Steve Wynn (center, in black) with some of the top chefs at Wynn Las Vegas.

A New Flavor At Las Vegas -The Wynn
The restaurants at Steve Wynn's latest resort focus on food, not fame

Rows of shiny metallic spheres glisten in the sun, floating on a small lake festooned with lily pads. A semicircle of cabanas huddles at lake’s edge; a Murano chandelier under each tent top illuminates a dining table. Trees and flowering plants on an adjacent hillside perfume the air. Two-story windows frame the scene for the diners inside Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare. The gigantic scale reminds us that this is Las Vegas, not coastal Italy.

Paul Bartolotta’s restaurant—indeed, each of the restaurants at the new $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas resort, owned by Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn—looks spectacular, is open to the outdoors and feels private. This is unusual, perhaps even unique, in Vegas, where, if you can see outside at all, the view inevitably includes the casino resort across the street.

Like the Palms, which opened in 2001, Wynn’s new resort avoids an overt theme. The building, a simple upswept curve, is deep bronze in color with subtle cream-colored horizontal strips, not unlike Wynn’s 1993 Mirage. The interior details, including acres of mosaic tiles on floors and walls, aim for exquisite rather than ostentatious; as in Wynn’s 1998 hit, Bellagio, guests can enjoy a conservatory, an art gallery and a lavish water show. The new resort could be in any city, at least any that could support a luxury hotel with 2,716 rooms.

One thing that makes this resort different is that Wynn rejected the restaurant formula that has worked so well for other resorts, including Wynn’s earlier ones: Sign up a star chef such as Wolfgang Puck or Emeril Lagasse, slap his name on the marquee and get someone else to do the cooking most of the time. Bartolotta heads a long list of well-credentialed chefs who have moved to Las Vegas full-time to do their restaurants at Wynn.

The lineup may not be all-star, but if there were a fantasy league for chefs, these are the guys everyone would want to draft. Foodies know them. Insiders sing their praises. And they left their previous jobs behind to work solely for Wynn, who will also be a partner in any new restaurants they create during their five-year contracts. Several of them are already planning for places in Encore, a second tower at Wynn Las Vegas due for completion in 2008.

Bartolotta best illustrates Wynn’s concept in that his ideas for the food at are about as far from the neon lights of Las Vegas as you can get. Despite the lavish setting, Bartolotta wants to cook the sort of direct, uncomplicated food that is served all along the coast of Italy, from Liguria to Sicily and up the other side of the boot to Trieste.

The heart of his menu is a page listing the fish types fresh from Europe, to be served roasted or grilled. He wants guests to eat whole spigola, filleted off the bone at the table, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil and served with a simple condiment such as halved mini-tomatoes and herbs. Such simple fish preparations are the current trend in New York, where non-Italian restaurants like Milos and BLT Fish are hot. But for Las Vegas, it’s a stretch.

“My goal is to transport people to a coastal restaurant in Italy,” the chef says, “to experience it in its extreme simplicity and explosion of flavor.”

Bartolotta is making the leap of faith that customers will be thrilled with Italian food that shows such restraint. But despite the considerable hype, there were empty tables at prime time in all of the restaurants I visited on a three-day tour two weeks after their opening. And that raises a big question at Wynn: Will diners flock to big-ticket restaurants if they don’t recognize the chef’s name over the door?

Wynn came to Las Vegas in 1967, and by 1973 he had put together a deal for the dusty old Golden Nugget downtown. He parlayed that revamped hotel into Mirage Resorts, which by 1998 included the Mirage, Treasure Island and Bellagio on the Strip. MGM Grand bought it all for $6.4 billion in 2000. Wynn regrouped and added new investors. His incipient new chain broke ground in 2004 on a resort in Macau and is planning something in Singapore.

“Everything in this company starts with an idea,” says Wynn, speaking almost in a whisper. “It’s the only approach we understand. If there’s an idea that has value and strength, even if you’re only 60 or 70 or 90 percent successful, you still have something of value."

The big idea behind Wynn’s restaurant program is a response to the many branches of celebrated restaurants which have popped up in Las Vegas over the past 10 years. “It’s all about who’s cooking dinner,” he says.

