Business at Los Angeles restaurants typically slows down during the summer because it’s travel and cookout season for many customers. But as usual, chef Edoardo “Edo” Baldi will not be denied.

His buzzing new Tuscan steakhouse, Baldi at Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, just expanded dinner service to seven nights a week after hearing guests clamor for the proper Baldi experience on Mondays and Tuesdays, which previously had a limited bar menu.

“A lot of people that were coming were like, ‘Oh, we want the full menu,’” Baldi tells Observer of the early week visitors. “I understand it, and I’m totally for it.”

Baldi is channeling his Tuscan upbringing at Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills as he grills prime cuts over olive wood. He is, as always, using time-honored recipes to make some of the most soul-warming pasta dishes in Los Angeles. He says that a big part of his success in L.A. has involved serving “health-conscious food,” so he’s also got beautiful salads and his famous minestrone with seasonal vegetables on the menu.

“What I’ve learned is to really understand the Los Angeles mentality,” says Baldi, who opened E. Baldi in Beverly Hills 20 years ago after seeing the success of his father’s Giorgio Baldi restaurant right off the Pacific Coast Highway. “I think about how to make a dish for people who are looking for something that’s healthier or vegetarian. You have to keep all those things in mind.”

Baldi at Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills is no doubt a meatery, but it’s also a deeply tomato-forward restaurant. Lobster linguine comes with an excellent spicy tomato sauce. Mezze maniche is bathed in an equally excellent tomato-based beef ragout that’s credited on the menu to “Sauro’s wife.” Sauro was Baldi’s father’s accountant and a close family friend in Italy.

“My education has not really been a book education, like where you go to culinary school,” Baldi says. “It’s been more about questioning people who do beautiful dishes that I enjoy eating and just learning through experience.”

You can and should get a side of farmers market tomatoes with red onions to accompany your steak at Baldi. And steaks come with two sauces that are a nod to what Baldi’s mother used to serve alongside bagna càuda. One is a salsa verde with a little anchovy, egg white, parsley, salt, pepper, capers, olive oil, garlic and red wine vinegar. The other is tomato paste with a little garlic, sugar, salt and olive oil.

“I have several pictures from when I was little where I’m picking tomatoes,” says Baldi, who also has core memories of going with his mom to markets in Italy for produce and pastries.

Baldi’s steakhouse is part of a striking ready-for-the-summer dining makeover at Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, which opened pan-Asian restaurant Gemma (with everything from crowd-pleasing butter chicken to har gow to lobster with Singaporean curry glass noodles) on its rooftop in May. And Baldi, who closed Edo Bites at Palisades Village after last year’s Palisades fire, understands revamps, renewal and rebirth more than most chefs.

His flagship E. Baldi in Beverly Hills is more popular than ever, even though it used to benefit from Hollywood expense-account budgets that no longer exist. What he realized along the way was that his restaurant had garnered a reputation as a power-lunch spot for the entertainment-industry elite, but that it was better to become a place for the masses.

“The restaurant has gained popularity with time,” Baldi says. “Before, it was more the business crowd. We’ve become more popular in the bigger picture. We get local clientele but also people from all over the world who are coming to Beverly Hills for a holiday.”

Baldi has long known that the restaurant business is inordinately challenging, but he’s eager to continue opening new restaurants while building on his legacy in Beverly Hills.

“There’s a saying my dad used to say all the time: ‘Even to your worst enemies, you wouldn’t want to convince them to open a restaurant,’” Baldi says. “Because the restaurant business is so difficult, right?”

Beverly Hills, for example, has seen the closure of prominent restaurants like Gucci Osteria da Massimo Bottura and Il Fornaio in the past year. And Daniel Boulud never opened his planned Café Boulud in the area.

“L.A. right now is having a very hard time,” Baldi says. “You read it everywhere. Restaurants are closing, and it’s a very negative outlook for the short-term future of restaurants. I’m not going to lie and tell you that I was for sure going to be successful at this hotel. You always have your worries. You can have a very good restaurant, but that doesn’t mean it will be successful. But besides being a chef, I love to create and I love to design. I think there’s much more ahead for me. I’m really looking forward to the future.”

He’s also looking forward to digging deeper into his family history as he gives Los Angeles new experiences.

“My dad built this brick, a so-called barbecue that didn’t even really work that well,” Baldi says about the earliest influence for his steakhouse. “But we used to grill meat all the time on Sundays. It was really so simple, just a little bit of olive oil, toss it on the grill, and eat it with tomatoes and onions and cannellini beans. I went back to the simplicity of how I used to eat meat.”

Baldi is located at 9850 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90210, and is open daily from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Vibey Afro-Caribbean restaurant Lucia celebrated its one-year anniversary this past weekend with three nights of Carnival-style festivities. And as the party, powered by dancers grooving alongside percussionist Denise Zavala and DJ Paper, got livelier and livelier on Friday, May 29, chef Cleophus Hethington was in the kitchen, quietly doing what he always does.

Hethington, who has run kitchens around the country and was a 2022 James Beard Award finalist for Emerging Chef at Benne on Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina, is a dedicated student of Black foodways. At Lucia, the Miami-raised Hethington takes inspiration from his extensive travels around the Caribbean as he focuses on diaspora cooking.

Over the weekend, he showcased wondrous new dishes like a crab-and-callaloo patty and cornmeal-crusted Pacific halibut with tomato-coconut water and peppa sauce. He served his riff on oil down, which is the national dish of Grenada and a recipe he’s been preparing with either prawns, snow crab claws or some lobster he’s saved for VIPs.

“I’ve always felt like the Caribbean is a map and a mirror to the world,” Hethington tells Observer. “It’s a place where continents collide and cultures converge. History has left its fingerprints on every plate. There’s every language and religion there. It’s in the soil. It’s in the music. It’s on the plates.”

The Caribbean is where Indigenous people coexist with groups who’ve migrated from Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. Hethington wants to reflect that diversity at Lucia, where he’s serving crowd-pleasing dishes like Trini-Chinese whole yardbird, eggplant-and-tomato choka, tamarind Caesar salad, green fig leaf fish roast, jerk lamb shank and wagyu patties filled with beef cheeks (an ingredient he first discovered at “Eurocentric restaurants” and prepares in the style of coq au vin).

Hethington was recovering from an intestinal cancer procedure and working as culinary director at Kneads Bakeshop in Baltimore when he was approached about the opportunity at Lucia last year. He wasn’t looking for a job, but he’s long been willing to go on a new and important journey. Hethington, a U.S. Navy veteran whose cooking career previously took him to Canje in Austin and Zak the Baker in Miami (which became a James Beard finalist and earned Michelin Bib Gourmand status during his tenure), moved to Los Angeles on November 8 and started working at Lucia on November 11.

At first, he thought about just consulting at Lucia, which is owned by entrepreneur Sam Jordan. But Hethington decided he needed to be present if he was going to put his name on a menu. 

He says he’s still figuring out L.A. and still “developing a life beyond the four walls of Lucia now.” He can do that now that things are more settled at the Fairfax Avenue restaurant. In Hethington’s initial weeks at Lucia, he wasn’t sure how long he would stay or how customers who came to the restaurant for the scene and the energy would react to his cooking. 

He says it took a little while for customers at Lucia to get it, but it turned out that Los Angeles is more than ready to vibe to his food. A glowing review from the Los Angeles Times solidified Hethington’s status as a talented chef who’s making terrific food that this city had never seen before.

Oil down is typically made by cooking down coconut milk until it splits and the fat separates. Hethington wants a less oily sauce, so he reduces the coconut into a yogurt-like cream that’s sweet and nutty. He layers on complexity and umami by adding a coconut dashi with bonito flakes, kombu, saffron threads, turmeric, coriander and Scotch bonnet peppers. There’s also green seasoning with ginger, garlic, shallots and scallions in his oil down, which is finished with tamarind pulp, lime juice and cane vinegar. At once complex and familiar, it’s one of those dishes that makes you feel like you’re seeing different shades of your favorite colors.

“I’m not Kwame Onwuachi or Mashama Bailey or Erick Williams,” says Hethington, who is eager to talk about the influence of the Black chefs he admires, including Nina Compton, Paul Carmichael and Tavel Bristol-Joseph. “But I know I’m a voice and a face who’s valued in this industry. My passion is for authorship and cooking and history and ownership of our culture. It’s about allowing us to create a new narrative and perception of what Black foodways look like.”

He remembers working at New York’s Jean-Georges in 2012, when the second season of The Mind of a Chef came out on PBS. The first episode featured Southern cooking icon Sean Brock traveling to Senegal.

“I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’” Hethington says and laughs. “That blew my mind.”

Seeing a prominent white chef going to Africa made Hethington want to dive deeper into his roots, which trace back to Senegal and Cameroon. Hethington looked at the cookbooks he had in storage, from restaurants like Le Bernardin and the French Laundry. He realized he wanted to go on a different path and focus on something that reflected his heritage. He started messaging Black food scholars on Twitter. He never heard back from Jessica B. Harris and Toni Tipton-Martin, but he started conversations with Adrian Miller, Kevin Mitchell and Michael Twitty. 

And he says that many of the Black chefs who are making waves at restaurants all over the country are closely connected on social media. (Last week, ABL, a new Caribbean restaurant in Hollywood, announced its opening, and Hethington posted an Instagram story about his excitement.) Lucia is clearly part of a movement.

“It’s an amazing thing to see so many restaurants of this caliber opening up,” Hethington says. “It’s allowing owners like Sam to take these risks and these chances.”

Hethington knows that Lucia gives him a glamorous platform to do what he’s been thinking about for more than a decade. Los Angeles hasn’t ever had a restaurant like Lucia, but Hethington doesn’t feel out of place here.

“For most Black chefs who are out here exploring our culture, history and cuisine, it’s about taking the techniques that we’ve learned at the Eurocentric restaurants we’ve worked in and intertwining that with the ingredients we’ve known and loved from childhood to adulthood and continue to love,” he says. “So what does it feel like to be doing this in L.A.? For me, it feels normal.”

Lucia is located at 351 N. Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036, and is open Wednesday-Sunday from 6 p.m. to midnight.

The journey from what chef Eric Greenspan calls “dystopia to diaspora” will culminate on Tuesday, June 2, when he opens new-school Jewish deli Mish in Los Angeles.

“Opening Mish is a public service,” Greenspan tells Observer. “People want to build the library so that little kids can read. It’s the same thing with Mish, but it’s pastrami.”

Greenspan has had a storied career that’s spanned fine dining, ghost kitchens and most recently the Tesla Diner, but Mish feels very different from everything he’s done before.

“What I did reflected my creativity and my training, but it never reflected my heritage,” Greenspan says. “This is an opportunity to do something with my heritage.”

It’s an opportunity to reflect, honor, pay tribute, riff, expand and create something new.

“This place is not going to feel like the Epcot Center version of the Lower East Side,” Greenspan says. “This is not an homage. This is a progression. It’s an evolution. What was really important is that I wanted to talk about the entire culinary diaspora. Mish is not just an Ashkenazi Jewish deli. Jewish food is not just pastrami sandwiches. Jewish food is not just the Lower East Side of New York. Jewish food is not just Poland. Jewish food is not just Montreal. Jewish food is not just Israel. Jewish food is not just Iran. Jewish food is not just North Africa. Jewish food is not just the Sephardic tradition of how we were before we got kicked out of Spain. Jewish food is all of those things.”

Greenspan is, on one hand, a supremely confident chef. But he’s quick to admit that there are many things he doesn’t know, so he’s asked a lot of friends for help. 

“If a Jewish grandmother comes into Mish and calls me out on my matzo brei, I can say, with all due respect, ‘Fuck off.’ Like, I know what I’m doing. I was raised on this shit, too,” he says. “But if a Persian Jewish grandmother comes into Mish and says that’s not koobideh, I can’t say anything.”

