Anything That Moves (10 page)

“I want to see more dandelion being used,” Ottolenghi said, making me wonder if he had a lead on a patch.

“I like it, but it makes you urinate a lot,” LaMorte said.

•   •   •

F
or most of Las Vegas's history, food there broke down into three main categories: coffee shop, steak house, and buffet. For high rollers, there were gourmet rooms, with names like the Sultan's Table and the House of Lords, where waiters in tuxedos plated Maine lobster and chateaubriand tableside. Restaurants were a way of fortifying gamblers, to keep them from straying too far from the tables and the slot machines.

The first big chef to come to Las Vegas was Wolfgang Puck, who had opened Spago, in Los Angeles, in the early eighties. The developer Sheldon Gordon approached him with the idea of putting a Spago in the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, a mall that he planned to build in a parking lot where Formula One races had been held. Puck, who liked to go to Vegas for the fights and already had a branch of Spago in Tokyo, agreed, and the restaurant opened at the beginning of December 1992, when the only thing happening was the rodeo finals. “We had all these people come up to the open kitchen—they'd see the plates and think it was a buffet,” Puck recalled. “I said, ‘I didn't know they had so many cowboys here. I would've done a rib joint.'”

For the first several weeks, Puck thought he'd made a terrible mistake, and drank himself to sleep every night with a bottle of wine in front of the TV. Then New Year's came, the shows resumed, and the Consumer Electronics convention came to town. Spago had lines out the door. Steve Wynn started hanging out at the bar, and so did the Molaskys, big local developers. Puck would see customers from the L.A. Spago at the fights—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack Nicholson, Tony Danza—and bring them back to Spago afterward. Before long, the Vegas location was outperforming L.A.'s. “People started hearing the numbers we were doing at Spago,” David Robins, the restaurant's chef, who moved to Las Vegas to help with the opening, told me. “I'd get calls saying, ‘Did you really do a million this month?' I'd say, ‘Actually, it was one-point-two.'”

In the late nineties, while getting ready to open the Bellagio, a $1.6-billion resort on the site of the old Dunes casino, Steve Wynn, mindful of Puck's success, decided that the property needed to be a dining destination. He sent a team of consultants out to recruit celebrity chefs, and when the Bellagio opened, in 1998, it housed world-class restaurants by Sirio Maccioni, Michael Mina, Julian Serrano, Todd English, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Soon every big casino had a roster of star chefs. Joël Robuchon came out of retirement to open two restaurants at the MGM Grand in 2005; in 2009, Pierre Gagnaire, a three-star Michelin chef in Paris, opened his first restaurant in the United States, at the Mandarin Oriental hotel at City Center.

From the beginning, the problem with haute cuisine in Las Vegas was ingredients. All you could get were frozen proteins and overstock produce. When Puck first arrived, he told me, “I went to visit a fish guy, who took me into a thirty-thousand-square-foot freezer. I said, ‘No, no. That's not who we are. We want fresh tuna and salmon.'” He had his chefs drive a van to the Santa Monica Farmers Market for fruit and vegetables. As more and more high-level chefs arrived, a culture developed of what one chef called “FedEx cuisine.” Claude Le Tohic, the executive chef at Robuchon, who won the 2010 James Beard Award for best chef in the Southwest, gets his butter and his cheese overnighted from France. According to Julian Serrano, it is easier to get good ingredients in Las Vegas than in San Francisco, where he used to work, because the airport there often gets fogged in, whereas in Las Vegas the weather is almost always clear, and a plane lands every three minutes at McCarran Field.

Paul Bartolotta, the chef at Bartolotta at Wynn, a complex that Steve Wynn opened in 2005, is perhaps the most extreme example. The concept of his restaurant—simple preparations of fish and crustaceans at exorbitant prices—depends on seafood being flown in as often as five times a week from the Mediterranean, in coolers equipped with microchips to monitor the temperature throughout the voyage. He has no patience with concerns about sustainability. “Las Vegas is a pilot project to see if man can live on the moon,” he says. “There's nothing local—our water comes from somewhere else, our electricity comes from somewhere else.” Fishermen have sent him texts in the middle of the night from their boats in the Adriatic, with pictures of themselves holding fresh-caught specimens and messages like “Want this fish?” On one such occasion, the fish was an eighteen-pound ombrina; when it arrived at the restaurant, forty-eight hours later, Bartolotta walked it onto the floor and offered it to a party of golfers as the main course in a tasting menu they had ordered. He took it back to the kitchen, sprinkled some salt and pepper on it, tied up the tail so it would fit in the oven, and within ninety minutes the golfers were eating it. Their bill came to nearly $5,000, before wine.