Bellagio opened with a half-dozen big-name restaurants operated by consulting chefs, including a Le Cirque and Circo by New York’s Maccioni family, a steak house by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and the first outpost of Todd English’s Olives outside Charlestown, Mass. But the biggest critical success at Bellagio—in fact, in all of Las Vegas—was Picasso, by Julian Serrano, who moved to Las Vegas to be the full-time chef. The message wasn’t lost on Wynn.

“San Francisco knew who Julian Serrano was because he was cooking at Masa’s there,” Wynn notes. “But who knew him anywhere else? Only the foodies. We decided we had to find the next Julian Serrano, the next Charlie Palmer, the next Charlie Trotter, maybe the next Bocuse or Girardet, and move them to Las Vegas to cook dinner for my guests.”

Having spoken quietly throughout most of a 90-minute interview, Wynn now pounds the table and raises his voice. “I want these guys to be here, take the blame or the credit, go face to face with guests the way Freddy Girardet did when I was blown away by his food in Switzerland, or Alain Ducasse [in Monaco] or Emeril Lagasse when all he had was Emeril’s in New Orleans.

“It’s all about who’s cooking dinner,” he repeats. “To the extent people find this hotel a place of distinguished achievement, it will be because of that idea.”

Alessandro (Alex) Stratta, who had a five-year run at the highly rated Renoir at the Mirage, has the new resort’s signature restaurant, He will get strong competition, especially from Bartolotta and two Asian chefs—Richard Chen and Takashi Yagihashi. Chen applies his highly refined, Western-inflected Asian cuisine to a Chinese restaurant, while Yagihashi aims to make the high-energy a Japanese restaurant, a balance between traditional dishes and the kind of inspirations that made his reputation at Tribute, outside Detroit.

Others fill their own culinary niches. Eric Klein, who wowed diners at Maple Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif., has the signature steak house. Stephen Kalt brings to the eclectic mix of Spanish, southern French and Italian food that he cooked at Spartina in New York. Mark LoRusso, who was Michael Mina’s chef in Las Vegas for five years, has his own place for the first time with offering an upscale American menu.

The one certified big-name chef is the only one who won’t be in his restaurant on a daily basis. Daniel Boulud will remain based in New York, where he operates Restaurant Daniel, Café Boulud and db Bistro Moderne. His chef de cuisine at Wynn’s however, is Philippe Rispoli, who came to Las Vegas in 1999 to cook at the exclusive Mansion at MGM Grand and later served as Charlie Palmer’s stand-in at Aureole Las Vegas.

Wynn said he promised Boulud a spot before he decided his strategy would be one of resident-chefs only. He felt he owed Boulud after being unable to fit him into Bellagio, and emphasizes the credentials of Rispoli, the chef in place. Besides, the restaurant aims to be more of a casual brasserie, not a full-fledged fine-dining experience.

To execute this plan, Wynn turned to some familiar faces. Grant MacPherson, his executive chef at Bellagio, came in as executive chef. Kevin Stuessi, now vice president of food and beverage, and Elizabeth Blau, executive vice president of restaurant development and marketing, recruited many of the star chefs at Bellagio and scouted out the key chefs for Wynn Las Vegas. Mark Poidevin, once executive chef at Le Cirque, is the new banquet chef. It’s the culinary version of Ocean’s Eleven—let’s get the old team together and go for the jackpot.

One key staffer missing from the reunited Bellagio gang is Gamal Aziz. Bellagio’s original vice president of food and beverage is now president of the MGM Grand, where he has raised restaurant quality significantly. Aziz likes the competition, arguing that it could only add to Las Vegas’ culinary credibility. “I have worked with many of these talents and know they will excel,” he says.

The support team takes care of all the pesky management issues that independent chefs must deal with every day. The hotel handles payroll and maintenance, and it also provides each restaurant with signature breads, chocolates (from Frederic Robert, former executive pastry chef for Alain Ducasse, now pastry chef for Wynn Las Vegas), ice creams, pasta and more. There is even a juice room whose staff squeezes everything from oranges to carrots to watermelon, adjusting the extraction rate and pulp content to order.

The bake shop, filled with the same ovens used by La Brea Bakery, the megasuccess started by Nancy Silverton in Los Angeles, turns out 70 different kinds of bread a day, everything from croissants to bagels to oversize sandwich loaves to an extremely seductive bacon bread. All are on display at a preview tasting for the new chefs and their assistants.