So Greenspan asked Ben Shenassafar, who’s known as Ben Hundreds and is the frontman of L.A.’s buzzing Benjamin restaurant, for his thoughts on what kind of Persian food Mish should serve.  

“Ben’s response was like, ‘Do it different. Greenify it.’” Greenspan says.

The result of this discussion is Mish’s koobideh-style sweet-and-sour meatballs made with wagyu and lamb. 

Greenspan stresses that Mish is a collaborative process, a library that many people want to build. The deli is serving both pastrami and slow-cooked brisket, which are available on sandwiches or on a tray that resembles a Texas barbecue platter. Greenspan worked closely with Matt Giamela of RC Provisions, who also supplies legendary L.A. delis like Langer’s, Canter’s and Brent’s, to develop Mish’s unique hardwood-smoked pastrami with Levantine flavors. 

Mish’s charcoal-grilled beef salami sliders, meanwhile, are inspired by a trip that Greenspan and his friend Spike Mendelsohn took to Montreal, where Greenspan fell in love with the little salami sandwiches at Wilensky’s.

“A lot of people know Spike from his Top Chef fame and being a powerhouse in D.C.,” Greenspan says. “But a lot of people don’t know that Spike’s family is part of Schwartz’s in Montreal.”

Greenspan knew he had to visit Montreal for R&D after he signed a lease on a La Brea Avenue space that came with a wood-burning pizza oven. And he knew Mendelsohn would be the perfect guide.

“I had never made bagels,” Greenspan says. “I had never used a wood-fired pizza oven. I didn’t even know how to light one. And I had never been to Montreal. But, yeah, no problem. Montreal bagels are traditionally wood-fired, right? So we’re making Montreal bagels.”

When Greenspan started envisioning Mish’s riff on Montreal bagels, he called Oren Salomon at the acclaimed Starship Bagel in Dallas for help. They ate bagels around Los Angeles and went to Restaurant Depot for equipment. But there was a problem: Neither one of them knew how to light a wood-burning oven. So Michael Fiorelli of Fiorelli Pizza came over and showed them.

Another powerhouse pizzaiolo, Daniele Uditi of Pizzana, assisted with baking trials in the wood-burning oven. So much of Mish’s R&D has been like this, with prominent chefs and restaurant operators coming by for tastings and advice. Aaron May, Burt Bakman, Danny Gordon and Max Miller gave Greenspan feedback. On one of the mornings that Observer visited Greenspan, Shenassafar was in the kitchen tasting a pastrami sandwich.

If Mish is a public service, Greenspan sees all the people who’ve helped him as “benefactors.” He’s been dreaming about opening a Jewish deli for years and is grateful for the assistance from friends who believe that Mish should flourish.

Mish’s menu includes a pastrami Reuben, a tuna melt (with Greenspan’s own New School American cheese), lemon blintzes, bagel sandwiches, all-beef Snap-O-Razzo hot dogs, Wexler’s Smokehouse salmon, fried kreplach, shakshuka in a hole, Sephardic chicken salad and much more. Not surprisingly, given the involvement of so many different people, this is a deli that celebrates the idea of overabundance.

Greenspan’s business partner at Mish is prolific restaurateur Bill Chait, who previously opened everything from Republique to Firstborn before working with Greenspan at the Tesla Diner. Mish’s pastry chef is Dara Yu, the youngest winner in MasterChef history. Julian Cox, a four-time James Beard Award nominee, leads Mish’s beverage program, which features coffee, matcha and cocktails.

This is very much a new chapter for Greenspan, who decided to take a long break from restaurants a decade ago because he wanted to spend more time with his two young sons. He knew he was the type of chef who would always be in the kitchen if he were running a restaurant. 

But he didn’t stop cooking. He was a ghost-kitchen pioneer who served everything from bacon-and-egg sandwiches to high-end duck dinners. He launched MrBeast Burger. He created New School American cheese. He showed up at Coachella with different pop-ups year after year. And then he returned to restaurants with the Tesla Diner. 

He thinks of the last 10 years as the dystopian part of his career. But his children are older now and don’t need him around all the time, so Greenspan can focus on the diaspora part of his career.

“I took my son Meyer to baseball practice two years ago, and he was like, ‘OK, Dad, I’ll see you at pickup,’” Greenspan says. “I’m like, ‘What do you mean? You don’t want me to stay?’ And he’s like, ‘No, I’m fine, just come back and pick me up.’ And I realized that what my kids needed from me now is different than what my kids needed from me in the past 10 years.”

Greenspan started texting people to see if they wanted to open a restaurant, and Chait immediately responded with a yes. Then it was time for Greenspan to talk to his sons.

“I said, ‘Boys, here’s the deal,'” Greenspan recalls. “‘You’ve known me your whole life, and you have no idea who I am.’ I said, ‘You know how Daddy’s crazy? There is one specific environment where the way Daddy is crazy leads to excellence, and that is running a restaurant. It’s time for me to go back to being who I am. It’s time for you to meet your father, because there’s a whole part of my life that you’ve never seen.’”

But Mish isn’t open in the evenings, so Greenspan can go home for dinner and to help with homework. He’s reserving the right to return to Mish and fire up his oven after dinner and homework. It’s all part of the juggling act of being a chef who cares deeply about his work. 

“I’m somebody who doesn’t run from challenges,” Greenspan says. “I run into them.”

One challenge that Greenspan clearly recognizes is that Los Angeles and other North American cities have a long history of Jewish delis. In L.A. alone, the original Canter’s opened in 1931, Langer’s dates back to 1947, and Brent’s launched in 1967, to name just three. Greenspan, with help from many friends, wants to rewrite the script.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of giants but unburdening ourselves from tradition to create something that is new and fresh,” Greenspan says. “The entire community behind this is really something. The amount of people who want this thing to happen, not because of their love for me but because of the glaring need for something new and fresh in this space, is fucking insane.”

Mish is located at 127 S. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90036 and will be open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Bad Roman self-identifies as a maximalist restaurant.

Bad Roman is maximalist in its design. It will make its West Coast debut today (Tuesday, May 26) in Beverly Hills, with a boar sculpture and greyhound statues standing guard next to green velvet banquettes. 

Bad Roman is maximalist in its attitude. Michael Stillman, CEO of Quality Branded Hospitality, remembers opening the original New York location in 2023 on the third floor of the Shops at Columbus Circle, in the wake of pandemic lockdowns.

“People wanted something fun and warm,” Stillman tells Observer. “We were like, ‘It needs to have a sense of irreverent humor.’ That’s very us. It’s like, ‘Hey, stop taking yourself so fucking seriously.’ It’s OK to have a really good time and have fun and be a little out of the box.”

Most important of all, Bad Roman is maximalist in its food. While there are other restaurants that want to be as Italian as possible, Bad Roman is about purposeful excess and about trying new things. This is an Italian-American restaurant that’s influenced by Rome, but also by the red sauce you’ll find all over New York City and the produce-forward Cal-Italian food at Los Angeles mainstays like Gjelina.

“There’s a maximalist thing to having handmade Sungold tomato chitarra but also to have pepperoni cups and ranch and then also have a traditional handmade gnocchi dish and then red sauce,” Stillman says. “Is it too much? A little bit. But if you’re not trying to overdo it with an individual dish, I think it works and is a great meal. And it flows because it’s fun and we’re not trying to be too serious.”

Chef/partner Craig Koketsu and Bad Roman Beverly Hills chef Clint Ives are in charge of an all-over-the-place menu that also features roasted garlic babka, filet mignon meatballs and la figliata. La figliata is like an oversized ball of burrata, and Bad Roman is having The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills bring this cheese in from Puglia every week. So make no mistake, Bad Roman is, in fact, very serious about the food it’s serving, while also layering cheekiness and luxury throughout its menu.

There are starters like crispy calamari casino and eggplant pull-a-Parm, which is a riff on mozzarella sticks. All the pasta at Bad Roman is made in-house, and there are baller dishes like osetra caviar gnocchi, black truffle cacio e pepe and spicy lobster campanelle. Despite all the extravagance, pricing is in line with high-end destination dining in New York and Los Angeles. There’s no silly $200 pasta here. The pepperoni cups with ranch are $14, the caviar gnocchi is $55, and you can get Dover sole for $75.

For dessert, there’s tiramisu ice cream cake. Or if you prefer dessert in the form of a beverage, there’s the reverse affogato with vanilla milk-washed vodka and espresso shaved ice.

Bad Roman is in the Beverly Hills space formerly occupied by the Palm steakhouse, and Stillman has been thinking a lot about old-school Los Angeles destinations like the Palm, Dan Tana’s and the Formosa Cafe. 

“I thought about Dan Tana’s and how it’s kind of labyrinthine,” says Stillman, who doesn’t want to have outdoor dining at Bad Roman because he likes the idea of a moody supper club. “A lot of L.A. places have this sort of cool, labyrinthine feel. That’s something I wanted to create here.”

And he’s done it his way with shielded neon, a mini menagerie, curvaceous door handles that look like snakes and trompe l’oeil elements you can gaze at while you enjoy pepperoncini martinis, tequila granitas with habanero shaved ice or an aperitivo in a shot glass attached to a toy car (Ferrari, Fiat, Maserati and Lamborghini, of course).  

Stillman is a second-generation restaurant operator whose Quality Branded Hospitality empire also includes New York’s Don Angie, San Sabino, Limusina and Quality Italian. Bad Roman is, in many ways, his most untraditional restaurant. But in the end, the ethos at Bad Roman is very much Italian-American. It’s about taking something familiar and changing things up and making it your own and having a great time in the process.

“It’s not just the food itself, but there’s a certain attitude, a certain nonchalance, a certain swagger,” Stillman says. “That’s very much an Italian-American restaurant feeling, to me at least.”

Bad Roman is located at 267 N.Canon Dr., Beverly Hills, CA 90210, and will be open Tuesday-Saturday from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. Lunch and weekend brunch hours are coming soon.

Michelin-starred Coral Gables destination Shingo is a 14-seat restaurant with $275 seasonal tasting menus and an interior that was built in Kyoto before being disassembled, shipped and rebuilt at its final destination in Florida. Shingo, which specializes in omakase featuring ultra-premium nigiri and signature items like eel with caviar, is perched at the pinnacle of Japanese fine dining in Miami. 

But for their next restaurant, chef Shingo Akikuni and partner Kenzie Motai are aiming for something much more approachable. Stand, which will debut its daytime service in Coral Gables on Thursday, June 4, is a 24-seat café focusing on sandos, bento boxes and shio pan alongside matcha and coffee.

“When you grow up in Japan, café culture is so big, and those bakeries are in every neighborhood,” Motai, who was born in Tokyo, tells Observer. “I grew up going to bakeries. And in every kind of Japanese household, you have shokupan, Japanese milk bread, inside the house.”

For Motai and the Osaka-born Akikuni, Stand is about going back to their roots and the food they enjoy eating day after day.

“It’s always been part of us,” Motai says of his and Akikuni’s love for Japanese cafés. “We were trained in fine dining, but, as people, we’re fairly casual. We wanted to create something that was more accessible. Shingo is expensive and not necessarily a concept that you can go to every single night. So our goal is to continue to create more Japanese food concepts and introduce more Japanese food and our culture to the people in Miami. We just celebrated three years of Shingo. And for a couple years now, we’ve been talking about creating a nice neighborhood spot where we could have sandos and onigiri and bento for lunch.”

Stand, which will also have its own private-label matcha from Japan and private-label coffee from Guatemala, while offering specialty drinks like matcha with strawberry puree, is inspired by both Japan’s kissaten culture and its convenience-store fare. But this new restaurant is, of course, taking a chef-driven approach to its everyday food. 

Chef de cuisine Lania Andrade, who was most recently Shingo’s pastry chef, is leading a team that’s baking its shokupan in-house. R&D for the milk bread was an arduous process. Andrade, Akikuni and Motai traveled to Japan last summer and tasted different shokupan. Motai, who spent the latter part of his childhood in New Jersey, also got some help from his parents.

