If it’s not quite accurate to say that food is Desert Companion’s (wink, wink) bread and butter, there’s still a whole grain of truth to it. Whether we’re showing our nom-hunting readers an out-of-the-way taqueria or guiding them through the Strip’s cathedrals of haute cuisine, dining coverage has been baked into our pages almost from the beginning. (Clearly, we also enjoy a tasty food pun now and then. An amuse bouche, if you will.) That continues with this issue’s Summer Dining feature, née DEALicious Meals, one of two food issues we publish each year. The other is December’s Restaurant Awards.
Las Vegas’ culinary reinvention — for context, picture a Michelangelo painting of Wolfgang Puck extending a tasting spoon toward the outstretched tongue of a Vegas buffet patron ready for something new — was already well underway by the time the first Desert Companion rolled off the presses 10 years ago. Still, the magazine’s first decade coincided with a certain maturation of the scene. While absentee celebrity chefs still opened splashy branded restaurants on the Strip, more of them actually stayed here, personally overseeing the kitchens that bore their names. Neighborhood dining got deeper, richer, more sophisticated.
Desert Companion’s crack squad of reviewers and reporters kept pace, reviewing restaurants, recommending dishes, profiling chefs, analyzing trends, and compiling guides to every kind of food — we have the expense reimbursements to prove it. We dispensed shout-outs to the talent in the kitchen, whether we found it in a suburban bar (say, Sporting Life lounge, for one of many examples), in Chinatown (Mio Ogasawara of Sweets Raku, who won a 2013 Restaurant Award for Best Pasty Chef), or in joints probably no one’s ever heard of (Le Cirque, whose executive chef Wilfried Bergerhausen took last year’s Chef of the Year award).
Often, cuisine tells a specific story, and we love when it does — indeed, this month we use food both to explore the immigrant influence in the valley, and to examine the potential, and limit, of food as a mode of communication and healing. Other times, it’s just about putting something good in your chomp-hole. Either way, our philosophy has been that quality dining adds volumes of texture to our quality of life, and reminds us all that, even at the super-basic level of fueling up your body, life in Las Vegas is a movable feast. How do you like them ... ( final food cliché cut — eds)