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 that’s for the better. The world needs no more tired reinforcements of cultural clichés.
Meanwhile, during those decades of transformation along Las Vegas Boulevard, another metamorphosis was happening less than two miles away.
In 1995 businessman James Chen and two of his partners, all of whom were high school classmates in Taiwan, opened Chinatown Plaza on Spring Mountain Road. They lined the complex’s roof with Taiwanese ceramic tiles and installed a paifang inspired by Tang Dynasty architecture as a gateway entrance. Their aim was explicit: Create the plaza to serve visiting Asians and Las Vegas’ growing Asian American population.
Their ambitions gave rise to the city’s Chinatown, and now nearly two dozen shopping centers dot the surrounding landscape. They house more than 200 restaurants serving, for starters, the cuisines of China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. For Angelenos who know the glories of dining in the San Gabriel Valley, the stretches of strip malls are a familiar and promising sight.
All of which is to say: Dining in Las Vegas has never been more exciting, or more overwhelming. Which is why this guide composed of fresh on-the-ground intel will be useful.
Jenn Harris, Betty Hallock and I each spent recent days racing across the city — including to the downtown Arts District, another culinary hotbed. We texted each other angles of the Sphere from various hotel rooms and compared notes on Peking ducks (a competitive field!). We didn’t love every meal, but we came away with nearly 50 dining options at every tier that we emphatically recommend. Among them are a taco stand worth lining up for, two new but very different chophouses, sushi and soup dumpling favorites and a 20-year-old jewel box worth a once-in-a-lifetime splurge.
And yes, Wolfgang Puck has another freshly minted restaurant, this one strictly Italian. It’s very, very good. — Bill Addison