Milling around tables groaning with loaves, breadsticks, rolls and bagels, the chefs taste, compare notes and eye each other warily, because some breads are to be assigned just to one restaurant.

Klein likes the roll he has had specially made for his steak house. “Pork fat,” he says. “I told them to use a little pork fat in these. I wanted a real American bread. I didn’t want focaccia or French bread. This is the kind of thing you might get at a family diner.”

MacPherson tastes the bread. He frowns. “It better be hot,” he says. “Oh yes,” Klein responds. “It has to be hot.”

MacPherson insists on buying fresh raw ingredients, making everything from scratch on site. “It’s all fresh, no canned or processed ingredients,” he says. “When you’re doing this kind of volume it’s actually more cost effective to do things by hand rather than buy them ready-made or frozen,” MacPherson adds. The executive chef insists on buying directly from the people who raise the foods, rather than relying on middlemen. “We learned the hard way at Bellagio to source directly from the producers,” he says. “It’s more reliable and less expensive.”

One chef’s full-time job is to stand at the loading dock all day and be the eyes and nose for all the others, rejecting delivery of ingredients that don’t meet their standards.

The hotel’s purchasing clout makes Bartolotta’s emphasis on Italian fish feasible. Wynn’s buying department has arrangements in place to buy freshly landed fish from Milan, Rome and Paris, air-freighted same day. It’s a prime reason the chef decided to take Wynn’s offer.

“If you’re in New York, with your own little restaurant, you might need to order four branzino for your menu. And you are going to get the same thing everybody else in town gets. Here, we have the leverage to buy so much fish, I’m getting things the American consumer has never seen: langostinos that are jumping out of the box; fish you don’t see outside Italy.”

The chefs also know that the hotel is designed to draw throngs. “What’s better than knowing that 500 people are going to show up on your doorstep?” asks Kalt. “And if I might be willing to spend $1.5 million to build a restaurant, here they spend $5 million. It really leaves you with a lot of time to think about what you want to put on the plate.”

It all sounds warm and fuzzy, but then there’s the firing of Jimmy Sneed. Sneed came to Vegas from the Frog and the Redneck, his celebrated restaurant in Virginia, with big plans for no-holds-barred modern American dining. Wynn gave him his walking papers on March 30, less than a month before opening day.

The place was to be called Jimmy Sneed’s at the Country Club and was to serve breakfast, lunch and dinner at the 18th hole of the revamped golf course. The abrupt change in plans cost the company thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of dollars in signage, promotional materials and lost time. It cost Sneed what he called “my dream restaurant.”

Officially, Blau says, the partnership with Sneed ended because of “creative differences.” Ultimately, however, problems included Sneed’s rough-cob persona and unwillingness to accommodate his employers.

There was, for example, the hot dog debate. When CEO Mark Schorr wanted a hot dog on the menu, Sneed balked. “I told them I was trying to do a fine dining restaurant and a hot dog wasn’t right,” he explained by telephone. “I never said I wouldn’t do it.” That’s not how Blau sees it. “We even offered to make a hot dog to his specifications in our butcher shop,” she says. “He refused.”

This and other issues eventually brought the bosses to the boiling point, and Sneed was gone. A week before the opening, Blau announced that David Walzog would run a straightforward American steak house in the spot previously allotted to Sneed. Walzog had been executive chef for five Glazier Group restaurants, including Michael Jordan’s Steak House NYC and the Steakhouse at Monkey Bar.

If there is a lesson in the Sneed debacle it is that beneath the surface, Las Vegas is not really a wild and woolly place where anything goes. It’s actually a carefully controlled environment where nothing is left to chance. And if Wynn and his complex set of restaurants are to succeed, it will be because they have carefully managed the odds.

The wine program is equally ambitious. Wine director Danielle Price is sensitive to the criticism that Vegas hotels just have a big master list for all the restaurants under the same roof. Price’s assignment was to create individual, even idiosyncratic, wine lists for each restaurant. She worked with the chefs and sommeliers hired for each venue to fine-tune these cellars. The idea is that you’re not going to see the same wines from one restaurant to the next.

