Dining Profiles
Profile
Sweet Success
Aureole pastry chef Megan Romano infuses desserts with artist’s sensibility
November 4th, 2010
Homegrown food and art always surrounded Megan Romano in the quaint home in which she was raised in North Haven, Conn. Not far beyond the front door, snap peas, strawberries, squash and blueberries sprouted in a small garden tended by her mother. Down in the basement, artwork emerged from the canvases and acrylic paint in her mother’s makeshift studio. Read more »
Profile
Self-Made Man
Not cut out for the mob, Steve Martorano finds his calling in the kitchen
October 28th, 2010
You can call him a gangster or a goombah (you won’t be the first or the last), but whatever you do, don’t call him a chef. “I’m just a cook,” Steve Martorano insists. The 52-year-old doesn’t really look like one either. Instead of chef whites, he wears a tight T-shirt, military-inspired shorts and a winter hat. Instead of standard kitchen clogs, he dons blue Nikes. His exposed arms are covered in tattoos, and diamonds bling loudly from his ears, neck, fingers and wrists. Nothing about him is by the book, aside from his family recipes. Read more »
Profile
Doug Taylor
Batali’s dessert guru shares a treat that features homegrown goodness
October 21st, 2010
Doug Taylor helped launch the Molto Vegas Farmers Market to show that good quality fruits and vegetables can be grown in our desert. As executive pastry chef at Vegas’ Mario Batali restaurants—Carnevino, B&B and Otto—Taylor also proves this theory in his kitchens by producing a variety of delicious desserts. Read more »
Profile
The Five-Diamond General
Brian Kenny aims to please, and as executive chef of room service for Wynn/Encore, that’s a tall order
September 30th, 2010
Chef Brian Kenny doesn’t see the Wynn and Encore as a pair of hotel-casinos; to him, they’re one big, sprawling, 4,700-room restaurant. It takes a small, efficient army to cater to thousands of guests’ demands 24/7, and as executive chef of room service, Kenny is its peerless leader. Read more »
Cooking With
Gaetano Palmeri
Sicilian restaurateur shares a flavorful pasta dish that’s a favorite of his wife’s
September 23rd, 2010
When local cognoscenti hear the name Gaetano, chances are they think only of one man and his restaurant in Henderson, at 10271 S. Eastern Ave. Think Frank, Dean and Sammy. Anyone who is anyone in Vegas, to paraphrase the writer John Gregory Dunne, is known by one name. But, if you insist, his full name is Gaetano Palmeri, and he’s been operating his plush, spacious Italian restaurant here since 2002, along with his ever-present partner and wife, Rory. Read more »
Profile
In Good Spirits
At Nevada’s biggest liquor distributor, Michael Severino is the guy who makes sure the money flows back into the city, too
September 16th, 2010
There’s little doubt that Michael Severino is a fortunate man. He works for a company whose business is alcohol, and besides being surrounded by some of the finest elixirs known to man, that business is always booming, thanks to a city in which more than 100 million alcoholic beverages are consumed each year. On top of that, in his role as general manager of event marketing for Southern Wine & Spirits of Nevada, Severino is responsible for overseeing the company’s extensive philanthropic efforts—essentially using spirits to lift spirits. Read more »
The Glad Scientist
The Whisky Attic’s Adam Carmer has invented a better way to taste
September 9th, 2010
Mother Nature, in her divine wisdom, has equipped us with the good sense to look, touch and sniff before accidently offing ourselves with ingested hazardous substances. But when Whisky Attic/Freakin’ Frog owner Adam Carmer turns to you during a spirit tasting and says, “Don’t smell,” you should probably do as he says. Read more »
Dining Profile
Mr. High Société
With P.U.B. and other new projects, hospitality guru Kelley Jones is on a roll
September 2nd, 2010
Squeezing through the crowd during a busy Thursday lunch shift at Todd English P.U.B., I am eager to meet one of the men behind this apparently recession-proof business: Kelley Jones, managing partner of the P.U.B. and CEO and founder of Société Hospitality, a Las Vegas-based hospitality and lodging group. He greets me with a friendly smile, a handshake and an invitation to sit down at his “office,” the last table in the back of the CityCenter eatery, surrounded by diners. “When I’m here, this is where I sit,” Jones says. “From this array I can see everything that goes on in the restaurant.” Read more »
Profile
King of Cocoa
Before he reigned over the chocolate world, Max Brenner wrestled with words
August 26th, 2010
Max Brenner never wanted to be a modern-day Willy Wonka, and he credits his rise to chocolate superstardom to pure “coincidence.” “I actually wanted to write,” says the Israeli-born king of cocoa, who now calls New York City home. “Writing was all a part of a scene of the Bohemian guy, sitting in coffee shops in Paris, working and writing and all this. And that’s what I did, and that’s what I liked.” After completing Israel’s mandatory three-year term of military service, Brenner enrolled in what he thought was the easiest government-sponsored class—pastry-making—in hopes of focusing on his true passion. His path took him to Paris, where he continued his pastry training while living the writer’s dream. But the dream was short-lived. Read more »
Drinking
The Perfect Cup
Social House pairs Nevada’s first siphon coffee system with artisan micro-roasts
August 19th, 2010
To watch Social House barista Jonah Vongdala toil over the intricate designs in his silken latte foams is to watch a craftsman at work. But while the 26-year-old self-proclaimed coffee fanatic from Hawaii is perfectly at home in the driver’s seat of Social House’s La Marzocco—“the Bentley of espresso machines,” he calls it—the real horsepower comes from the Bonmac Hikari siphon coffee system, one of six of the Japanese imports operating in the U.S. and the first in Nevada. Read more »
