The Man Who Ate the World (4 page)

Restaurants weren’t just places you went to eat. They were to be signifiers, statements about the city’s newfound confidence and sophistication. It helped that the U.S. had seen a restaurant renaissance during the nineties, and that media interest in food had exploded. The U.S. cable channel, the Food Network, founded in 1993, had come of age by 1998, after being brought under new ownership the year before. The names of top chefs were now familiar to people who were not in regular striking distance of their restaurants.

At the same time journalists like Ruth Reichl, then restaurant critic for the
New York Times,
were reinvigorating food writing and championing cooks who might otherwise have been ignored. Into the Bellagio, therefore, came a restaurant by the Alsatian uber-chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and a new outpost of the legendary Le Cirque from New York. Big-name American chefs like Michael Mina, Todd English, and Julian Serrano were offered deals.

And what deals! Generally there would be an annual consultancy fee, plus 5 percent of the gross. All they had to do was fill the tables and, if they wanted to, forget about the bottom line. As long as there was money coming in, they got a cut of it. Plus, if there was a profit, they got 10 percent of that, too, and there was a lot of profit. Suddenly people were no
longer coming to town merely to throw their money away in the casinos while surviving on desiccated shrimp or lumps of sweaty pork that had been festering under the heat lamps of the all-you-can-eat buffets for six hours. The tables they were coming to were covered not with green baize, but in heavyweight linen. Every hotel on The Strip had to have a superstar chef in residence or, better still, six of them, or twelve—and it wasn’t just the big U.S. names. The French boys with the Michelin stars were starting to pay attention as well.

In 2004 non-gaming revenues in Las Vegas—from high-end hotel rooms, glossy arcades of shops stuffed full of Cartier and Chanel and, of course, those restaurants—overtook gaming revenues for the first time. This wasn’t because gambling had suddenly fallen out of favor. Gaming was still a roaring express train, which was pouring cash into the town. It was just that more money was being spent on all the other stuff. If you were interested in restaurants, you had to be there.

I am interested in restaurants. Ergo, I had to be there. Plus I needed to do something to exorcise the memory of John Wayne Bobbitt and his damaged limb.

B
efore I could begin, though, I had an appointment to see Freddie Glusman at his restaurant down on Convention Center Boulevard. Piero’s is old Las Vegas and so is Freddie. He used to feed clams to Moe Dalitz, the original Las Vegas mobster who founded the Desert Inn and the Stardust. Frank Sinatra was a regular at Freddie’s, too. Once, when he was out of town, Sinatra sent down to Piero’s for dinner, so Freddie plated up some of his famed pollo vesuvio—chicken, tomato, fried aubergine, and mozzarella—made sure it looked nice, put it on the Learjet, and flew it over to the old man on his estate in Palm Springs.

When Martin Scorsese came to town to shoot his movie
Casino
and needed somewhere to play the part of Joe Pesci’s restaurant, the Leaning Tower, he knew exactly where to go: Freddie’s place down on Convention Center Boulevard.

Me? I had absolutely no intention of eating at Piero’s. I was looking for transcendent meals and I really didn’t care whether the food came with Sinatra’s approval. He was a fantastic singer but no restaurant critic. Anyway, I had just four nights in town, and none of them were going to be wasted on pollo vesuvio or saltimbocca alla romana, however good Freddie insisted they were. Still, in the clichéd way of nice middle-class boys who have never punched anyone and who would run a mile from a real Mafia hood if ever they met one, I’ve always had a thing about the old Vegas of the Rat Pack era.

One of my favorite recordings of all time is
Sinatra at the Sands.
Not vintage Sinatra vocally—he was only a few years from the nightmare of “My Way” by then—but the Count Basie Orchestra is tight as ever and from Frank’s opening line—“Who let all these people into my room?”—to the very last crack of the snare drum you know who’s in charge. I was about to submerge myself in the complete artifice that is twenty-first-century Vegas; before I did that I wanted to go back a bit. I wanted to live a little of that recording. It felt like I was coming to pay my respects.