“I had them ship shokupan from a café that I grew up with,” he says. “In New Jersey and in New York, there are a lot of Japanese people and Japanese bakeries and cafés. There is something very authentic there as well.”

After six months of testing to perfect Stand’s pillowy milk bread, Motai is convinced that Stand’s shokupan is just as authentic. The shokupan at Stand is the foundation of sandos filled with egg salad, chicken katsu, wagyu and other options. The café also has toasts topped with flavors like pizza and sweet potato. 

And Stand is using the same dough for grab-and-go shio pan (buttery salt bread) with options including chocolate, sausage and curry.

“Curry is such a staple in Japanese households, and curry pan is something that I probably ate every single day growing up,” Motai says.

Beyond Stand’s grab-and-go options, which also include onigiri, the restaurant offers made-to-order sandos, salads and bento boxes (with seasonal proteins, sides, rice and miso soup). Stand is keeping things accessible with shio pan that starts at $3.50, sandos that start at $12 and bentos available for less than $20.  

“It seems like interest in Japanese food is at an all-time high,” Motai says. “We feel a responsibility to give people the most authentic experience. We’re really excited and happy to be able to share that cuisine in an approachable and affordable way. We feel like we’re kind of Japanese ambassadors here in Miami. It’s about having those authentic products that we grew up with and really enjoy eating every single day.”

Stand is starting off as a walk-in daytime destination. The space will add dinner service, with reservations available, in the fall. That will be in the form of a dimly lit izakaya with a to-be-determined menu, which might include Japanese staples like karaage and ramen paired with sake, beer and wine.

“We’re bringing in a chef from Japan for the nighttime concept,” Motai says. “I think the izakaya allows us to explore a lot of different types of food. And if something sticks out and it becomes really popular, we might look at that and say, ‘Hey, maybe we should open something based on that.’”

Stand is located at 98 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables, FL 33134, and will be open daily from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

There are countless restaurants that serve pasta in New York, but Uovo should stand out when it makes its New York debut in NoMad on Thursday, May 28.

“We don’t do comparisons with other restaurants because we are so unique in what we do and so specific in what we do,” Uovo chef Germano Minin tells Observer. “We do this thing day after day after day. We’re quality fanatics. Our focus is on pasta only.”

Minin is in charge of Uovo’s food in Los Angeles (where the restaurant has five locations) and New York. Uovo also has a kitchen, led by chef Pino Mastrangelo and pasta-maker Stefania Randi, in Bologna.

Minin isn’t misusing the word “unique” when he describes Uovo’s process. Uovo, which opened its first location in Santa Monica in 2017, serves pasta that’s handmade in Bologna and then shipped in a temperature-controlled compartment to the United States. 

Uovo is also sourcing Italian ingredients like Basilicata tomatoes and 24-month-aged Parmigiano-Reggiano. With a menu that features Bolognese, Amatriciana, cacio e pepe, carbonara, arrabbiata and vongole made from time-honored recipes, Uovo’s goal is to be nothing less than the most Italian restaurant you can find outside of Italy.

“I work on the floor and talk to people almost every day,” Uovo operating partner Christian Bertolini tells Observer. “I’m at Uovo six days a week, and I’ve been doing this since we opened. I can tell you that I see so many Italians coming in, and they all end up being regulars. And the comments they make are about how this pasta is as good as the best places in Italy.”

Like the Los Angeles locations, the new Uovo on West 28th Street will feature counter seating with a direct view of cooks preparing pasta. Whether you’re at the counter or at a table, you can order à la carte or choose from different tasting menus that include three pastas along with a starter and dessert. But there are no secondi at Uovo. Pasta is the main event.

“What we want to do in New York is replicate the quality, consistency and expertise that we have in L.A.,” Uovo co-founder Carlo Massimini tells Observer. “We want it to be exactly the same.”

Uovo is about taste memories. Its Bolognese recipe is from Bologna’s Antica Trattoria della Gigina and dates back to the 1950s. Carlo and Lele Massimini, the Rome-born brothers who started Uovo with Jerry Greenberg and Lowell Sharon, re-created their mom’s vongole for their menu.

Uovo is undoubtedly a serious, precision-focused restaurant, but it’s also an informal and accessible place to have dinner. There are no reservations. You can order a tasting menu for $50 or less per person, hospitality included. You are also very much encouraged to come by for a plate of pasta, a glass of Italian wine and absolutely nothing else. Uovo is about traditional, no-frills dining.

“We’re old-fashioned,” Lele Massimini tells Observer. “We were eating around Italy years ago and just asking ourselves why we couldn’t have pasta in America that’s as good as the best places in Italy. And then we just said, ‘Well, we should do it.’”

And if you’re going to create a game-changing restaurant, you might as well strive for perfection.

“We all have the same goal,” Minin says. “As a chef, it’s such a pleasure to be able to work with people who are like-minded. We try our pasta every single day, three, four, five, six times. We do it because we love it. And we want to make sure that every dish that our guests are going to enjoy is exactly what we want to serve.”

Uovo is located at 13 W. 28th St., New York, NY, 10001, and will initially be open from 5:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday-Thursday and 5:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday. All-day hours will follow in late June.

MML Hospitality will debut its revamp of Austin’s historic Driskill Grill and Bar today (Monday, May 18), with a deep focus on Texas beef alongside an all-over-the-map cooking sensibility from chef April Bloomfield.

“It always comes back to what’s in Austin, what’s the market,” MML co-founder Larry McGuire tells Observer. “It seems like the capital of Texas should have an independent, grand, badass steakhouse. It’s never really had that. We’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”

“Procuring Texas beef was a No. 1 priority,” Bloomfield tells Observer. 

So at a restaurant space that dates back to 1930, inside a hotel that debuted in 1886, the Driskill Grill is serving Dean & Peeler beef that’s raised, finished and dry-aged in Texas while Bloomfield nods at everything from legendary New York steakhouses to her British cooking roots to a recent trip to Egypt.

“It’s really just about taking a chef-driven approach to it, where you’re just modernizing how we think about menus and seasonality and produce and applying that to the steakhouse model,” McGuire says. “I think April’s the perfect person to do that because she’s known for her meat cooking, but she’s also amazing at vegetables and unexpected flavors.”

For Bloomfield’s version of steakhouse bacon, she’s dry-rubbing the bacon with dried Mexican chiles, sugar and salt, before smoking it and then heavily searing it.

“You get a little kiss of char, a little sweet caramelization,” Bloomfield tells Observer. And then, to complement the sweet, smoky, salty bacon, “We made a pickle of charred green tomatoes with lots of pickled onions,” Bloomfield adds.

Like New York’s Keens, a steakhouse that McGuire loves, the Driskill Grill is serving its steaks with a roasted red pepper. Prime rib, meanwhile, is carved tableside and comes with Yorkshire pudding.

“You go to a steakhouse because you want it to feel grand,” Bloomfield, who joined MML Hospitality as executive chef in 2025 to put her stamp on multiple restaurants, says. “There’s nothing more grand than somebody coming around and slicing a 14-ounce piece of perfectly cooked prime rib.”

Bloomfield and Driskill Grill and Bar executive chef Nick Erven have collaborated on a menu where the side dishes are as chef-driven as the main courses.

“Being from England, I love potatoes,” Bloomfield says. “And we’ve got three kinds of potatoes.”

There are house-made fries, twice-baked potatoes with a cacio e pepe crumble and mashed potatoes that are baked and mixed with hot milk, cream and butter, then topped with chive butter.

Beyond potatoes, side dishes include braised peas with mint poblano pesto. A stewed okra dish with tomatoes sounds like a Southern classic, but it was inspired by a trip Bloomfield took to Egypt, where she was “blown away with the okra they do there.” The okra-and-tomato dish at the Driskill Grill is stewed with slow-cooked onions, lemon zest, lemon juice, garlic, cumin, coriander and chiles.

“It’s tangy and spicy,” Bloomfield says. “It’s nice to have things that are a bit more punchy next to the beef.”

The Driskill Grill’s creamed spinach is made with lots of Taleggio cream, along with Parmesan, basil, braised lemon zest, garlic, thyme and black peppercorns, and is finished with lemon juice for extra brightness.  

“We’ve definitely made a menu that’s familiar but a bit refreshed,” Bloomfield says.

Guests who visit the Driskill Bar can order off the entire steakhouse menu, and Bloomfield is working on a burger and some snacks specifically for the bar. 

“There’s nothing better than sitting at a beautiful bar, having a cocktail and eating a big fat steak or a nice burger,” Bloomfield says. “I think that’s just a lovely thing to do.”

Along with the 24-ounce strips and 16-ounce Akaushi wagyu rib-eyes on the menu, there’s grandeur all-around at the Driskill Grill, which boasts old photos, Texas art, taxidermy and a history of A-list guests.

“The lore is that LBJ and Lady Bird had their first date at the Grill,” McGuire says. “There’s all this amazing photography and all these events that have happened in the space. I’ve wanted to do a steakhouse interior for a long time. We totally tricked out the interior with leather and fine materials and big, comfortable booths. It’s kind of like a fever dream of what we would want a steakhouse to be. We have a bar room with a big new bar, and we kept a lot of elements that were there, like cheesy cut glass from the last renovation and wood paneling that’s kind of over-the-top. We were able to really create some layering.”

McGuire remembers the Driskill Grill from his youth, when it was a traditional fine dining destination. He’s excited about reimagining the space for the next generation, at the first restaurant where he has an in-house dry-aging program, while continuing to be inspired by the past.

“I’ve always spent time in New York and eaten at Peter Luger and Keens, and it’s like, ‘Why isn’t there this 100-year-old steakhouse in Austin?’” McGuire says. “So now we’re getting to do it.”

The Driskill Grill & Bar is located at 117 E. 7th St., Austin, Texas 78701. The Driskill Grill will be open for dinner seven days a week from 4:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. and for lunch Thursday-Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Driskill Bar will be open Sunday-Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Thursday-Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m.

Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn want their new Los Angeles restaurant to be a fine-dining destination with dinner-party vibes. So at Jacaranda, which will open in the Hancock Park area on Wednesday, May 6, the married couple has a six-seat communal table for guests who are inclined to make new friends.

Patterson wants to rethink tasting-menu culture at the 30-seat restaurant. And one thing that Lewitinn noticed at Jaca Social Club, the precursor to Jacaranda that she and Patterson ran at their Hancock Park home, was demand from solo diners.

Jacaranda is, at its core, a love story. And like all love stories, it’s about new beginnings. Patterson earned two Michelin stars at San Francisco’s Coi before moving to Los Angeles and focusing on social enterprise at LocoL and Alta. Lewitinn, aka Ultragrrrl, was an influential New York City music tastemaker and DJ who helped shape the scene as bands like The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol took over. 

Lewitinn met Patterson at the beginning of 2021. She asked him out on a date and later proposed to him. They got married in 2022. Patterson asked her to take a different kind of huge leap and create a restaurant together.

At Jacaranda, Patterson, chef Andrew Miller and pastry chef Matt Tinder are cooking with the same level of precision, technique and attention to detail that they did at Coi. But Patterson wants Jacaranda to “culturally feel like Los Angeles.” So he’s been foraging, hitting farmers’ markets and exploring the wonders of plants.

A lot of what Patterson cooks at Jacaranda, which serves 10-course, $295 tasting menus, is deceptively simple. It looks like food that you might be able to make at home, but then you take a bite and notice the details and realize you’re in a different realm altogether. During a preview of Jacaranda at the end of April, we ate asparagus that was cooked and cooled in its own juice. It tasted more like asparagus than any asparagus we’ve ever had. 

A dish with pieces of about a dozen grilled and raw vegetables was served with a green juice made from yerba santa and nopales. (This dish was inspired by a vegetable aguachile that Patterson made in 2017 for a collaboration dinner with Taco Maria chef/Coi alum Carlos Salgado.)

