Dining Features
Dining
Steeped in Culture
Mandarin Oriental’s Chinese tea ceremony offers a new window to the East
April 26th, 2012
On a Friday afternoon in April, Mandarin Oriental’s tea lounge feels miles above the chaos of the Strip. A couple sits in opulent club chairs sipping champagne and taking in the view from the 23rd floor. Read more »
Dining
Get Behind the Wheel
Even with a little age on it, Morels is still ripe for cheese-lovers
April 19th, 2012
When Sal Casola and Chipper Pastron opened the first Morels in the Grove, a nouveau-swank Los Angeles mall and cinema complex, what everyone talked about was the cheese program, arguably the best that anyone had seen in L.A. Morels Las Vegas, which opened in 2008 in the Palazzo, treads a similar path. Read more »
Dining
Beyond Byblos
Slipping into spring’s al fresco dining is easy when Mediterranean is on the menu
April 12th, 2012
Khoury’s Mediterranean Restaurant may be our foremost Lebanese restaurant, though it insists it be called Mediterranean. That’s fair enough. Lebanon has, after all, the geography to make that claim, with a Mediterranean coastline, a warm climate and an abundance of olives, citrus and fresh vegetables. Read more »
Dining
Against the Grain
Three venerable properties revamp their meateries to wonderful effect
April 5th, 2012
Tender Steaks & Seafood at Luxor got the ball rolling in 2009. R Steak & Seafood at the Riviera followed suit last year. And last month, Center Cut opened at the Flamingo, for a total of three do-overs, turning venerable rooms into new-generation steak houses. Read more »
Dining
Sneaky Hot
Sensational home-style Thai from a hidden one-woman kitchen
March 29th, 2012
If Penn’s Thai House weren’t east of Sunset Station in an obscure suburban mini-mall, it would enjoy wide acclaim by now. Read more »
Dining
Just a Taste
By the ounce or by the glass, Enomatic systems open up a world of wine possibilities
March 22nd, 2012
"Enomatic” is a term similar to Kleenex or Jell-O, because even though a French company of that name first developed these wine-dispensing and preservation systems, competing companies such as Napa Technologies are now producing them, yet anything falling into the category is called an enomatic. Several dining spots around town take advantage of a proprietary technology that allows wines to remain fresh in the bottle, while being visible behind a glass window in a stainless-steel dispenser. Read more »
Dining
High Praise
Nearly a decade later, the high-end, high-up kitchens at Ducasse’s Mix are running better than ever
March 15th, 2012
Walking into Mix is like walking into a fizzy champagne bottle. The drama begins when you take one of five private elevators to the top floor at The Hotel at Mandalay Bay, and follow the backlit, steel tunnel into the dining room. The restaurant was reputed to have cost around $15 million when it opened in 2003. The champagne effect is from the strands of carefully strung Murano glass bubbles that extend from floor to ceiling, one of designer Patrick Jouin’s many innovations. Read more »
Dining
An Initial Success
KJ anchors the new Dim Sum Triangle out west
March 8th, 2012
Suddenly, there is a cluster of dim sum restaurants on Flamingo Road, just west of the Strip. Ping Pang Pong is at the Gold Coast, and Cathay House is at the Palms across the street, so it only seemed logical that the Rio would get into the game. That’s exactly what the casino has done, and on a grand scale, I might add. Read more »
A Near Hit
Former Mayor Oscar Goodman’s steak house doesn’t quite ‘meat’ expectations
March 1st, 2012
I recently wrote a short history of the Las Vegas steak house for the April issue of Saveur magazine in which I included a quote from former Mayor Oscar Goodman, whose moniker is on a new steak house under the dome at downtown’s revamped Plaza Hotel & Casino. “No one cares where the meat comes from,” he told me. “They want a big martini, a few broads and a nice evening.” Mr. Goodman: That thinking is behind the times, even for the downtown crowd. Read more »
Accidental Restaurateurs
The Lee’s Liquor family adds a must-see Korean joint to their legacy
February 23rd, 2012
The mall is anchored by Greenland Market—which has a terrific food court—and Woonam Jung, a spiffy new casual Korean restaurant with a contemporary look rather than traditional. Initially, the Lee family leased the restaurant space to a tenant. But he bugged out in 2010 and left the family, quite by accident, in the restaurant business. Read more »