“We wanted to create a program where each restaurant is very different from the one next door,” says Price, who ran the wine program for the Smith & Wollensky restaurants for seven years.

Each place has its own wine cellar, designed to hold a few bottles of each wine on offer. Several of the restaurants have elaborate display cellars. The lists range from 200 wines, at the casual Corsa, to 1,000 at Alex. A 5,000-square-foot refrigerated storage room holds backup bottles for all the restaurants; they replenish their individual cellars from that, then reordering is done for the backup cellar. In all, Price says, Wynn opened with 2,600 wines in the database, backed by 100,000 bottles, an inventory valued at $6 million.

“And that’s a modest start,” says Price. “Some of these lists might double in size in the first year.” The deeper lists have older wines purchased from private collectors, and Price says she has sources for more. Markups are not exorbitant; at about double retail, wine prices are lower than those at most Vegas hotels.

“I had my ideas about what should be on each list,” Price says, “but it wasn’t until I sat down and talked with the chefs that it fell into place. A perfect example is Bartolotta. Originally, I thought his list should be Italian and American wines. He wondered if we could also have a few Australian wines and Spanish wines, which he loves. Then he came back to me and said, ‘Danielle, I’ve been thinking about it. I would like to have an all-Italian wine program.’ I loved the idea.”

Bartolotta opened with 800 wines, including a broad selection of Italian whites to go with the fish, and lots of big-name reds from Piedmont and Tuscany. Florence-born Claudio Villani, who came from Incanto in San Francisco, is the sommelier.

Alex has the biggest list, at 1,000 wines. It focuses on Burgundies, with a deep vertical of Coche-Dury Corton-Charlemagne and an extensive lineup from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, for example. There’s also a broad international selection with depth in vintages of the 1980s. Greg Condes, the sommelier, comes from Restaurant Gary Danko, a Wine Spectator Grand Award winner in San Francisco. The wine manager is Paolo Barbieri, a master sommelier. “That’s the crown jewel,” says Price. “It can grow as big as it wants to.”

One feature at Alex is a sommelier’s menu of five courses, which challenges the chef to cook for wines chosen by Barbieri. “I ask Paolo to choose some of his favorites, wines that people won’t be able to taste very often,” says Stratta. When the restaurant opened, for example, the sommelier’s menu included Château Ducru-Beaucaillou 1995.

Even the Asian restaurants have significant lists; at 350 wines strong, the list at Wing Lei shows more breadth than those at 99 percent of high-end Asian restaurants in the United States. It focuses on aromatic white varietals, such as Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling and Gewürztraminer, Meritage blends and Champagne. There is also a deep selection of clarets. “All the other top-level Chinese restaurants around town sell tons of red Bordeaux,” says Price. No big surprise there—what’s better with Peking duck than Cabernet?

Okada’s wine list has 300 choices. There are some serious Burgundies, both white and red, plus a significant selection of sake and shochu, the now-trendy Japanese liqueur.

SW, Klein’s steak house, has 800 choices, concentrating on Cabernet, with verticals from blue-chip producers around the world, including Bordeaux. It also has its share of Alsace wines to honor the chef, the son of an Alsace beef producer.

Corsa Cucina’s list is considerably smaller at 230 wines, but there were 100 half-bottles on the opening list, encouraging diners to try more wines. The focus is on Italy, but this is where Spain is most strongly represented.

Price plans to put hard-to-find, cutting-edge American wines on the 330-wine list at Tableau, the 80-seat restaurant featuring Mark LoRusso, formerly chef de cuisine at Aqua Las Vegas at the Bellagio. At dinner, the public can try his seven-course tasting menu paired with wines chosen by sommelier Caleb Dial, who also came from Aqua Las Vegas.

“Some of these handcrafted wines, we’re lucky if we get a case,” says Price. “What are you going to do in a place this size with one case of wine?” Dial is excited about selling one case of something special, whereas other sommeliers may not want to bother.

As it stands now, the wine program at Wynn differs only incrementally from those at other top resorts in Las Vegas. The Italian restaurants at Bellagio and Caesars focus on Italian wines, and high-end restaurants elsewhere also go after older vintages of venerable labels. Wynn ups the ante, says Larry Ruvo, president of Southern Wine and Spirits, Las Vegas’ biggest wine distributor, by slotting in as many rare and allocated wines as it does.

