It took 30 years for Vegas to become a global dining destination. COVID wiped it out. What do we do now?
We seemed invincible once, didn’t we? Thirty years of ever-expanding prosperity will do that to you. With Vegas surviving Gulf wars, dot-com busts, recessions, mass shootings, and depressions, it felt like the public’s appetite for all things Las Vegas was insatiable. Since 1994, we witnessed one restaurant boom after another: celebrity chefs, the French Revolution of the early aughts, Chinatown’s 20-year expansion, Downtown’s resurgence — and all of it gave us rabid restaurant revelers a false sense of security. A cocky confidence that the crowds would flock and the champagne would always flow.
Then we were floored by a COVID left hook no one saw coming. In an instant, literally, 30 years of progress hit the mat. To keep the metaphor going, we’ve now lifted ourselves to the ropes for a standing eight count. The question remains whether we can recover and still go the distance, or take one more punch and suffer a brutal TKO.
There was an eeriness to everything in those early months, as if a relative had died, or we were living in a bad dream. A sense of loss and apology filled the air. Our first instinct was to reassure ourselves. Restaurants were there to feed and help us back to our feet, and the feelings were mutual. Reassurances and gratitude were the watchwords whenever you picked up a pizza or grabbed take-out from a chef struggling to make sense of it all.
Then the mood turned surly and defensive. The moment restaurants were given the go-ahead to start seating people again, the battle lines were drawn. It took some weeks to build the trenches, but by July, what began as a “we’re all in this together” fight for survival devolved into a multi-front war pitting survivalists on all sides against each other. Mutual support evaporated as tensions arose between those needing to make a living and those who saw epidemic death around every corner. Caught in the middle were the patrons: people who just wanted to go out and take advantage of our incredible restaurant scene. Suddenly, everyone felt uncomfortable, and in a matter of a few calamitous weeks, dining out in America went from “we’re here to enjoy ourselves” to “let’s all struggle to get through this” — not exactly a recipe for a good time, which is, after all, the whole point of eating out.
Reduced hours and crowds meant shorter menus, since every restaurant in town was forced to narrow its food options. No one seemed to mind, since anyone taking the time to dine out was simply happy the place was open. But if you sum it all up — the rules, the emptiness, the fear, the feeling of everyone being on guard — it’s a wonder anyone bothered going out at all. But going out to eat is what we do, because it is fun, convenient, and delicious, and because we are human.
As Las Vegas’s most intrepid gastronaut, I’ve had to curb my voracious appetite more than anyone. Overnight, my routine went from visiting 10 restaurants a week to a mere few. Even in places where I’m on a first-name basis with the staff, the experience is as suppressed as the voices of the waiters. Instead of concentrating on hospitality, the singular focus is now on following all the rules. All of which makes you appreciate how the charm of restaurants stems from the sincerity of those serving you — something hard to notice when you can’t see their faces.
Nowhere are these feelings more acute than on the Strip. “Las Vegas needs conventions to survive,” says Gino Ferraro. “If the hotels suffer, we suffer.” He’s owned Ferraro’s Italian Restaurant and Wine Bar since 1985, and he’ll be the first to tell you how thin the margins are for success in the business. Restaurants are in your blood more than in your bank account, and micromanaging, cutting costs, and (hopefully) another year of government assistance are what he sees as keys to their survival. “Good restaurants will survive,” he says, “but there’s no doubt there will be less of them.”
Unlike the free-standing Ferraro’s, the Strip is different. There, the restaurants are amenities — like stores in a mall, if you will — and from Sunday-Thursday (when the conventions arrived) they used to thrive. These days, like Ferraro’s, they still pack ’em in on weekends, but almost all are closed Monday-Wednesday. This doesn’t mean the food or the service has suffered — far from it — only that everyone is hanging on by their fingernails, and this anxiety is palpable when you walk through the doors. The staffs are almost too welcoming, which is nice, but you can sense the fear. It’s not pretty, and it is not going away for many months to come.
As Vegas slowly re-opens, one thing you can no longer take for granted is that each hotel will have a full complement of dining options, from modest to world-famous. If I had to make a prediction, it would be that a year from now, some hotels may field a smaller team of culinary superstars, and their bench will not be as deep, and those stars will have another season of wear and tear on them without any talented rookies to come along and take their place. Long before the shutdown, there were already signs we had reached peak Vegas and things were starting to wane. Some fancy French venues were showing their age, the Venetian/Palazzo (with its panoply of dining options) seemed overstuffed, and rumblings were heard that even the indefatigable David Chang had lost his fastball. The same could be said for the whole celebrity-chef trend, which was starting to feel very end-of-last-century by the end of last year. The Palms’ murderer’s row of newly minted sluggers was mired in a slump, and our gleaming, big box, pan-Asian eye-candy (Tao, Hakkasan) was not shining as bright as it once did.
The stakes are much higher when you consider the reputation of Las Vegas as a whole. Survey the landscape these days and all you can ask is, how much of this damage is permanent? It took from 1989-2019 to take Las Vegas from “The Town That Taste Forgot” to a world-class, destination-dining capital — a claim to fame like no other — where an entire planet of gastronomic delights, cooked by some of the best chefs in the business, was concentrated among a dozen closely-packed hotels. Now, what are we? A convention city with no conventions? A tourist mecca three days a week? Can we recapture this lost ground, or is it gone forever? Everyone is asking, but no one has the answers.
Perhaps a culling of the herd was already in the works, and all COVID did was accelerate the process. Are the big-money restaurant days over? Certainly until those conventions return, and no one is predicting that until next year, at the earliest. If that’s the case, it will be a leaner gastronomic world that awaits us down the road, not the cornucopia of choices laid before you every night. The fallout will include the casinos playing it safe; not throwing money at chefs like they once did, and sticking with the tried-and-true for a while. Less ambitious restaurant choices? Absolutely. It is impossible to imagine a single European concept making a splash like Joël Robuchon did in 2005, or any Food Network star getting the red carpet treatment just for slapping their name on a door. The era of Flay, Ramsay, Andrés, and others is over, and the next big thing in Las Vegas dining won’t be a thing for a long time.
If the Strip’s prospects look bleak, the resilience of local restaurants has been astounding. Neighborhood venues hunkered down like everyone else, but now seem poised for a resurgence at a much faster rate than anything happening in the hotels. If the Strip resembles a pod of beached whales, struggling to get back in the water, then local restaurants are the more nimble pilot fish, darting about, servicing smaller crowds wherever they find them. Four new worthwhile venues are popping up Downtown: upscale tacos at Letty’s, Yu-Or-Mi Sushi and Sake, Good Pie, and the American gastropub Main Street Provisions, all in the Arts District. Off the Strip, Mitsuo Endo has debuted his high-toned yakitori bar Raku Toridokoro to much acclaim, and brewpubs are multiplying everywhere faster than peanut butter stouts. The indomitable Chinatown seems the least fazed by any of this, and Circa is springing to life on Fremont Street, hoping to capture some of the hotel mojo sadly absent a few miles south. The bottom line: Look to the neighborhoods if you wish to recapture that rarest of sensations these days — a sense of normalcy.
Watching my favorite restaurants endure these blows has been like nursing a sick child who did nothing to deserve such a cruel fate. In a way, it’s made me realize that’s what they have become to me over decades: a community of fledgling businesses I’ve supported and watched grow in a place no one thought it possible. As social experiments go, the great public health shutdown of 2020 will be debated for years, but this much is certain: Las Vegas restaurants were at their peak on March 15, 2020, and reaching that pinnacle is a mountain many of them will never climb again.