“I was going out with a forager and learning more and more about native ingredients,” Patterson tells Observer. “I found the yerba santa, and it just blew me away. It didn’t smell like anything familiar. It was, like, sweet and resinous, almost like bubble gum. I was just like, ‘Fuck, this is amazing.’ But then I had to figure out how to extract the flavor without extracting the bitterness. And so what I ended up with is just putting it in cold water for 36 hours. And then I found you could add more water and do it again, and then you have, essentially, a stock.”

Discovering, clarifying, amplifying, calibrating, reducing, reconstructing, reimagining. Patterson and his team are aiming for nothing less than a singular experience as they build dishes like soft tofu with fresh seaweeds and caviar. They’re carefully considering time and temperature as they cut and serve pepper-crusted duck with a crackling-adorned green salad and a broth made from duck bones. They’re starting meals with little handheld bites like a yuba roll (which is filled with kelp and mushrooms and resembles a bonbon because Patterson was inspired by the shape of a Tootsie Roll) that’s steamed right before service and then is brought close to room temperature. Tinder has a dessert with raw chocolate, roasted kelp and dates that gave us a flavor combination we had never experienced but also somehow reminded us of the pleasure of eating s’mores. There are a lot of neat tricks like this at Jacaranda.

Patterson remains as community-oriented as ever, and he wants Jacaranda to be a pipeline into fine dining for communities that don’t have fine dining. He and Alta chef Keith Corbin continue to run LocoL in Watts as a vocational training program that addresses food insecurity. Patterson has two employees at Jacaranda who’ve come out of that program, and Corbin himself is a reminder of how the formerly incarcerated can thrive in kitchens and go on to run a restaurant. 

Patterson and Lewitinn are very much looking forward to the day when they have staff leave to start their own business. But they also know that one great thing about the restaurant industry is how people who’ve parted ways can find a good reason to reunite.

“We’ve known each other for 15 years,” Patterson tells Observer as he talks about his relationship with Miller and Tinder. “We were talking about it. Maybe there’s like 100 years of experience between us. There is no kitchen this size that has that kind of firepower, but also, like, a kind of ESP with each other, because we know each other so well.”

For Patterson, food is about relationships, more than anything else. 

“Human connection has always been the most important thing,” he says. “Food’s about people. Cooking is an act of generosity. Outside of sex, it’s the most human thing you can do with another person. And it’s the thing that builds the most memories with our family, with our friends when we go out. There’s something very visceral and emotional about that. So that’s kind of always, like, a truism for me. But then in this restaurant, I have this other factor called Sarah.”

Lewitinn spent years being at the center of raucous, decibel-shattering shows and parties, and Jacaranda is a quieter reset for her, even though the restaurant’s playlist includes punk and indie-rock songs suggested by guests.

“I told Daniel that I know a lot of people, but I don’t actually know them,” Lewitinn tells Observer. “Through the years of doing the music scene and the club scene, there were a lot of conversations that happened in very loud rooms in between drinks, makeouts and dancing. Getting into the food world has been the first opportunity that I’ve had in a long time to sit with people and talk to them and have long conversations.”

Still, Lewitinn knows that being a host is about engaging and also about disengaging.

“One of the things I used to do a lot when I was doing parties was, if I knew I was going to be busy and someone was coming to say hi to me, I would clock the room and find the person that I think they would connect really well with and bring them over,” she says. “I would introduce them, so they could start talking and I could go do my thing.”

In her new role in the restaurant industry, she’s “constantly trying to find the people that can become friends with each other.” When I visited Jaca Social Club a few months ago, I was a solo diner at a table that became fast friends. As dinner wrapped up, two couples at the table decided to go elsewhere for a nightcap together. The end was the beginning.

Jacaranda is located at 6623 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA, and will be open for dinner Wednesday-Saturday and for lunch on Sunday.

“Don’t say anything,” chef Kwame Onwuachi told Observer on Saturday night as we began to compliment him on the wonderful food we were eating at Maroon, his new Caribbean steakhouse at Sahara Las Vegas. “You’re going to make me cry. I’ve been crying all night.”

Onwuachi was overwhelmed by the response he got from guests in his restaurant on Saturday, and he was still riding the adrenaline of Friday night’s grand-opening party at Maroon. 

Friday’s blowout bash brought more than 1,000 guests to Alex Meruelo’s Sahara casino-resort and was punctuated by both a Busta Rhymes performance and a drone show about Onwuachi’s ascent in the culinary world. One night later, Maroon’s kitchen was remarkably on point, even though the staff must have been exhausted after the previous evening. And Onwuachi was encouraging his guests to keep the party going.

“Welcome home,” he said. “I hope you start dancing at the table.”

Everything the James Beard Award-winning Onwuachi has created and accomplished, including Tatiana (named New York City’s No.1 restaurant by the New York Times in 2023 and 2024) and Dōgon (a Washington, D.C. destination that made the inaugural North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list), has led to Maroon. 

Onwuachi did not come to Las Vegas to play. He lives here now and is all-in with his quest to bring Afro-Caribbean flavors to the masses while creating something distinctly new.

“In the back of my mind, I was like, I’m gonna get Vegas what it needs, not what it wants,” Onwuachi said on Thursday as he readied himself for the weekend’s festivities. “What it wants is Tatiana. What it wants is something that I’ve done. But Vegas needs something that’s for Vegas. You have to be in Vegas to come to this restaurant.” 

This is a steakhouse where beef is rum-aged. It’s a restaurant where the jerk chicken and the oxtail fried rice has been outselling the steaks on many nights. It’s a new experience where both the lime pie and mixologist Lu Lopez’s margaritas are powered by soursop. 

Onwuachi wants okra (which he uses in dishes including a green mango salad with deeply delicious tomato choka) and oxtail to be treated like luxury ingredients. He’s filling patties with oxtail, smoked mozzarella, shiitake mushroom and black truffle, and then topping the patties with ossetra caviar and more black truffle.

“It’s very decadent, right?” Onwuachi said. “I definitely wanted something that’s screaming Vegas. So I have that, and then I have oxtail Wellington.”

Needless to say, Maroon is the only place in Las Vegas where you can get filet mignon wrapped in oxtail and jerk beef bacon. It’s also the only Vegas steakhouse with a jerk pit. Onwuachi isn’t just changing the game—he’s creating an entirely different playing field in Las Vegas.

“The jerk pit is one of the dopest parts in the restaurant,” Onwuachi said. “It adds vibrancy. You can hear the crackle and flames. You can smell the food.”

The jerk pit, where Maroon has a custom Grillworks setup and is smoking chickens with pimento wood and also cooking with oak and apple wood, is churning out dishes like beautifully smoky Colorado lamb chops and Iowa pork tomahawks. Maroon’s impressive array of sauces, ranging from herbaceous chimichurri to fierce pepper sauce to tangy barbecue blends, is a choose-your-own-dipping-adventure that enhances every bite of protein.

For surf along with your turf, Maroon has terrific options like head-on curry shrimp, wood-fired lobster and grilled branzino. Banana leaf snapper comes with curried okra and squash.

“I think this is a restaurant that’s like no other on the Strip,” Onwuachi said. “I wanted to create something very unique that’s for Vegas.”

Onwuachi knows the spotlight is on him now. He was embracing it on Friday night, dancing to Busta Rhymes before taking the stage himself to greet and thank his guests. 

During Friday’s party, Macy Gray and Flavor Flav made the rounds in a crowd that also included Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis and hospitality powerhouses like Plaza CEO Jonathan Jossel and Carversteak founder Sean Christie. When we went to the bar of the Sahara Theatre during the Busta Rhymes performance, we ran into DJ Spider, Playback Prodigy’s Jonathan Shecter and Los Angeles nightlife scene-makers Mark and Jonnie Houston. As we walked through Maroon, we saw Michelin-starred chef Phillip Frankland Lee chatting with poker pro Scott Seiver. Then Maya-Camille Broussard, the Chicago baker/Netflix star behind Justice of the Pies, strolled by and reminded us that chefs from all over the country will show up for an Onwuachi opening. 

Friday night was glamorous and fun, but now it’s time for Onwuachi to focus on the important work at hand, every single night, in the city where he lives.

Onwuachi wants Maroon to be a restaurant for everyone, a place that attracts both locals and tourists of all kinds. But he is, of course, a Black chef who wants to cook for the growing number of Black visitors and retirees in Las Vegas.

“There are no restaurants on that Strip that have really catered to that demographic,” Onwuachi said. “I think that it’s important. I think that it’s necessary. I’m hoping, wishing that this is a beacon of light and that some other restaurants can open up the street from us with this type of cuisine. This has always been my mission. I want to shine a light on why this food is important.”

Maroon at Sahara Las Vegas, located at 2535 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV, is open from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday and from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. Friday-Saturday.

“The thing that makes me proudest is longevity,” Wolfgang Puck told the crowd at the Generational Tasting Tour dinner on April 30 at Cut in Las Vegas.

The legendary chef was at the Venetian casino-resort to cook alongside his son, Byron Lazaroff-Puck, and showcase the importance of both tradition and innovation. Wolfgang has seen so many competing restaurants come and go since he opened Chinois in Los Angeles more than 40 years ago, and he reminded guests of his legacy on Thursday as he served his beloved Chinois oysters with curry and salmon roe, before bringing out other greatest hits from his diverse repertoire. Kärntner käsnudel, a caviar-topped cheese-filled pasta, paid tribute to his Austrian heritage and his mother’s cooking. Chinois angry lobster demonstrated how Puck was at the forefront of proper fusion cuisine.

Byron, meanwhile, showcased the skills he honed at globally acclaimed culinary destinations like Baumanière, Alinea and Le Bernardin as he put together innovative dishes with local ingredients. He evoked the desert with Nevada beets and nopales in a beautifully composed dish that also displayed the sugar-blowing skills he learned at El Celler de Can Roca. Guests at the dinner included Michelin-starred chef Phillip Frankland Lee, who was in town to play in a high-stakes heads-up poker tournament. Lee marveled at the pastrami foie gras that Byron served alongside Liberty Farms duck breast with sour cherry and bourbon.

As guests enjoyed Wolfgang’s tableside-plated apricot strudel and Byron’s black forest cherry dessert, there were audible gasps in the back of the dining room. A guest had proposed to his date, and she said yes as Wolfgang stood nearby and saw another memory being made in one of his restaurants.

The Pucks will be making all kinds of memories as they embark on a worldwide journey for their Generational Tasting Tour. Byron told Observer he’s excited that sponsorship support from DoorDash (which has made a big push into reservations after purchasing SevenRooms for $1.2 billion last year) allows him to buy the best seasonal ingredients in different cities. 

Earlier on Thursday, the Pucks talked at length with Observer about the Generational Tasting Tour and how they constantly balance tradition and innovation. Wolfgang, who is 76, still gets five newspapers from around the world on Saturdays. And the menu for the Generational Tasting Tour that guests received was a 16-page booklet inspired by a newspaper. But there was a QR code you could scan to give you a trippy augmented reality of the cover art on your phone. 

Byron is using A.I. chatbot Claude daily to help optimize business at his family’s restaurants, and Wolfgang would be fine with chefs exploring A.I. to develop recipes.

“If something is delicious and I would love to eat it again and again, I don’t really care how someone put the recipe together,” Wolfgang told Observer. “A.I. can give you all these ideas, but you still have to cook it correctly. At the end of the day, it’s the execution.”

The Generational Tasting Tour might imply that Wolfgang is willing to pass the torch, but he has no plans to retire soon. He could imagine himself being in the kitchen for another 50 years.

“That would make me 126,” he said. “I would be OK with that. I signed a long lease on my life.”

He’s taken up painting recently, but doesn’t know what he would do with all his time if he retired. So he plans to stick around and remind his son and employees what Wolfgang Puck food was, is and should be.

“I think that something that my father has kept with him his entire life is that we don’t want to overcomplicate our food,” Byron said. “We want it to look beautiful. But most important, it has to be delicious. It’s all about highlighting the ingredients in the best manner possible. ‘Buy great ingredients, and don’t fuck them up’ is the constant adage of Wolfgang Puck.”