“We got them some wines that others don’t have yet,” Ruvo notes, “but Las Vegas is a very competitive town. Whatever one property does, it won’t take long before the others do it too.”

Several weeks before the hotel opened, while builders were still hammering away in the restaurants, I visited the key chefs to talk about their new places and to get a taste of what they planned. Other than Bartolotta, the most promising talents appear to be Alex Stratta and Richard Chen.

Wynn brought Stratta to Las Vegas in 1999 from Mary Elaine’s in Scottsdale, Ariz., which subsequently earned a Wine Spectator Grand Award for its wine list. Under the heading of “now it can be told,” Wynn confirms that Stratta was in the running to be the chef at Picasso, the signature restaurant at Bellagio. It came down to Stratta and Julian Serrano; Serrano said yes first, and so got the post. Although Wynn built Renoir in the Mirage for Stratta, the chef’s elevated French style wasn’t a smooth fit in the glitzy, midrange Mirage, where the star attraction was the Siegfried & Roy show.

“I promised [Stratta] that in the next hotel I built, he’d get the prime spot,” Wynn says. The resulting restaurant, Alex, is as spacious and dramatic as Renoir was precious. Curving stairs add drama to the 104-seat dining room’s entrance. Two-story windows face a garden with goldfish ponds. Wine racks are visible through glass partitions. There are also three private dining rooms and a glassed-in chef’s table for six.

Stratta has a kitchen staff of 30 now, compared with 11 at Renoir. “Instead of one guy per station, I have three,” he grins. “We have all the tools, all the people. It’s first-class all the way.”

The standard prix fixe dinner comprises three courses—appetizer, entrée and dessert. “We also bombard them in the beginning with a lot of little canapés, and give extra sweets to go with dessert,” the chef adds. A seven-course tasting menu features Stratta’s specials.

Trained as a French chef, Stratta grew up in an Italian family, and he borrows freely from both cuisines. Juicy frog legs are separated by delicate white ricotta gnocchi and sautéed chanterelles, the two emulsion sauces featuring ricotta and porcini. (Stratta calls them porcini rather than the French name, ceps.) Geoduck clams from the Pacific Northwest, some cubed and sautéed, some sliced thinly and barely warm, are tossed with a traditional Sicilian relish of roasted fennel, bitter orange, chile and coriander. Pastry chef Jennifer Witte’s spectacular mojito ice came as a garnish for a pineapple dessert, but I would have been happy to eat it all by itself.

If there is a sleeper chef in the Wynn stable, someone with the culinary chops to be a superstar, it’s Taiwan-born Richard Chen. His unique classical background in both Chinese and French cooking, expressed in a Western-inflected classic Chinese menu, served him well at Shanghai Terrace in the Peninsula Hotel in Chicago. Before that, he cooked with Sarah Stegner, then at the Ritz-Carlton Dining Room, also in Chicago.

Plenty of Western chefs incorporate Chinese ingredients and techniques such as stir-frying, notes the soft-spoken Chen, “but few Chinese chefs go to the European side to see what they can include.” Rather than simply turn a stir-fry out onto a platter, Chen does what any upscale Western chef would do—heat the plate and arrange the ingredients so they look sharp.

When Chen stir-fries black cod with oyster mushrooms, Chinese yellow chives and sugar peas, the flavor is delicate, the presentation exquisite as he arranges mushroom slices in a row, tops them with pieces of fish fillet and tucks the vegetables in between. Dressed with microgreens, the sauce just barely thickened, the dish looks terrific on the plate—and tastes even better.

He rolls wide rice noodles into bundles and browns them in a pan to serve as a base for gently cooked pork belly that has first been smoked for six hours with chrysanthemum tea leaves, then steamed for two hours, until meltingly tender. A few bok choy leaves make a garnish. It’s delicate, subtle, yet gutsy.

At Okada, Japanese cuisine too goes more contemporary, with chef Takashi Yagihashi bringing to bear his 20 years of experience serving French cuisine with an Asian twist. Before the move to Michigan for Tribute, Yagihashi cooked in Chicago at Yoshi’s Café, one of the earliest exponents of East-West cuisine, and at the very French Ambria under Gabino Sotellino.

