Ogden bets on Las Vegas with debut of latest restaurant

Nation's Restaurant News, May 19, 2003 by Alan J. Liddle

LAS VEGAS -- For nearly two decades most gourmets from outside California who were interested in sampling the American-regional culinary artistry of chef-owner Bradley Ogden had to travel west to visit his acclaimed restaurants.

Now, thanks to his San Francisco-based operating company's strategy of partnering with hotels, visitors to the Las Vegas Strip from the East can indulge in the chef's creations at the new, eponymous Bradley Ogden in Caesars Palace.

Ogden, his partners and their Lark Creek Restaurant Group management company are relatively late in making a move to Las Vegas, which since the mid-1990s has seen a tidal wave of big-name chefs sweep over the once-arid culinary scene.

But Ogden's mid-March opening in Caesars--in a 234-seat restaurant that's beside a new 4,000-seat performance center anchored by pop superstar Celine Dion's show--underscores his role in the landmark hotel's efforts to compete with newer megaresorts on the Strip, such as the Bellagio and Mandalay Bay.

"This is very exciting but very challenging as well," Ogden said, referring to operating a large fine-dining restaurant that does most of its nightly business during a 90-minute interval ending about a half hour before the 8:30 p.m. curtain of Dion's "A New Day" extravaganza.

Adding to Ogden's production challenge in Las Vegas is the new restaurant's slightly higher-end positioning compared with his well-known Lark Creek Inn in Larkspur, Calif., which he operates with his wife, Jody, and partners Michael and Leslye Dellar. While starting with the same "farm-fresh" ingredients found at all Ogden-Dellar concepts, Ogden is producing food that "is a little more refined and composed and contemporary, relative to style and plate ware," the chef explained.

Ogden indicated that operating a restaurant in Las Vegas has required his organization to work harder to secure supplies and cope with higher product costs tied to transportation. With the network of specialized fresh-produce purveyors he has developed in the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of California since the mid 1980s, "We're flying in everything," he said.

The chef said the per-person average tab at Bradley Ogden has been averaging from $85 to $100. General manager John Cunin said the restaurant had served as many as 261 dinner covers in a single night during its first six weeks and only recently began opening for lunch. Alcoholic-beverage sales represent 35 percent of the gross, Cunin indicated.

Joining Ogden in the kitchen at the 9,800-square-foot Bradley Ogden is his son Bryan, who is a graduate of The Culinary Institute of America and has worked with Chicago chef Charlie Trotter, among others. The junior Ogden is one of four executive sous chefs at the Las Vegas restaurant. In all, his kitchen team includes about a dozen CIA and Johnson & Wales culinary-school graduates, Bradley Ogden said.

Cunin is known for having managed San Francisco's renowned Masa's restaurant for five years in the mid-1980s, and in 1990 he created and was managing partner of Cypress Club in that city. The financial-district restaurant closed in 2001, after which Cunin was a consultant before joining the management team of the Las Vegas restaurant.

At Bradley Odgen "my goal and training message is about creating customer trust," Cunin said. "I'm telling people, 'Everything you need to be doing involves one of two things: showing [customers that] you know what you are talking about or showing them that you care.'"

To help his servers demonstrate the "knowledge side of the equation," the restaurant's employees are being tutored in a wide range of topics, Cunin said. They include how certain foods are made or processed, what sets apart the Bradley Ogden kitchen from others and what is the cultural history of certain dishes and cooking styles, he explained.

Ogden, a native of Traverse City, Mich., who graduated from The Culinary Institute of America, gained early acclaim while he was working with legendary restaurant consultant Joe Baum and food specialist Barbara Kafka at the American Restaurant in Kansas City, Mo., in the early 1980s. After becoming known as an innovator within the growing circle of American-regional chefs of that era, Ogden moved to San Francisco and took the culinary helm at the Campton Place hotel for a short time before striking out on his own with his current partners to open Lark Creek Inn.

The new restaurant Bradley Ogden, a joint venture with Caesars Palace parent Park Place Entertainment Corp., brings the number of joint ventures between Lark Creek Restaurant Group and various hotel companies to three. The company's other joint ventures are Arterra, in a franchised Marriott hotel in Del Mar, Calif., and Parcel 104, in the Marriott in Santa Clara, Calif.

Apart from the hotel restaurants, the Lark Creek group operates six establishments in the Bay Area: Lark Creek Inn, One Market Restaurant, two branches of the Lark Creek Cafe concept and two Yankee Pier restaurants.

Caesars Palace helped spur the tablecloth-restaurant revolution in Las Vegas starting in 1992 when the adjacent Forum Shops mall debuted the first branch of Wolfgang Puck's Los Angeles flagship Spago. But competitors responded by launching several restaurants created by the cream of the American restaurant scene, and the battle for superiority in terms of sheer numbers of restaurants by pedigreed operators has been raging for much of the past decade.