The ethos behind the food remains the same, but the Pucks are constantly looking at new technologies and platforms. They like working with DoorDash because it puts Spago on a digital marketplace that reaches customers they’ve never had before.

“It’s about building experiences,” Byron said. “People shop for experiences the same way they shop for clothes online.”

“I think apps and learning how to communicate with young people is a really important path for us in the restaurant business,” Wolfgang said. “If we want to continue to be successful, that’s the way to go.”

Technology, of course, now plays a big role in customer retention.

“I always tell the story of Bernard [Erpicum], our original maître d’ at Spago,” Byron said. “He knew every diner who walked into the dining room by name, knew the table they liked, knew their wine preferences and their food preferences. It was that anticipatory style of service that you look for in fine dining. And what SevenRooms in its CRM allows us to do is to train the entirety of our teams to be like Bernard.”

It also lets the Pucks keep tabs on what’s happening in Los Angeles as they travel the world. There are 14 stops on the Generational Tour, including Istanbul, Singapore, Bodrum, Shanghai, London and New York.

In Las Vegas, DoorDash (which has huge billboards on the Strip promoting some of its partner restaurants) is also working with The Venetian on Culinary Crossroads. This is a series of high-end food events, based around storytelling, featuring the resort’s star chefs. In addition to the Puck dinner and a previous event with Bouchon’s Thomas Keller, the Venetian has announced a May 31 live show and dinner with Bazaar Meat’s José Andrés. This evening will be inspired by the chef’s forthcoming Spain My Way cookbook. Other Culinary Crossroads events will be announced soon.

“We’re working with our partners at Cote and Wakuda to create experiences, and there’s more to come, as well,” Julian Griffiths, SVP of food and beverage at the Venetian, tells Observer. “We’re trying to create one-night, one-of-a-kind events. It’s an opportunity for the guests to really understand and see the creative process and the stories that go into the food. What makes it special for us is that intimacy.”

Like the Pucks, the Venetian wants to showcase both tradition and innovation. This is a resort where newcomers like Gjelina, Scarr’s Pizza and Howlin’ Ray’s share the spotlight with Puck, Keller and Emeril Lagasse. Three very distinct steakhouses (Cote, Bazaar Meat and Boa) opened at the casino last year.

“It’s a marriage of the legacy of who we are and the foundation we have and what our future looks like,” Griffiths said. “But all of these chefs are evolving. They’re not standing still.”

And Wolfgang Puck, who has recently been thinking a lot about how mixing colors in paintings is a lot like bringing ingredients together in a recipe, is a still-in-his-prime example of a Venetian chef who just won’t quit.

“I know a lot of older people have problems with change,” Wolfgang said. “I love change. You have to change when you’re on top. You can’t change when business slows down. Then it’s too late. Cooking is a constant evolution. I think it’s really important to continue improving, to do new things, to get people excited about new dishes.”

A lot of new Miami restaurants aim to open in time for December’s social season, with Art Basel being a prime target. Genghis Cohen owners Marc Rose and Med Abrous have a different December extravaganza in mind.

“For Genghis Cohen, we’re trying to open in time for Christmas,” Rose tells Observer.

Genghis Cohen, a beloved New York-style Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, will open its Miami Beach outpost at 1801 Purdy Ave. in the Sunset Harbour neighborhood. Rose and Abrous, both former New Yorkers, know that Christmas is the main event for Genghis Cohen. This is a restaurant where guests come to spin around lazy Susans as they feast on crowd-pleasing egg rolls, turkey minis (Genghis Cohen’s signature dumplings with spicy soy sauce and cilantro), crab rangoon, salt-and-pepper tofu and playfully monikered classics like no name duck, nothing special beef sizzler and a General Tso’s riff known as queen chicken.  

“It’s a Chinese-American menu that invokes nostalgia, one that has all the dishes a lot of us grew up eating,” Rose says. “I think it’s a menu that also represents a lot of what people in South Florida grew up eating. Fort Lauderdale and Miami had a plethora of this type of restaurant in the ’80s and ’90s, and a lot of them are gone. It’s just like what happened in L.A. and New York.”

Rose and Abrous, whose Call Mom hospitality group also includes former Sinatra hangout La Dolce Vita in Beverly Hills, are students of history. Genghis Cohen was born in 1983, and Rose and Abrous took it over in 2015 to preserve a very specific kind of time-capsule food and throwback vibe that they held close to their hearts. Last year, Rose and Abrous made headlines when they moved Genghis Cohen to a new address a few blocks south on Fairfax Avenue after they were unable to extend their previous lease. 

The Miami location is Genghis Cohen’s first expansion outside of Los Angeles.

“I think the intention is to continue the Genghis Cohen story,” Rose says. “We’ll have our big booths. Whether or not they’re red, we’re not sure at this point. There will be an oversaturation of all the elements that make you feel transported when you walk into Genghis Cohen. Of course, there will be a fish tank. Maybe the fish tank’s bigger. Maybe it’s saltwater instead of freshwater. What we want to do is represent Genghis Cohen, but also understand that we’re not on Fairfax. We’re going to be in the heart of Miami Beach in Sunset Harbour and we want to reflect that, too.”

Genghis Cohen is also known for its tiki-inspired “foo foo cocktails,” and the drinks could get more tropical and more theatrical in Miami.

“I think we’re going to come out kind of guns blazing with the cocktail side of things and amplify what we do here in L.A,” Abrous tells Observer.

Let’s be clear, though. You can visit Genghis Cohen for a trio of mini martinis or a zombie so potent that the restaurant caps it at two per customer, and you can order a dish called volcano chicken that’s lit on fire tableside. But this restaurant isn’t an over-the-top party destination like Papi Steak or Sexy Fish. 

Genghis Cohen is a seven-night-a-week spot that’s built around gently priced family-style feasts (the volcano chicken is $20 in Los Angeles). Rose and Abrous expect to do lots of takeout and delivery in Miami. They’re excited to evolve their menu with Florida produce and seafood, and to see how things play out with the first outdoor space Genghis Cohen has ever had.

Rose and Abrous are partnering with a longtime friend, hospitality mogul Jason Pomeranc, to open the new Genghis Cohen. Pomeranc is best known as a hotelier, but Miami Beach’s Genghis Cohen is a standalone venture. This, like the Miami Beach outpost of Brooklyn-born Lucali, also in Sunset Harbour, is designed to be a neighborhood restaurant that happens to have a multi-layered backstory.

“I think Genghis Cohen really is a community place,” Abrous says. “It’s a year-round place, basically never closed. It’s a reliable place that really caters to the local community, and Sunset Harbour really is a place that people go to year-round.”

For Rose, who as a child spent many holidays in South Florida with his snowbird grandparents (who later became South Beach residents), Genghis Cohen is about channeling old memories while celebrating new moments.

“Miami will always have a special place in my heart, and getting to relive some of my childhood and spending more time in a city that just has colors that make you smile is pretty exciting,” says Rose, who spent almost five years looking for a Miami location with Abrous. 

Genghis Cohen has been around for more than four decades, and Abrous says he’s been thinking about the next 40 years of the restaurant.

“I think it starts with our love of history,” Abrous says. “We love legacy. We love places that have stories. In many ways, our job is to make memories and make stories. We couldn’t be happier about bringing this style of restaurant to Miami. It’s vibrant. It makes people feel good in so many ways.”

Sam Bakhshandehpour left his high-profile role as CEO of José Andrés Group because he saw an opportunity to make an impact that goes far beyond the four walls of a restaurant.

He had been advising Bilt, a startup that enables members to earn rewards on housing, for about two years, and realized that this financial technology company had the power to transform the hospitality industry. In February, Bakhshandehpour joined Bilt as president of merchants, a role that involves growing Bilt’s partnerships with restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, retail, pharmacies and much more.

Bilt, which launched in 2021, lets members earn points on monthly rent payments without transaction fees. And it’s since grown beyond its Bilt Alliance of rental buildings into a program that applies to other housing payments.

Bilt members can use reward points to, among other things, eat, party, shop and book fitness classes in their neighborhood and beyond. They can also earn points by frequenting neighborhood businesses and booking travel. 

Bakhshandehpour’s initial conversation with Bilt founder and CEO Ankur Jain was about “delivering hospitality to residential.” Bakhshandehpour and Jain brainstormed ways to enhance guest experiences and help restaurants identify, satisfy and retain important customers.

“You start with housing, and you would always reference this hotel analogy,” Bakhshandehpour tells Observer about his discussion with Jain. “The home should feel like a five-star hotel. Your neighborhood needs to be an extension of that.”

On March 20, Bilt introduced Bilt Hospitality with an Instagram video that featured testimonials from heavyweights, including Observer Nightlife + Dining Power List alums Daniel Boulud, Danny Meyer, Jeff Zalaznick, Eugene Remm, Kwame Onwuachi, Elizabeth Blau, Michael Mina, Sean Feeney, Noah Tepperberg and David Grutman. As Thomas Keller says in the video, Bilt has created a platform that gives operators knowledge about who their guests are before they arrive.

This is an “orchestration platform” with an A.I.-powered concierge as a key feature. It doesn’t conflict with reservations apps or point-of-sale systems. It sits on top of a restaurant’s existing technology stack to help operators maximize revenue and turn first-time guests into regulars. Using Bilt’s platform, restaurants can enhance dining experiences by sending bonus dishes out to certain guests, offering special after-dinner drinks that encourage visitors to stay longer, having cars waiting for customers to transport them from one venue to another, delivering personalized greetings and seating guests in quieter or livelier areas based on preferences. It’s about optimizing everything all at once.

“All the data exists,” Bakhshandehpour says. “It’s just disjointed. Like, I know you have a shellfish allergy. That data sits in the reservation platform. In my CRM in the restaurant, I know you love wine. In the POS, it gives me the SKU-level data of what you like to order. The checkout has separate data. When you sit on top, you’re now unifying all of this to enhance experiences, capture more spend, extend the night and create more loyalty.”

Before Bakhshandehpour became a hospitality executive, he was an investment banker who led the global casino and West Coast real estate and lodging teams at J.P. Morgan. Then he became president and CEO of SBE Entertainment, where he ran hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. He is still a hospitality operator, active at The Electric Jane in Nashville. His leadership role at Bilt allows him to apply his knowledge and experience to help operators all over the country improve their businesses. 

“I’ve been fortunate,” Bakhshandehpour says. “I’ve spent my career building and scaling really iconic brands. It’s been such an incredible run. Bilt is something much larger than transactions within four walls. It’s about something that the restaurant industry, hotel industry and travel industry are all trying to solve. Where does my guest come from? What is the experience like inside the plane, the hotel, the restaurant? And where do they go after they leave?”

Bilt connects all of this.

“Bilt has a moat around housing, which no one else does,” Bakhshandehpour says. “So for me, it was really taking the lessons of my chapter of gaming and investment banking and the chapter of running hotels, restaurants and nightclubs, and moving on to how you use technology to enable the best guest experience that extends from the home into your neighborhood.”

Bilt’s A.I. concierge helps restaurants tailor experiences for guests, but this is about a lot more than dinner. In addition to restaurant reservations, Bakhshandehpour recently used the Bilt concierge to book a 9:30 a.m. flight to New York, have a Lyft ride waiting for him at the airport, find a hotel near his Meatpacking District office and schedule a 7 a.m. workout within walking distance of the hotel. When he showed up at the fitness studio, he was offered a free mat rental. It was a small but meaningful perk that made him happy, the exact type of moment he wants Bilt members to experience again and again.

He loves it when he hears about chefs welcoming Bilt members with personalized notes, gifts from the kitchen and invites to special events. 

