The Las Vegas dining scene has a spicy relationship with stereotypes. It creates them, embraces them, defies them, reinvents them. Which tropes we hold closest likely are generational.
Some of us will recall the midcentury Before Times when dining in Vegas meant endless buffets, cheap steakhouses and the brown-sauced, Cognac-flamed zenith of Continental cuisine. Many more may always consider the city a satellite state for celebrity chefs. As he did for Los Angeles in the 1980s, Wolfgang Puck shifted restaurant culture in Vegas forever by opening his second location of Spago in 1992.
It took residents and visitors a few months to acclimate to the open-kitchen vibes and his sunny Cal-ltal cooking. But when the nightly receipts for goat cheese ravioli and smoked salmon pizza began to match his Beverly Hills earnings, other chefs from around the country who had become figures in the “New American” fine-dining boom tuned in. At the turn of the millennium, Vegas was for a moment the de facto destination for luxury dining in the United States.
A quarter-century later, the steady introduction of imported concepts — global chains, brand extensions for lifestyle gurus, restaurants with national name recognition — remains a fact of dining on the Strip. Fantasias and themes are baked into its amusement park nature, but with newer restaurants in recent years there are fewer attempts to “transport” diners to a corner bistro in Paris or a hidden den for Hong Kong dim sum, and th.