Cheftimony Snack: Back to Las Vegas…
“...for all the overuse of water in the desert, for all the gaudy and the tacky and the overwrought, Las Vegas actually gives us a glimpse into human ambition and human achievement.”
Before the heat of the summer becomes unbearable, I’m heading back to one of my favourite places to visit, Las Vegas, Nevada.
I spend a fair bit of time answering the same question from friends – “Why do you like Vegas so much?” – so I’m sharing a few thoughts on the topic on today’s snack-sized episode. Let’s start with the easy and obvious. I like Las Vegas because it has a great food scene. That scene is as good as it is, at least in part, for the second reason I love the city, which I’ll touch on that later. But to put it simply, Las Vegas has the budget to attract talented chefs and the visitors willing to spend money to sustain the restaurants. Annually, there are somewhere north of 40 million people visiting the city. That is a lot of restaurant customers.
On the Strip, this means big-name chefs can open eponymous restaurants and charge prices that allow them to attract and retain talented staff. I’ve cooked with many of these staffers, and I hear a common refrain that it’s possible to have a great life as a cook in Las Vegas. Wages are good – higher than in many other cities with higher costs of living – and the cost of living in Vegas, although rising, is still quite comfortable.
As a cook, I can say that the big budgets mean no-holds-barred kitchens. The equipment they have to work with really is incredible. Every time I step into the kitchen at Bouchon, I feel like I’m entering Willy Wonka’s factory. It’s huge and shiny and gorgeous and filled with the most wonderful equipment. Even the cutting boards there amaze me. They are so heavy and stable and secure. And that’s not to say anything of the combi-ovens, and the blast freezers and brass-dyed pasta extruders…
All of that money, all of those restaurants and all of those cooks have, over time, created another great feature in the Vegas food world – the independent restaurant scene. Many of the chefs who came to town to work the big-name places on the Strip are choosing to stay in the city when it’s time to open their own restaurants.
These chefs are creating an off-strip culinary scene that is really coming into its own. Sparrow and Wolf and Esther’s Kitchen are two names that come quickly to mind, and I’m looking forward to discovering more. On this trip, actually, I’m going to meet a new friend I met virtually through Instagram and the world of podcasting – Kristy Totten who produces the Spicy Eyes Podcast in Las Vegas with her co-host Sonja Swanson. Spicy Eyes explores food and culture in Vegas and they’ve already done some great episodes on off-strip dining.
Oh, that second thing I like about Las Vegas. This is much harder to capture, because I haven’t sorted it out fully yet myself. But it’s kind of this… For all of the city’s flaws, for all the environmentally non-sensical decisions, for all the overuse of water in the desert, for all the gaudy and the tacky and the overwrought, Las Vegas actually gives us a glimpse into human ambition and human achievement. Of course you don’t need that many slot machines or that many high-roller suites or opulent lobbies or spas that are air-conditioned against the desert heat, but warm you up in a hot tub within the air conditioning before cooling you down again in an ice room. No we don’t need any of that, but someone built it. Because someone could.
And with all of that, and all of the troubles it creates, Las Vegas brings talent. Chefs and singers and acrobats and dancers and artists and jugglers and magicians. In Las Vegas they will give you all of that, and almost anything else you want, measured against one very simple metric, a metric that has lots of its own problems, but at least it’s easy to understand: money. They’ve parsed every piece of real estate and even every slice of time (“Hey, you want a late checkout? No problem! 40 dollars please.”) to make more money. The same thing is happening everywhere else, of course, to a greater or lesser degree. It’s just that it’s much more obvious in Las Vegas.
And maybe that’s the best way to express the second thing I like about this city. For all of its problems, and all of its artifice, Las Vegas is surprisingly honest. It has fake cities and skylines, fake Egyptian pyramids, fake Venetian canals and even that fake Eiffel Tower. But I feel closer to the answers to many of the big questions when I’m there.
So let me get back to Pizza Rock, to Bouchon, to American Coney for hotdogs, to the Stage Door Casino, my favourite place to sip a one-dollar beer, and to a new-to-me place on this trip, Prime Steakhouse in the Bellagio.
Thanks for joining me for this pre-Vegas snack episode, and I’ll be back here soon with a full culinary report on the trip.