Bilt’s app has a virtual wallet, so guests can quickly pay for meals without flagging down a server. Even though Bilt makes money on these transactions and works with hospitality groups to create house accounts, guests can also use any other payment method a restaurant accepts, whether it’s cash, a physical gift card, inKind or points from a hospitality group’s own loyalty program. One goal for all restaurants is repeat visitation, and Bilt is here to facilitate that in many ways. It’s about enhancing without interfering. No matter how a customer pays, the restaurant’s point-of-sale system processes the transaction.

Bilt already has a network of customers who occupy 6.5 million homes across the country, and it’s recently expanded beyond renters. In February, Bilt launched its Blue, Obsidian and Platinum cards, all of which replace the previously issued Wells Fargo Bilt Mastercard. Homeowners can now earn points on mortgage and HOA payments with their new Bilt card.

“The projection is over $100 billion of housing spend through the Bilt ecosystem this year,” Bakhshandehpour says. These residents are projected to spend another $20 billion at businesses in their neighborhood. So it’s clear why restaurants want to tap into Bilt’s membership base.

“We can create a whole neighborhood experience,” Bakhshandehpour says. “It’s about identity and recognition.”

There are many customers who have elite status and lots of rewards points with certain brands, but only those brands. Bilt is reimagining a hospitality industry where guests can get that kind of status the first time they visit many different restaurants, hotels and neighborhood businesses.

“In our world, we sit there and talk about the tip of the iceberg,” Bakhshandehpour says. “This is actually the iceberg. We talk to every restaurant operator and chef about those top 50 guests who will get the red carpet treatment. How do we create experiences that elevate 5,000 people to this status? This is larger than life, the possibilities of what this can become.”

A lot of people go to Las Vegas and wager on red or black. But for chef Gabriela  Cámara, it’s always about betting on red and green.

Cámara will open her highly anticipated Cantina Contramar at Fontainebleau Las Vegas on Saturday, March 28, serving standout dishes like her iconic Pescado a la Talla Contramar. This, of course, is her whole grilled fish with red adobo and parsley rub. This green-and-red fish is the signature item at Mexico City’s Contramar, and it has inspired—and been copied by—many other chefs.

Cantina Contramar will also offer other Contramar greatest hits, like a dessert cart with crowd-pleasers including strawberry meringue. But Cámara wants to cast a wider net in Las Vegas with dishes that take the Contramar brand beyond the seafood and fresh produce it’s known for in Mexico City. 

So Cantina Contramar will serve new dishes like wagyu aguachile, rib-eye tiradito, chicken mole enchiladas and braised pork shank in adobo. The expansive menu will also feature Cámara’s version of the cantina-style Caesar salad, a tostada flight that includes Contramar’s popular tuna tostada, caviar-topped sopes and main courses (like slow-cooked short rib) that will be build-your-own-taco experiences with house-made tortillas. This restaurant is very much designed for choose-your-own surf-and-turf adventures.

“I think it’s going to be more inclusive for the public that will visit here in Vegas,”  Cámara tells Observer. She hopes that adding lots of meat to Contramar’s repertoire will help grow its audience in Las Vegas.

“I think it’s just going to be more accessible in terms of how one approaches a menu and how one understands the cuisine,” Cámara says. “For many Americans, Mexican food is not necessarily ceviche or seafood in general. It’s tacos. It’s carne asada. And we’re going to make amazing versions of those dishes.”

Cámara has been experimenting with different salsas, moles and adobos as she develops Cantina Contramar’s menu. Charred sweet potato, for example, is served with bone marrow salsa negra.

“We’re going to add a complexity in terms of the flavor and use extraordinary ingredients,” says Cámara, who’s sourcing California-grown meat like Cross Creek Ranch wagyu. “We’re very much looking forward to working with our California purveyors. We’re bringing in cheese from Point Reyes. We’re bringing vegetables from the farmers market in Los Angeles. It’s a real pleasure to be able to cook with these ingredients.”

Cantina Contramar adds to the international flair of the Fontainebleau Las Vegas dining collection, which also includes Alan Yau’s Chyna Club and Washing Potato; Masa Ito and Kevin Kim’s Ito Omakase; David Grutman’s Papi Steak and Komodo; and Evan Funke’s Mother Wolf. This diversity of destination restaurants was no doubt a key factor in Fontainebleau Las Vegas becoming the only Las Vegas casino with a Michelin Key in 2025.

Cantina Contramar will also add celebratory energy to the mix. Alcohol is a key component of any good cantina, so Casa Dragones co-founder Bertha González Nieves is collaborating with Cámara on agave-powered cocktails and showcasing a Casa Dragones tequila flight. Cámara is looking forward to highlighting Mexican agave spirits and showing Vegas guests how well tequila and mezcal pair with food.

Cantina Contramar will have a cart for tableside margaritas and carajillos. “I think that’s going to lead to more festiveness in terms of tables interacting and looking at each other’s experiences,” says Cámara, who has been thinking about future tableside dishes she will unveil at Cantina Contramar.

Cantina Contramar is about celebrating Mexican culture and giving guests reasons to visit again and again. They can come for snacks and drinks and dessert. They can come for meaty main courses. They can come for fish they’ve seen on Instagram a thousand times. They can go big and come for all of it all at once.  

“This is why I wanted it to be a cantina,” Cámara says. “A cantina is a place where you can go and eat every day.”

Cantina Contramar, located at 2777 S. Las Vegas Blvd., Las Vegas, NV 89109, will open seven days a week from 5:30 p.m to 10:30 p.m.

It was just a few minutes before Monday night’s industry preview party at Joint Seafood in the Los Angeles Arts District was set to begin, when owner and dry-aged fish pioneer Liwei Liao gave a few VIPs a quick tour of the 4,000-square-foot space. 

“We thought it was going to be 3x,” Liao told Observer when asked about the amount of fish he can now offer to his restaurant clients and retail customers.

Tripling his capacity would be a major accomplishment, but it turns out that Liao had underestimated.

“It’s going to be 4x, 5x,” Liao said during Monday’s tour. “We were at 4,000 to 5,000 pounds per week. This is pushing 15,000 to 20,000 pounds.”

Guests like Verse chef Oscar Torres and Majordomo Media co-founder Christopher Chen pondered that staggering number as Liao continued to flex like a man who knows he’s changed the game.

“You see that tuna room over there?” Liao asked. “No one in the world is able to hang 350 pounds in any space right now unless they have a forklift. We can do it. How many spots do you see a 400-pound fish hanging? We’ll get to 500 pounds.”

Then Liao walked into the tuna room and spun around a fish that was twice his size as his right-hand man, Josh Ko, looked on with the amusement of someone who knew he would soon have to break down a lot of that tuna.

The new Joint Seafood at 600 E. 1st St. will open around the beginning of April with Liao’s Uoichiba hand-roll bar, a coffee bar and dry-aging chambers that have 14-foot ceilings. The centerpiece at Joint Seafood will be a retail market selling carefully sourced fish like Ōra King salmon, Balfegó tuna and Seremoni smoked black cod, all of which were used to make hand rolls at Monday’s preview party. 

In the near future, Liao will have an omakase bar on a 16-foot stage at the new Joint Seafood.

“It’s going to be an omakase stage featuring collaborations with other chefs around the world using our fish,” Liao said.

As always, Liao, who sells fish to restaurants operated by prominent chefs including Wolfgang Puck, Dominique Crenn, Enrique Olvera and José Andrés, is here to remind everyone that “fresh is boring.” He wants the world to know that dry-aging fish clarifies flavors, improves textures and removes impurities.

Liao’s original Joint Seafood in Sherman Oaks, which opened in 2018, is busier than ever. He’s essentially run out of capacity there. So it’s time to make a much bigger bet.

“In 2018, we set out to change the way fish is sold all over the world,” Liao told the crowd on Monday night just before he and his wife, Iris Chen, welcomed everyone with a Dassai sake-barrel breaking ceremony. “This is the next stepping stone to realizing that dream.”

Clearly, the Los Angeles restaurant industry believes in Liao’s dream. At Monday night’s party, Damian’s Chuy Cervantes made tacos with dry-aged barramundi while 626 Hospitality Group’s Amber Tan and Waldo Yan topped their salted yuzu sorbet with caviar. Yang’s Kitchen’s Christian Yang showcased his new Joimo kombucha brand.

Anajak Thai’s Justin Pichetrungsi walked into the event with Majordomo Media co-founder Noelle Cornelio, while Kato’s Jon Yao checked out Damian’s outdoor taco setup. Chefs and operators from Jitlada, Steep L.A., Antico Nuovo, Jade Rabbit, Avi Cue, Flouring, Cobi’s, Casa Vega and Redbird circulated as content creators Nigel Ng and Celine Linarte chatted at the hand-roll bar (presented by inKind, which has helped fund the expansion of Joint Seafood). NextShark founder Benny Luo and Hedley + Bennett founder Ellen Marie Bennett surveyed the scene while Saffy’s general manager Nick Sasto had a moment with music industry power couple Orly and Ziggy Marley. 

Torres considered Joint Seafood’s new capacity and what this would mean for Verse and many other restaurants. Then, perhaps in an attempt to get preferred allocations at Verse, Torres heaped high praise on Liao.

“He’s the greatest fishmonger of our generation,” Torres said. “Luckily, he’s not a gatekeeper.”

That’s the thing about Liao. He wants to change the way the world’s top restaurants think about fish, but he also happily sells to private chefs and home cooks. He consults for supermarket chains and wants to open hand-roll bars all over the country. A 400-pound tuna is just the beginning of Joint Seafood’s new chapter.

Carversteak, one of the best and liveliest meateries on the Las Vegas Strip, will make its New York debut when it opens on West 48th Street on Friday, March 20. 

Like the Las Vegas original, the New York location will feature branded dry-aged tomahawks, wagyu cheesesteak bites, ice-cold martinis and custom “choose your weapon” boxes with an assortment of steak knives. But there will be plenty of new offerings as Carver Road Hospitality CEO Sean Christie considers how to balance Las Vegas razzle-dazzle with New York refinement and bring his own sense of theater to the Theater District. 

Instead of the caviar poppers that Carversteak has in Las Vegas, executive chef Daniel Ontiveros will serve caviar-and-potato popsicles that are a playful nod to McDonald’s hash browns with a different shape. Other new dishes at New York’s Carversteak include short rib croquettes, uni toast, French onion short rib and lobster rigatoni alla vodka. Famed mixologist Francesco Lafranconi, who has showcased a martini cart and a spritz bar at Carversteak in Las Vegas, will have a freezer martini bar and an Old Fashioned cart in New York.

For Christie, who was a longtime Las Vegas hospitality executive with a focus on nightlife and entertainment before he started Carver Road, the goal is to turn dinner into a spectacle that can and should be the main event of any given night.

“Toward the end of my tenure at Wynn and in the beginning of my tenure at MGM, nightlife was evolving,” Christie tells Observer. “And for myself, I like to socialize, to be out, but I like to do that in a much different way now. At Carver Road, our motto is, ‘We sell fun.’ I believe that restaurants have taken on a more significant stake in our overall social life. It used to be something you go to for a meal and then go on to the next thing.”

Christie used to run Las Vegas party venues like Encore Beach Club. But nowadays, he wants to talk about moments like the first time he went to Torrisi and sat at the bar, or the energy he soaked up when he visited The Corner Store. Not incidentally, David Rockwell’s Rockwell Group, whose recent hits include The Corner Store, Coqodaq and New York’s Din Tai Fung, designed New York’s 124-seat Carversteak at Jason Pomeranc’s Civilian hotel.  

The hotel is also home to Carver Road’s Rosevale Cocktail Room and Starchild Rooftop. Carversteak has taken over the space that was formerly home to Rosevale Kitchen. 

This Carversteak is a much cozier location than Carversteak at Resorts World Las Vegas, which can seat three times as many guests. But Christie says it’s important to create distinct spaces and encourage guests to come back for different kinds of Carversteak experiences in New York.

There’s a front bar and dining room, an atrium and a private dining room that integrates with the freezer martini bar. Guests enter the restaurant via a gold velvet curtain. But in many ways, Christie is going for subtlety in New York.

