| The Best City in the U.S.A. For Food and Wine | | | | By: Ron Kapon |  Page 1 of 4 next >> |
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta and Los Angeles may be the finalists, but the winner is Las Vegas. There are 120 Master Sommeliers in the world (wine knowledge and blind tastings are part of the rigorous exam). 74 of them live in the USA; 13 of whom work in Las Vegas. There are celebrity chefs who promote their TV shows, books, clothing lines, pizza etc and rarely turn on a stove. I have eliminated the two most prominent examples from this discussion. If you put your name on a restaurant you should be there working at least half the time. There are 76 Wine Spectator Grand Award winning restaurants world-wide and 4 are in Las Vegas; 28 of the 700 Best of Award of Excellence restaurants are also in Las Vegas. Follow along with me as I sliced, diced and slurped my way through five days of the best food and wine of Las Vegas. But first, a brief summary of what I did outside the food and wine scene.
Janelle Brown of the New York Times in 2004 wrote: “When the Rat Pack moved out, Las Vegas lost its reputation for chic. Between the ubiquitous frozen margaritas, the roving bachelorette parties, the theme-park décor (and don’t forget the $3.99 buffets), the town scared away the nation’s arbiters of taste. The emerging Las Vegas is now sexy rather than tacky, knows its contemporary design and is definitely priced for the high-roller crowd.”
Ron’s Choices: Take the kids to Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay. If you are of a certain age and love the music of the 1950/1960’s stroll over to the Sahara Hotel’s Conga Room for the Coasters/Platters/Drifters concert. There are no four letter words and I, along with most of the crowd, knew all the songs. The hotel is a bit like the audience, old and creaky. Since I was staying with my cousin who is a Major in the Air Force and headquartered at Nellis Air Force Base. I took his suggestion and saw one of the IMAX shows at the Luxor Hotel: Fighter Pilot, filmed at Nellis.
Lance Burton, magician extraordinaire, has his own theatre at the Monte Carlo Hotel. Even sitting in the third row center I couldn’t figure out how all those doves kept appearing from his rolled up sleeves. If you can get tickets for one of the five Cirque du Soleil (literal translation is Circus of the Sun) shows go for it. I saw “KA” at the MGM Grand and all I can say is WOW!! It combines acrobatic performances, martial arts, puppetry, multimedia and pyrotechnics. The show's title is inspired by the ancient Egyptian belief in the "ka" an invisible spiritual duplicate of the body which accompanies every human being throughout this life and into the next. I had less than 15 minutes to run through the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian Hotel for a bit of cultural perspective. For true Las Vegas kitsch I stopped at the stretch of Fremont Street known as the Fremont Street Experience. The Neon Museum has rescued signs and placed them in this pedestrian street of souvenir shops, strip clubs and low-rent casinos. The two block stretch is canopied by an L.E.D screen with 12 million lights and two stages for shows. Bring your sunglasses. For the best views of the strip travel to the older north end of Las Vegas Boulevard ( where the aforementioned Sahara sits) and the Stratosphere Tower. Head to the top (1,149 feet) that offer panoramic views of the entire Las Vegas Valley. An alternative is the Top of the Eiffel Tower at Paris LV at 460 feet or dine 56 stories up at Alize at the Palms Hotel (an Andre Rochat restaurant). Even though I didn’t dine at Andres the nighttime view was fabuloso. I had a car, and drove to Lake Mead/Hoover Dam, less than an hour outside town. There is always a bus tour since a car is not really needed in LV. Alas, I did not have time to get to the Liberace Museum or Classic Car Museum.
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