Although he has a chef’s menu at Okada, Yagihashi wants to talk about the classic side of his Japanese menu, dishes such as soft-shell crab tempura, sashimi and beef teriyaki. The restaurant itself has a curved sushi counter, a robata (wood grill) room and a separate space for teppans (flat grills popularized by the Benihana chain).

Fresh-faced Eric Klein has never run a steak house (despite the family beef-connection) but is taking on the hotel’s signature version, SW, where the emphasis is on steaks served European style—sliced and sauced. In hiring Klein, Wynn is perhaps aiming to recreate the success of Prime at Bellagio, where celebrated New York chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten (who, like Klein, has roots in Alsace) designed the menu, even if he was seldom in the kitchen.

Along with the steaks, Klein serves a signature salad that mixes chunks of melon with slices of prosciutto in a take on the classic Italian appetizer. An appetizer of crab salad is dressed with a simple lemon vinaigrette that gets extra zip from the zest marinated in it.

Chef Stephen Kalt at the 128-seat Corsa Cucina relies on a wood-fired rotisserie and a light touch to reprise a list of Mediterranean favorites. Kalt has worked in Italy, southern France, Spain and Morocco, and it shows in the rustic flavors of his hearty pizzas and his appealing Corsa salad, a warm mushroom sauté tossed with corn, avocado and a fresh goat cheese–infused dressing.

In the end, Bartolotta’s simple Italian food may be the most ambitious of all. “We know that there is an undisputed love affair with Italian food in this country,” he argues, his voice rising with intensity. “Today more than ever, people are looking for quality over quantity. More than anything, the American consumer wants to be in the know, wants to know the real deal, and I think they’re ready to graduate.”

The heart of the menu is the simplest of fish, but that’s not all Ristorante di Mare does. Each page of the menu—antipasti, first courses, second courses—groups the seafood dishes in the top two-thirds of the space, while the lower third has poultry and meat options. A featured page, which changes daily, lists the imported fish, to be served grilled or wood-roasted.

“You don’t see these fish in any other restaurants,” he says, ticking off a list that includes pagro, mormore, pezzogna, sarego (all sea breams), gallinella (red gurnard), scorfano (what the French call rascasse) and ricciola (an amberjack). “I’m going to be bringing in true San Pietro (aka John Dory). Most people are using the one from New Zealand. If you see halibut and cod on my menu, you’ll know I’m in trouble,” he laughs.

As well as cooking in Italy, Bartolotta worked at a string of French restaurants, including Troigros, Bocuse, Vergé and Taillevent in the late 1980s. More than a little of that experience influences his alta cucina dishes, including a signature item from his days at Spiaggia: sweet scallops, barely browned, sautéed with porcini slices, draped with shaved Parmigiano and sprinkled with parsley. “Just parsley,” he says. “There’s a desire to put more on it than parsley, but not in Italy. Of course, they wouldn’t put cheese on seafood in Italy, either, but the milky texture of a relatively young Parmigiano is really good in this, don’t you think?”

Such creative items notwithstanding, will Americans follow Bartolotta’s lead in the name of Italian authenticity? Bartolotta has confidence because he has done it before. “They told me I couldn’t do it in Chicago but they loved it,” he shrugs. “My whole life I’ve been plowing against the grain.”

In the reality check of opening week, there are a few surprises. The public areas are filled with rubberneckers who, while trying to determine whether the beachball-size spheres of flowers on the atrium’s trees are fresh (they are), are effectively clogging access to the escalators leading down to SW and Daniel Boulud Brasserie. They gawk at the lineup of Rodeo Drive stores, including a Ferrari dealership, and at the dramatic stroke of a wooded mountain, complete with waterfalls, that hides the restaurants from the street.

Two weeks after the opening, however, there are empty tables in the restaurants and empty seats at the signature show, “Le Rêve.” At Bartolotta, guests are demanding California and high-end French wines, sending the sommeliers scurrying to other restaurants to procure them. But the unfamiliar fish are popular and guests love sharing platters of pasta and fish.