“Vegas has, to me, always been something like, you go there, and you take something and supersize it,” Christie says. “You go for the razzle-dazzle. That’s Las Vegas. I think for New York, we’re doing it in a more subtle tone by choosing incredible plateware and cutlery.”

The Carversteak team has been spending a lot of time poring over details like the colors of plates and how that integrates with what Ontiveros is cooking. Ontiveros, who previously worked at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas, is sourcing steaks from prime purveyors like Snake River Farms and Flannery Beef. Beyond the Old Fashioned cart, there will be tableside fun with a flambé cart for baked Alaska (known as Baked NYC at this Carversteak) and a wine cart curated by master sommeliers Steven and Lindsey Geddes. 

Christie plans to add brunch service in New York soon, and he’s envisioning different treatments for a dessert cart and a Bloody Mary cart that can flip into a Champagne cart. But to be clear, there are no sparklers whatsoever at Carversteak, which once had a cookie dessert with sparklers in Las Vegas and is now sparkler-free.

“I always tie it to things like music,” Christie says. “Music is defined by decades, usually. I really feel like hospitality is moving so quickly, and sparklers feel very 2010 to 2020 now. I feel like people are coming up with new ways to create that same emotion.”

For Christie, it’s about knowing what you should discard and what you want to hold onto for all time.

“If 30 years from now, everyone’s saying they’re sick of ‘choose your weapon,’ we’re still going to do it,” Christie says of Carversteak’s dramatic steak knife presentation. “Because that’s who we are.”

Carversteak, located at 305 W. 48th St., New York, NY 10036, will be open Sunday-Wednesday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. and Thursday-Saturday from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.

As we made our way to the patio of the new Zero Bond members’ club at Wynn Las Vegas on Saturday night, we strolled past LeBron James and Keegan-Michael Key before pausing to sample some caviar cannolis. We took a moment to pop into Zero Bond’s private gaming lounge, where Bond Hospitality founder Scott Sartiano greeted guests by the bar while high rollers pressed their blackjack bets. We went from bar to bar in the 15,000-plus-square-foot Zero Bond, walking by New York hospitality heavyweights like Eugene Remm and David Rabin, who were holding court as other well-heeled VIP guests discussed real estate, fashion, TikTok trends, the cryptocurrency crash and Netflix’s acquisition strategy while standing next to a Chagall painting. Guests compared Chanel bags as they walked past a Renoir and also a Modigliani.

And when we got to the patio, overlooking the Wynn Golf Club and the Sphere, it was time for a surprise performance from Doja Cat, who said what she said as a well-dressed crowd, including Kevin Costner and John Stamos, watched from an upstairs perch. This was the culmination of Zero Bond’s star-studded preview weekend, hosted by Sartiano and Will Makris, with attendees including Tom Brady, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Alba, Orlando Bloom, Shaboozey, Hannah Bronfman and Dorothy Wang.

This weekend was a first look at Zero Bond’s signature spaces, including the Fairway Grill, the Salon (with a menu featuring sushi and craft cocktails) and the Baby Disco. The Fairway Grill, like the rest of Zero Bond’s food program and the adjacent open-to-the-public Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse, is led by culinary director Alfred Portale and chef Michael Rubinstein. The Baby Disco is an intimate nightlife space with a DJ booth that the Chainsmokers took over late Saturday night.

The Chainsmokers, of course, are headliners at Wynn’s XS nightclub. Zero Bond is here to, among other things, offer a less-is-more nightlife alternative while also being a spot for casual hangouts, power lunches, cocktail tastings and cigar sessions that don’t end up on social media. Yes, Zero Bond put tape on everyone’s phones at Saturday’s party.

But you can go to Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse and take as many selfies and pictures of caviar cannolis and meatballs as you please.

“We’re going into some unknown territory here,” Sartiano told Observer prior to the preview weekend. “We love the idea of privacy and exclusivity, but we felt like it would work in Las Vegas to put Sartiano’s and Zero Bond next to each other. We think the two places are going to feed off each other really well.”

It seems like a proper strategy at Wynn, a casino that’s for the ultra-elite but also for the masses, in a city that’s built on big bets by nonchalant whales but also on the bucket-list desires of guests from Middle America. So this past weekend, people who might never have an opportunity to visit Zero Bond showed up in Las Vegas on Saturday to do things like eat at a steakhouse, see a UFC fight and check out Illenium’s cinematic performance at the Sphere.

At 1:45 a.m., we were reminded that many roads lead back to Wynn. Exhausted but still wired after Zero Bond’s opening party and a quick off-Strip stop for ramen and skewers, we walked into a Wynn Tower Suites elevator and saw someone who was without question more exhausted and also more wired. It was Illenium. We thought about telling him that we had seen his performance on Friday night and thought it was amazing. Then we decided it would be better to give him his privacy.

Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse will have its grand opening at Wynn Las Vegas on Wednesday, March 4, and Bond Hospitality founder Scott Sartiano knows that this is a high-stakes endeavor. The Las Vegas restaurant is a meatier and more over-the-top version of the original Sartiano’s at The Mercer in New York. 

Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse will be adjacent to members’ club Zero Bond, where Sartiano will host an exclusive grand opening party on Saturday, March 7. There will be much more to reveal soon about Zero Bond, including an astonishing art collection, extensive food-and-beverage menus and a private casino, but Sartiano is taking things moment by moment as he sets the highest of expectations for himself and his team. 

“We want this to be the best thing that people have ever seen,” Sartiano tells Observer. “We’re not just trying to open a restaurant or a members’ club. I really want to make every single place a masterpiece.”

At Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse, culinary director Alfred Portale and chef Michael Rubinstein are showcasing the most showstopping dishes from the New York Sartiano’s while adding luxurious seafood towers and elegant steak carts for colossal cuts that will be sliced tableside.

“We’re in Las Vegas and, in terms of presentation, we wanted to build some theater into the dining experience,” Portale tells Observer.

Many meals at Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse will no doubt begin with the caviar cannolis that Sartiano’s is known for in New York.

“The first time I tasted it, I said, ‘We’re going to sell a thousand of these a night in Las Vegas,’” Rubinstein tells Observer. “It’s the perfect caviar vehicle. It’s adorable, it’s celebratory, and it’s just fun.”

During previews and its soft opening, Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse has indeed seen a huge demand for the caviar cannolis.

“We have tables that will order them for an appetizer and order another round for dessert,” Rubinstein says.

Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse and Zero Bond share a kitchen, and Wynn is procuring top-tier seafood that’s served at both venues. Tuna, for example, might be used for a Sartiano’s seafood plateau and also for sushi at Zero Bond. And Sartiano, Portale and Rubinstein all say that what makes Wynn stand apart from other places is its desire and ability to bring in the finest ingredients from around the world. 

“I haven’t had to ask Wynn for anything,” Sartiano says. “They do get the best of everything. It’s enabled us to be more creative. There’s never been a time where I’ve had to ask for more. I think that every day you don’t try to do better, you’re doing worse. We’re always trying to make it better, and Wynn really gives you the best canvas in the world.”

Todd-Avery Lenahan, president and chief creative officer of Wynn Design & Development, collaborated with Tihany Design principal Alessia Genova on mid-century Milanese modernist design for Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse, which includes an arched ceiling and a terrazzo floor. The restaurant’s perch, overlooking the Wynn Golf Club, adds to the allure.

For Sartiano and his team, this restaurant is about legacy and history. The seafood towers are exclusive to Las Vegas, but there’s a key component that nods to Portale’s glorious past. Each plateau has a take on the seafood salad (featuring grilled shrimp, grilled calamari and avocado with greens) that Portale first served at New York’s iconic Gotham Bar & Grill. These seafood towers also include East Coast and West Coast oysters, shrimp cocktail, lobster, king crab, clams Calabrese and caviar-topped toro.

Other new offerings include a tableside presentation of fettuccine Alfredo. This is an elaborate riff on the original version of fettuccine Alfredo from Rome’s Alfredo alla Scrofa. Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse has a custom-built guéridon with a burner underneath. The pasta, which is made with 40 egg yolks for every kilogram of flour, gets tossed with Parmigiano-Reggiano, burro di bufala (Italian buffalo milk butter) and fresh black truffle.

The steak program will also feature dramatic tableside offerings, like a 40-ounce Snake River Farms wagyu porterhouse that’s rubbed with porcini powder and encased in rendered tallow before being aged for two weeks. Each porterhouse is slowly roasted after being crusted with peppercorns, herbs, garlic and dried chiles.

“That comes out on a cart, and it’s sliced tableside and served with an oxtail, porcini and black truffle ragu,” Rubinstein says. “That is a really special steak that is sort of our biggest showpiece in the steak realm here.”

Portale and Rubinstein have also spent a lot of time working on vegetable side dishes as Sartiano’s leans into its new identity as a Las Vegas steakhouse. So guests can order grilled asparagus and creamed Tuscan kale along with butternut squash gnocchi al forno and Yukon Gold potato purée.

This is a total-package Italian steakhouse where you can start with steak tartare and ricotta-laden pork-and-beef meatballs before indulging in Double R Ranch and Schuyler Ranch steaks alongside Dover sole piccata and veal chop Parm.

“I think that the sky is the limit,” Portale says when asked about his long-term ambitions for Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse. “Once we get rolling, we’ll have really expanded tableside presentations and a seasonally changing menu with a series of specials. We’ve got a lot of resources here. We want to have the consistency in quality of food that we’re known for in New York, and then we’ll build on it.”

Sartiano’s Italian Steakhouse, located at 3131 Las Vegas Blvd. S, Las Vegas, NV 89109, will be open for dinner Wednesday through Sunday.

Chef Phillip Frankland Lee moved from Los Angeles to Austin during the Covid-19 pandemic, but there was not a damn chance that he was abandoning California. 

Lee, who grew up in Los Angeles, has continued to operate Sushi by Scratch Restaurants. The Montecito outpost earned a 2021 Michelin star, and Sushi by Scratch is also going strong at its locations in Encino and the SLS Beverly Hills. Lee keeps pushing harder at Encino’s Pasta | Bar, which has had a Michelin Star for five consecutive years and was featured in Apple TV’s Knife Edge series last year. (In 2025, Lee and his brother, Lennon, made history by becoming the first siblings to earn a Michelin star at different U.S. restaurants in the same year.)

And now he’s back in L.A. to remind his hometown that he’s also an ace at creating casual food. On Friday, Feb. 27, Lee and pro skateboarder Neen Williams will open NADC Burger’s first Los Angeles location in Westwood, near the UCLA campus. 

NADC, which is short for Not a Damn Chance, is a wagyu burger spot that Lee and Williams already operate in Austin, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, Denver, Charlotte and Nashville. The menu is straightforward and habit-forming, with double wagyu cheeseburgers and beef tallow fries. 

NADC has become a viral, celebrity-friendly sensation, with clientele including David Beckham and Zedd. Jelly Roll, who has declared that NADC’s burger is the best he’s ever had, loves it so much that he serves the burger at his Goodnight Nashville honky-tonk. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recently popped by NADC in Austin and also headed next door to Lee’s new Shokunin sushi restaurant.

“I think what sets us apart at NADC is that I run it like I run the line at Pasta or Sushi,” Lee tells Observer. “I put as much attention into every spec when we’re building the burger.”

There’s American cheese, secret sauce (a ketchup and mayonnaise base enhanced with Tabasco and some “little secret notes to make it extra umami”), onions, a generous amount of pickles and “slightly tamed” jalapeños that are boiled before they’re pickled. The beef is American wagyu with Japanese genetics. And when each 3-ounce patty comes off the griddle, it goes onto a resting rack with a 90-second timer so that the juices settle and excess grease drips off. This is precision-focused cooking that grew out of Lee’s backyard hangs with Williams. 

Like Jelly Roll, Zedd and Joe Rogan (who collaborated with NADC on a limited-edition burger in Austin last year), Williams was a guest at the counter of Sushi by Scratch when he met Lee.

