-plus collection created by master sommelier Barrie Larvin and available at the hotel's restaurants (like Jean-Louis Palladin's Napa) and its retail wine operation.

* Then there's the frozen vodka room in Red Square located in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, where members don heavy fur coats and hats so they can sip their favorite frozen vodkas in quiet contemplation and subzero temperatures.

* Rarely have cocktail traditionalists had a place where there's so much reverence for the so-called Golden Age of Drinking as the Bellagio bars that Tony Abou-Ganim and Seth Martin have wrought. The Bellagio (winner of the 2000 Cheers Hotel award), may be the only hotel in the world where such recreations of old-style cocktails as Gin Daisies (Tanquery Malacca Gin, orange curacao, fresh lemon juice and rock candy syrup) and Clover Clubs (Leyden's Dutch gin, raspberry syrup, fresh lemon juice and egg whites) regularly appear on the menu. And sell as well.

* And what could top Aureole's wine tower, a three-story glass case that dominates Charlie Palmer's Vegas outpost and has generated more publicity and is probably the single-most mentioned wine-related restaurant topic in the past few years?

Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck may get most of the general media-attention, but the real revolution in the new Las Vegas isn't destination dining; it's the change from give-away booze in the gaming rooms to high-profile, top-quality beverage programs that sell the best, the gaudiest and the wildest to a very thirsty customer base, many of whom believe that price is no object.

CHILLY AND RED

In the Vegas hotel business, restaurants and clubs were once exclusively owned and operated by the hotel, but Mandalay Bay, which opened about a year ago, brought in a number of outside operators to create a multi-faceted dining and drinking program.

One of them, Red Square, (the sister operation to China Grill Management's original Miami Beach location) is a Soviet-inspired fantasy club, as if a Moscow restaurant, circa 1960, run-down, dark and plastered with mammoth Soviet realist posters, was transferred intact to the desert. In the midst of what appears to be a crumbling cavernous club, fine, Russian-style dishes (blinis with caviar, steak tartare, the stuffed and baked salmon entree known as kulebyaka) mix with such contemporary dishes as seared yellowfin tuna and crab and arugula angel hair pasta.

Meanwhile, every table and massive booth seems to have two or more of the many colorful cocktail creations on the Red Square menu. Their lengthy list includes the Bolshevik Bellini, made of Champagne, Zone Peach Vodka and peach schnapps; the Cuban Missile Crisis made from Rain Vodka, Meyers's Original Dark Rum and a squeeze of lime juice, and the From Russia With Love Martini (Stoli Gold, Crown Royal and sweet vermouth with a lemon twist).