In the end, Bartolotta is counting on people getting excited about its pure, Italian freshness, just as Wynn is taking a risk that the time is right for a classy, nonthemed luxury hotel in Las Vegas. To an outsider, it still feels like a gigantic roll of the dice, but Wynn will have none of that sort of pessimism. “This is just a logical extension of our own experience,” he insists. “That’s my security.”

Wing Lei is a hit. The room hums with activity and looks sensational, with recessed patterns in the ceiling, mother-of-pearl tiles in the walls and two ancient pomegranate trees fruiting in the garden. Chen sends out a four-part amuse-bouche plate. How many Chinese restaurants do that? His food tastes, if anything, even better than when I previewed it.

Other restaurants are stunning. Alex is the grand setting that Stratta’s rich, urbane food deserves. Boulud’s brasserie looks like a luxury auberge on a secluded lake, and a simple dish such as basil-braised artichoke bottoms feels right at home. Okada’s space opens onto two waterfalls and there’s a private table outdoors next to one of them.

Ultimately, these details are what Wynn Las Vegas is about. The cares of the real world fade away when you’re sitting next to the waterfall at Okada or dining in a cabana at Bartolotta, and the food tastes better because the chef whose name is on the door is cooking just for you.

The Restaurants: Reservations Recommended

Alex
Telephone (702) 770-3300
Open Dinner, Tuesday to Sunday
Chef Alessandro Stratta
Atmosphere Modern French cuisine with Italian accents in a grand interior space; jackets requested
Wine list France
Wine selections 1,000
Cost Menus $70–$350
Corkage $35

Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare
Telephone (702) 770-3305
Open Lunch and dinner, daily
Chef Paul Bartolotta
Atmosphere Two-story restaurant on a man-made lake serving Italian cuisine with emphasis on imported fresh fish and seafood
Wine list Italy
Wine selections 800
Cost Entrées $15–$55
Corkage $35

Corsa Cucina
Telephone (702) 770-2040
Open Dinner, daily (closed for renovations until 12/16/05)
Chef Stephen Kalt
Atmosphere Modern cuisine served in a simple rectangular space featuring a wood-burning oven and pan-Mediterranean cooking
Wine list Italy, Spain
Wine selections 230
Cost Entrées $23–$39
Corkage $35

Country Club Grill
Telephone (702) 770-3315
Open Breakfast, lunch and dinner, daily
Chef David Walzog
Atmosphere Steak-house menu; picture windows frame the golf course from this replica of an American country club
Wine list California
Wine selections 600
Cost Entrées $30–$46
Corkage $35

Daniel Boulud Brasserie
Telephone (702) 770-3310
Open Dinner, daily
Chefs Daniel Boulud and Philippe Rispoli
Atmosphere Like a lakeside auberge in France, serving casual French cuisine
Wine list France, U.S.
Wine selections 450
Cost Entrées $18–$42
Corkage $35

Okada
Telephone (702) 770-3320
Open Dinner, daily
Chef Takashi Yagihashi
Atmosphere Modern rooms have waterfall views; food focuses on traditional Japanese sushi, robata yaki and teppan yaki
Wine list Global, with sake
Wine selections 300
Cost Entrées $22–$27
Corkage $35

SW
Telephone (702) 770-3325
Open Dinner, daily
Chef Eric Klein
Atmosphere Big, modern space has views of the lake show and serves steaks with a French accent; modern creative appetizers
Wine list California, France
Wine selections 800
Cost Entrées $32–$45
Corkage $35

Tableau
Telephone (702) 770-3330
Open Breakfast, daily; lunch and dinner, daily; brunch, Sunday.
Chef Mark LoRusso
Atmosphere Modern American cuisine in a poolside space modeled on an airy conservatory
Wine list U.S. (boutique)
Wine selections 330
Cost Entrées $34–$110
Corkage $35

Wing Lei
Telephone (702) 770-3388
Open Dinner, daily
Chef Richard Chen
Atmosphere Inventive Chinese cuisine with Western touches in a room highlighted by two gnarled pomegranate trees
Wine list France, California
Wine selections 375
Cost Entrées $27–$88
Corkage $35

For more information about Wynn Las Vegas and the restaurants featured in this article, visit www.wynnlasvegas.com.

By Harvey Steiman 
From Wine Spectator magazine