Another local feature is the wildly variable demand. Olivier Dubreuil, the executive chef at the Venetian and the Palazzo, which together command nearly two million square feet of convention space, says that he sometimes serves eighty thousand people one day and twenty thousand the next. “I can use five hundred
magrets
and then never use them again,” he says. “I can use sixty pounds of foie gras in three days.” Even in the age of cutbacks, the pharmaceutical companies still spend handsomely. When Tylenol comes to town, he told me, food budgets soar.

Vegas may be the one food town left in America where the ego of the customer still trumps the ego of the chef. If a big player wants a cheese pizza, he gets a cheese pizza, even at a formal French restaurant like Alex. I heard a story about a Korean high roller who travels twice a year to Wynn with an entourage of twenty-five and plays six-figure hands of baccarat. One night he tried Bartolotta and loved it so much that he arranged to bring his whole group back the following night. Only this time he was in the mood for a roast-beef dinner. So what did Bartolotta do? He went out and found some beef to roast. Bradley Ogden recently bought from Ottolenghi some 1890 balsamic vinegar in tiny bottles that looked as if they should hold perfume; they cost $350 apiece and would most likely be served to high rollers, after supper, on mother-of-pearl spoons. “Vegas is the entertainment capital of the world,” David Robins, of Spago, says. “We want to treat customers with respect, and we want to take all their money.”

•   •   •

A
relative of mine who lived in Buffalo and went by the name Shorty Plumb used to run booze across the border to Canada in the back of a pickup truck loaded with horse manure, and never got caught. Truffle cheats follow that same rule of thumb: you hide the good stuff in with the shit. The sums of money involved can be vast. White truffles from Italy cost up to $4,500 a pound wholesale; black ones, $800. Claude Le Tohic, Robuchon's executive chef, told me that when truffles are in season he goes through ten or twelve pounds of black ones and five pounds of white a week. He sometimes offers a six-course truffle tasting menu, which includes a truffle tart, and serves a truffle‒foie dish topped with edible gold.

For an importer, the temptation to con can be strong. Some will stash a box of truffles deep inside a container load of something boring, like lettuce, to dodge the import tax. Others route their paperwork through places not within the bounds of the EU. For years, Ottolenghi says, all the European truffle companies were based in San Marino, a tiny independent republic in northern Italy, which was exempt; now most run their paperwork through Croatia.
Another common trick, this one played on chefs, is to add a few worthless Chinese truffles to a box of black Italians; the color is indistinguishable, and the Chinese truffles take on the aroma of the more expensive ones. A chef would have to know the subtleties of truffle morphology to pick out the impostors, or isolate each truffle under a bell jar and smell it again after waiting fifteen minutes. Ottolenghi finds the chicanery infuriating; crooks serve as a good foil for virtue, but they make for tough competition in the marketplace. “Basically, selling truffles, you're a smuggler,” he says.

I asked Joseph Magnano, the young, tattooed West Coast representative for Sabatino Tartufi, a large importer based in Umbria, about the business. At the time, he was the top truffle seller in Las Vegas, and he saw it as a magnet for come-latelies. “Every distributor in Las Vegas at one point or another will try to get in on it, try to get on my coattails,” he said, agitated, between sales calls at the Wynn. He had on a black wool cap and carried a small cooler full of truffles. “But they don't know how to sell truffle. They don't
care
to know about truffle.”

I asked if there was a lot of fraud. “Oh, a hundred percent,” he said. “I'm not saying that
we
do it, but I'm saying it's there, especially during black winter–truffle season, because it's at the same time as Chinese truffle season. Chef will never know the difference if he doesn't know truffle. You
can
identify them, they have a different hardness, the flavor's different, they taste more rubbery, they're not as clean, the veins are skinnier, it's just not a good product. You can tell, if you know truffle.” A Chinese truffle, Magnano said, smells like burned drip coffee, while a bad white truffle tastes like a greasy Lay's potato chip. But he dismissed Ottolenghi's priggishness. “It's not that the business has no ethics—it's a business,” he said scornfully. “If you don't move product, you don't live.”

