January 7, 2008 |
Short Order
Celebrated chef wrangler Elizabeth Blau has been called in from private practice to refocus the dining image at Encore, the grandiloquent add-on to Wynn, Las Vegas, scheduled to open in December 2008 as casino legend Steve Wynn’s Ultra–all bells, all whistles, all premium suites property.
Since recruiting a constellation of stars for Wynn’s splashy opening in 2005, Blau has been running her own consulting firm and opening restaurants with partner Kerry Simon, most recently the new Simon Kitchen and Bar at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. But as Blau notes, “the Wynns are family for me. ” So when star chefs weren’t falling out of the sky and restaurant machinations struck rock, she was called in.
Wynn’s expectation that Paul Bartolotta would sign on as the fine dining centerpiece dissolved when the two couldn’t agree on Bartolotta’s dream of a super upscale Italian restaurant. Bartolotta’s astounding Italian fish house has been the jewel of Wynn dining from the day it opened with meals easily costing $300 to $500 for two, depending on how thirsty you are…perhaps upscale of that ilk seemed dicey in the current economy.
Blau meets with the Wynn team tomorrow to take their temperature and see what they want. Blueprints sent over to her before Christmas showed everything changed from the last time she saw them – locations and sizes of restaurtants all revised. The trick will be to get major star chefs who are willing to movie to Vegas, as Steve Wynn requires.
“A lot of young chefs are eager to move to Las Vegas,” she insists. “It was not difficult to get Alex Strata or Bartolotta to move,” she recalls. It all depends on where the chef is stuck. But Minneapolis, the suburbs of Detroit and Milwaukee are not New York.
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