“I was already a fan of his because I grew up skateboarding,” Lee says. “He was solo, and I always talk to everybody. He’s like, ‘Yeah, I like to cook.’ I’m like, ‘OK, cute.’ And then he shows me a picture of his backyard where he has a 12-foot masonry hearth that he built himself. I’m like, ‘Oh, you really cook.’”

Lee and Williams started hanging out a lot, skateboarding together, getting their wives together and cooking together.

“We did whole pigs and a lot of steaks over the fire,” Lee says. “And one thing we were doing often was burgers.”

Lee had recently returned from Bangkok, where he had been working on a sushi restaurant and a burger spot that never opened due to the pandemic. So he was in the mood to make burgers, and he and Williams started giving away burgers at Austin skateparks and comedy shows. That led to a 2022 pop-up and then, in 2023, NADC’s first brick-and-mortar location.

The success of NADC has spawned the Not A Damn Chance! podcast, with Lee and Williams talking to guests like Jelly Roll, Zedd, Bert Kreischer, Tom Segura, Mel Robbins, Aaron Franklin and poker pro Doug Polk. Lee is an avid poker player who’s done well in tournaments. And to use a gambling term, he’s been on some kind of rush, opening restaurant after restaurant.

Lee didn’t have any intention of moving to Austin when he went there in 2020 for a sushi pop-up. But after he saw that pop-up sell out with a 25,000-person waiting list, he kept it going month to month. After five months in Austin, Lee looked at his wife, pastry chef Margarita Kallas-Lee, and said, “I think we live in Austin now.”

Lee has built a new life in Texas, where he’s now working to create his most over-the-top project yet. He’s found four acres in Hill Country, about half an hour from Austin, where he plans to have a farm, inn and restaurant with aspirations at three-Michelin-star status and World’s 50 Best recognition.

“We will grow or harvest most of the menu and hunt the rest of the menu,” Lee says. “We’ll milk cows in the morning to get the cream to make butter. We’ll get dairy cows from a local farm and finish them on the grain of the local brewery and the mash of the local olive oil mill.” 

Lee is nothing if not ambitious. In 2017, when he was 30 years old, he told me he wanted to have “100 world-class restaurants” by the time he was 50. The pandemic slowed him down a bit, but the L.A. location of NADC Burger puts him at 30 restaurants, and he still thinks he’ll hit his lofty goal.

“I’m the same age Thomas Keller was when he took over The French Laundry, and you could argue that was the beginning of his career,” Lee says. “I’m going to be 39 on March 9, so I’m still young. I think I’ll probably surpass 100 restaurants by the time I’m 50. But I don’t think I’m doing it for the same reasons that made me want to do it before.” 

All the success he’s had has motivated him in a more meaningful way. 

“I’ve now gotten the stars and the TV and the accolades and the personal freedom to feel like I’ve ‘done it,’” Lee says. “But I think I now get off on different things. It used to be more ego-driven. Now I look around and see someone who comes on as a prep cook, moves all the way into executive chef in our company, has a child and gets a fully paid paternity or maternity leave. They’re getting a 401(k). I have cooks and bartenders buying houses. The more I grow, the more we grow.”

NADC Burger, located at 1091 Broxton Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90024, will be open seven days a week from 11:30 a.m. to midnight.

The South Beach Wine & Food Festival celebrated its 25th anniversary over the weekend with a cavalcade of Food Network superstars and other A-list culinary talent. As always, it was a weekend of delicious food, copious alcohol and fans swooning over their favorite cooking-competition stars, who happily soaked up the love. It was also a weekend about rebirth, renewal and next acts.

“For South Beach this year, I get to represent my new restaurant that I just opened in Dallas, which is Night Rooster,” chef Shirley Chung told Observer on Friday, 10 hours before the Antonia Lofaso-led team of Chung, Stephanie Izard, Tobias Dorzon, Joe Sasto and Jonathon Sawyer won the festival’s Tournament of Champions Live event. “When I saw the banners at the festival, you should have seen me laugh, knowing that I’m back. I’m really back.”

It was a remarkable moment for Chung, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 tongue cancer in 2024 and is now in remission. Two years ago, she wondered if she was staring down the end of her life. She wondered if she would ever properly taste food or cook in a restaurant again. And now here she was, serving lu rou pork belly baos on the beach, mugging for photos with fans, dancing and headbanging on stage with her chef friends at a raucous event hosted by Guy Fieri.

“Nothing is stopping me now,” Chung, who won Food Network’s House of Knives in 2025, told us earlier in the day. “I have a lot more opportunities coming up. I’m living fearlessly. I’m not saying no. I just want to live my full life and experience everything. I’m probably going to be even more extreme than before. Nothing’s holding me back.”

There were a lot of celebrity chefs reveling and holding nothing back on Friday night.

“You ready to get schmaltzy?” chef Eric Greenspan screamed at the Tournament of Champions Live crowd as he served schmaltzy grilled salami sandwiches with his own New School American cheese. “We’re about to get fucking schmaltzy.”

Then the DJ played “Jump Around,” and Greenspan started doing the Running Man. He was clearly here to throw down as he gave guests a glimpse into the not-so-distant future.

Greenspan recently left the Tesla Diner to focus on opening his forthcoming Jewish deli, Mish, in Los Angeles this spring. Friday night’s event was the first public preview of Mish, and Greenspan was in a festive mood. 

“Mish is my dream project,” Greenspan, who has been thinking about opening this deli for almost a decade, told Observer. “It’s my life’s goal. I mean, look, I extracted 99 percent of the dopamine that I was going to extract from the Tesla Diner project in the first three weeks. And after that, it was time to do this.”

The theme of the weekend, in many ways, was new beginnings. Dorzon, who is running Maryland’s Huncho House again after recovering from being shot 11 times in a 2024 armed robbery, beamed as he stood on stage alongside Chung. Earlier in the day at Bistro Collins inside Loews Miami Beach, rapper Ja Rule (who was in Miami to perform at the festival’s Grand Tasting Village) showed off his bartending skills as he poured his terrific new honey-infused Amber & Opal whiskey. Later on Friday night, Kwame Onwuachi hosted the Las’ Lap Link Up event with Nina Compton and served curry mussel toast as a preview of Maroon, the Caribbean steakhouse he’s working to open at the Sahara casino-resort in Las Vegas this spring. 

New power couple Bobby Flay and Brooke Williamson made the rounds, starting with a private opening party at the W South Beach, where going to get a drink at the bar in the back meant walking past chefs like Chung, Greenspan, Izard, Michael and Bryan Voltaggio, Chris Oh, Eric Adjepong, Aaron May, Burt Bakman, Michael White, Tim Love, Mattia Agazzi and Todd English.

It was that kind of star-studded weekend all over South Beach as chefs bounced around to events and their favorite restaurants. We joined Chung for a casual lunch at legendary Cuban restaurant Puerto Sagua on Friday. It turned into an impromptu Food Network meetup because Kevin Lee, Shota Nakajima, Nini Nguyen and Leah Cohen had also decided to visit Puerto Sagua. Many visiting chefs, including Chung, Greenspan, May, Izard and Mei Lin, also put on bibs to eat at the iconic Joe’s Stone Crab over the weekend.

This was a weekend where everyone was eating well. Our favorite bites included chef Danny Grant’s Eight Bar burger and its accompanying creamy Szechuan pasta salad at Thursday night’s Burger Bash; Wan’s chef Alex Kuk’s traditional hot & sour soup at Thursday night’s Asian Night Market hosted by Jet Tila and Aarti Sequeira; Native chef Nyesha Arrington’s buttermilk fried chicken sandwich at Tournament of Champions Live; Jamaica Kitchen chef Anson Chin’s jerk pork and Kween Patty’s chef Daniel Lai’s wagyu/Scotch bonnet patties at Las’ Lap Link Up; and Lumpia Bros chef David Dualan’s pancit at the Grand Tasting Village.

This was a milestone year for the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. But in many ways, it feels like things are only getting started for this festival and the chefs who come here to cook, party, see their besties, meet their fans and be reminded of the resilience of human beings. 

“It’s all my friends here, and this is one of the happiest moments of my last two years,” Chung said. “I’m ready to do so much more.”

Gaia, which will make its United States debut when it opens its Miami location in March, is a glamorous, globally minded restaurant where everything just blends. 

Gaia launched in Dubai in 2018 and has expanded to Monaco, Doha, London and Marbella; it serves Mediterranean food with an emphasis on Greek flavors. The restaurant is led by Nigerian-British chef Izu Ani, who cooked at some of Europe’s most avant-garde and elite restaurants before realizing he wanted to do something simpler and more nourishing. 

Gaia, which is complemented by a late-night lounge called Nyx at all its locations, has attracted A-listers like Tom Cruise, LeBron James, Naomi Campbell, Roger Federer, Idris Elba, Lewis Hamilton, Peggy Gou and the Dubai royal family. It makes sense that a restaurant with this kind of clientele will open on South Pointe Drive in Miami Beach’s buzzing South of Fifth area, where lively blockbuster restaurants like Joe’s Stone Crab, Carbone and Catch call home.

“At the end of the day, the essence of what we do is good food,” Ani tells Observer. “And when we built the concept, from day one, it was all about building something that would last. It’s not about being fashionable. We have a festive restaurant. We have a vibe in our restaurant. But that’s not the basis of our restaurant. We need to build something of substance.”

Ani loves the “simplicity” of Greek food and thinks Miami will appreciate the way he cooks.

“Miami suits our kind of food,” he says. “It’s a happy place. It’s a sunny place. It’s a place where you want to eat a Greek salad. You want to eat a grilled fish. You want to have tzatziki. You want to have the sea bream carpaccio, the food that keeps you light. Not food that weighs you down. People are looking for great food that’s healthy. Miami really fits our kind of food and culture.”

Gaia’s sea bream carpaccio is a beautiful example of how Ani’s food is simple while also being technique-driven, globally influenced and exquisitely plated. The exacting knifework on every sea bream is inspired by Ani’s love of Japan.

“I’m a big fan of Japanese culture,” Ani says. “It’s about the preciseness, but also the less is more. Everything is minimal. That’s what I love about it. I’ve designed my home to be Japanese because I hate clutter. I like to see less things so I can enjoy the things I see.”

What guests might enjoy seeing most at Gaia is its signature “ice market,” with a daily selection of fish and other seafood. You can choose the fish you want and how you would like it prepared, with options including raw, baked (with spiced tomato, Greek herbs and potatoes), grilled (in a charcoal oven with lemon oil), salt-crust, harissa-style and pan-fried.

Ani cut his teeth at modernist restaurants like Arzak and Mugaritz in Spain, but he wants to do something much more straightforward for a mass audience at Gaia. 

“Our food is all based on ingredients,” Ani says. “It’s about leaving as much alone as possible.”

At the same time, “I added my Nigerian heritage, which is spice, to the Greek cuisine because I felt that sometimes you need a little heat to wake up the palate,” Ani adds. “If you’ve ever tried the broccoli at Gaia, it’s with chili, ginger, lemon and oil. That’s it.”

Ani always considers the setting he’s in when he opens a restaurant, so he’s thinking about palm trees, the beach and the diversity of residents and visitors in Miami.

“Miami is a place that is vibrant with a lot of international people,” he says. “Whenever we choose a location, it has to fit the soul of what we’re trying to offer because the food is eaten by the environment. If food goes into an environment where it doesn’t belong, it doesn’t have the same impact.”

Ani’s looking forward to cooking with seasonal ingredients in Miami, and letting the ingredients take the lead.

“We adapt to the environment because we want to be part of the environment,” he says. “We do not impose our will. If a tomato is different in Miami, we will adjust. It might be a bit sweeter, so maybe we will give it a bit more acid. One thing I’ve learned is that your palate changes everywhere you go because of the different mixture of oxygen in the air. We’re going to adapt with the ingredients we find in Miami because the soil is different. You work with nature. You don’t work against nature.”