A few years ago, Ottolenghi sent a letter to his chefs, announcing that, after twelve years, he was scaling down his truffle business, “because the only way to succeed selling truffles in Las Vegas is to have lower ethics and cheat more than your competitors.” He went on to say that saffron, “a once noble spice,” was going the same way, and claimed that not a single restaurant in Las Vegas was using pure product. Most of the saffron on the market—sold for $85 an ounce—was, he said, a hash of crocus parts dyed with red food coloring. He, on the other hand, was personally importing saffron directly from Spain. The letter served as an announcement that his fresh shipment had arrived and that he would be offering it for $145 an ounce.

While in Spain, Ottolenghi went to see Pina, his saffron source in La Mancha. “Saffron is the second product I started selling, after truffles,” he told me. “Light products do well on the Internet.” Pina has a lab where it analyzes competitors' saffron to suss out fakes, and Ottolenghi thought that this would be a selling point to chefs: they'd give him a one-gram sample of whatever they were using, he'd pay to have it tested at Pina, and if it turned out to be dyed the chefs would promise to buy from him. “I know I'm going to win that bet,” he said.

After he got home, Ottolenghi was back on his beat, going from chef to chef, a brown leather satchel slung over his shoulder, hand-selling his goods: 100-percent-pure saffron; vanilla bean from Papua New Guinea; and a variety of salts, including one that had been smoked over a Chardonnay cask. It was 116 degrees, and, to his embarrassment, he couldn't wear a suit. Furthermore, his sturgeon had died, and Chef Robuchon had said no to the Spanish caviar. But SW Steakhouse had just ordered a kilo, for $1,500; barMASA was using the foie gras; and RM Seafood, Rick Moonen's sustainable fish restaurant at Mandalay Bay, had picked up both.

At midday, Ottolenghi trudged into the Rio, an old casino that houses the purchasing department for all the Harrah's properties in Las Vegas. He wound his way past giant carnival masks and fixated smokers staring at the slots, and through an unmarked door to the loading dock, where crates of plucked chickens sat next to plastic bags of precooked chili. In a windowless office off the dock, he sat down to make a pitch to a senior buyer. “I'm trying to convince everyone to switch to real saffron,” Ottolenghi said. “It's terrible. There's more cheating going on in saffron than almost any other product.” He pulled a jar from his satchel, and took off the top. A heady, tobacco-like aroma filled the room. He held up a piece, bright red, like a shrunken coral. “The fake ones, you put them in water, the water will turn orange-red from dye,” he said. The buyer pushed a pair of glasses up onto his forehead. “Interesting,” he said flatly. “Never knew that.” Ottolenghi leaned in, and suggested that he could do a demonstration for the chefs, soaking the saffron from their stockrooms in water to show them what they really had: flavorless flower bits and food coloring. The buyer agreed, and Ottolenghi packed up his wares and said good-bye. But, rather than leaving, he started walking down the hall, popping his head into other buyers' offices, just to introduce himself and say hello and see if they might like to take a sniff of his vanilla from Papua New Guinea, which was the same species and just as good, based on his research, as the prized Tahitian stuff, and a bargain by comparison.

•   •   •

O
ttolenghi has attended the Fancy Food Show since he was eight. (The minimum age is eighteen.) I went for the first time in 2012, to the winter show in San Francisco. Before long, I ran into Ruth Reichl, the former editor of
Gourmet
who had become the director of Gilt Taste, an ever-changing online market for everything from golden-roe bottarga to gluten-free pound cake. Reichl, an experienced showgoer, was reminiscing about weird, off-putting products past, like Gourm-Egg, a tube of extrudable hard-boiled eggs, for salad bars and restaurants. This time around, the novelties were throwbacks: “ancient grains,” chia seeds, camote flour—subsistence fare from the early days of agriculture.

At Culinary Collective, a sophisticated Washington-based importer with a line of pre-Columbian flours and grains, Betsy Power was talking up
kañiwa
, a hearty, high-protein grain that grows in the Andean
altiplano,
which she had recently placed in some Whole Foods stores in Northern California. Power extolled
kañiwa
's earthy, nutty flavor and its plumping ratio, comparing it favorably to its sometimes bitter-tasting cousin, quinoa. “People had started growing quinoa, due to the Western influence in the market,” she said. “
Kañiwa
was out of favor. They were growing it for animals”—a sure sign that it was poised for exploitation by the wealthiest eaters. The rise of Bolivian quinoa, though, served as a warning: embraced by Americans as a high-brow carb, its price nearly tripled in five years, making it unaffordable to the poor Bolivians who once made it a staple of their diets but now relied on less-expensive processed foods.