When radio and TV restaurant critic John Curtas moved to Las Vegas in 1981, it was, as he puts it, “The town that taste forgot.” Aside from cheap buffets, coffee shops and swank surf-and-turf restaurants catering to high rollers, there wasn’t a whole lot to excite a foodie’s palate.
Since then, of course, Las Vegas has undergone nothing short of a dining revolution, with every celebrity chef from Tokyo to Paris throwing his or her toques in the ring. At the same time, the city has become a mecca for young chefs seeking a Hell’s Kitchen level of culinary training they can’t get anywhere else.
“Vegas has become a boot camp for a lot of chefs,” says Curtas, who airs his dining commentaries on Nevada public radio and KLAS TV, the local CBS affiliate. “They learn to work under a lot more pressure than in New York or San Francisco because the volume is so much higher. A steakhouse here will do 1,000 covers a night.”
Heidi Rinella, restaurant critic for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, notes that Vegas also draws prospective chefs to a growing number of culinary academies.
“We have a Cordon Bleu and the Culinary Institute of Las Vegas, plus the College of Southern Nevada and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas have good restaurant and hospitality schools,” she says.
Curtas, whose favorite local restaurants (“if price is no object”) include Alex at Wynn Las Vegas, Le Cirque at Bellagio, Fleur de Lys at Mandalay Bay and Valentino at The Venetian, says the stampede of new celebrity-chef-owned restaurants is slowing down and more restaurants are being run by “home-grown” chefs.
“We’ve become a food town, not just a big splashy restaurant town,” he says. “The recession is making things more real. A big-name chef can no longer just open a restaurant and charge more than he does in New York.”
One of the best-kept dining secrets in town is the wealth of Asian restaurants in the Chinatown section of Las Vegas on Spring Mountain Road, he adds.
“We have a Chinatown—really Asiatown—just two miles west of the Strip where you can get really good Asian food that’s very cheap,” he says. “I really beat the tom-tom about this. Not only Chinese, but great Vietnamese, Japanese and noodle houses. And the Lotus of Siam restaurant is considered by many critics to be the best Thai restaurant in the world.”
Rinella also enjoys the Spring Mountain dining scene, with favorites that include the steaming bowls of Vietnamese soup at Pho Kim Long II and seafood at Hot and Juicy Crawfish.
And while buffets no longer rule the Strip, she doesn’t count them out.
“There are a lot of really good buffets, although they are not the bargains they once were,” she says. “The ones at Paris, Bellagio and Wynn are especially good.”