Piero’s is a low-slug, dirty pink building, opposite the Convention Center. Glusman’s office is reached through the back car park, past the sort of garbage Dumpsters that would be good for dumping a body in, if you were in the body-dumping business. The office is a windowless box on the first floor at the back. Naturally, it’s carpeted in tiger print. On the desk in the middle there’s a wide dish of black jelly beans. Neither of these things are as interesting, though, as the walls. They are filled with photographs, all the same size and each with the same simple black frame. At first I assumed they would be friends of Freddie’s, and some of them are.

Many are not. Here’s a picture of Bugsy Siegel, the old hoodlum credited with turning Las Vegas into a gambling Mecca by opening the Flamingo, before taking a bullet in the eye. There’s one of Jack Kennedy with Sinatra, and not far away a portrait of Nick “The Greek” Dandalos, the professional poker player famed for having taken part in the greatest card game of all time, against Johnny Moss, a five-month marathon of Texas Hold ’Em held at Binion’s Horseshoe in 1949.

Freddie comes in as I am studying the wall. “This is a tribute to Old Vegas?” I say, indicating the pictures.

“Yeah,” Freddie says. Now in his seventies he has dark brown leathery skin, big hands, and a voice like he gargles daily with gravel. He’s wearing a black sweatshirt and various bits and pieces of gold jewelry and he has those large dangly earlobes that some people acquire in old age. “There’s Al Dorfman,” he says, pointing with one stubby finger at a black-and-white photograph. “He got shot dead in Chicago. Here’s Priscilla and Elvis. Here’s Elizabeth Taylor. Here’s Harry. He was a Nevada Supreme Court Judge. Had to resign because of some bullshit or other.”

“And here’s Jimmy Hoffa,” I say enthusiastically, pointing at a picture of the Teamsters boss who went missing in mysterious circumstances in 1975, presumably because he had displeased his friends in the mob. “I wonder where he is now.”

Freddie stares at me. “How the fuck do I know?” He trudges off back behind his enormous desk.

Glusman has been in Vegas for over forty years. He started out in the “schmatte business” selling women’s wear from concessions within hotels. Back then there was only one big-ticket restaurant in each hotel. “Vegas is an entertainment town,” he says. “And people in the entertainment business, they want somewhere good to eat, but there weren’t that many places. The Flamingo had the Candlelight. At the Sahara it was the House of Lords and the Sands had the Regency Room.” These were old-style joints, where the boys on the floor always dressed in a tux, and almost nothing was served unless it had first been flamed tableside in imported cognac.

For years Freddie had been interested in restaurants so, in 1982, he found a chef called Piero and put him in business.

“What happened to him?”

“He left,” Freddie says. “After six months.” And then, as if I had asked why, “Because I wanted him to leave.” So now he was running a restaurant called Piero’s without a Piero. It seats 350 people and is only open for dinner.

His place, he says, has always been a local place. Nobody gets hassled at Piero’s. As it says on his Web site: “It quickly became a hangout for Las Vegas locals and celebrities like the Rat Pack, politicians, and some of those businessmen in the casino industry with Italian surnames, the ‘local color’ guys.” All of this plays up to the myths, of course—by 1982 the Rat Pack was probably talking hip replacements and pensions—but it’s clear the restaurant has had an interesting clientele over the years.

Just a few years ago, one of the big casino developers was beaten up at his table over dinner by a bunch of other casino guys, because of an argument over $250,000’ worth of chips, all of which redefines the term “floor show.” Later Freddie told the press and the police he didn’t see anything. Or hear anything. At all. He hands me a tightly printed list of the celebrities who have eaten in his dining room downstairs, with its beige leather banquettes and cozy booths and its low ceilings. Some of them mean nothing to me. Who is Too Tall Jones? Just how magical was “Lady of Magic”? But others—Muhammad Ali and George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Sammy Davis, Jr.—are obviously familiar. On the wall behind his desk is a photograph of Sinatra signed, “Hi Freddie, great as usual, Frank.”

I ask him what he thinks of the new breed of hotel and restaurant.

“The hotel owners are different today,” he says. “In the old days they took care of the customer, and not just the high rollers. Now it’s just too impersonal. Unless you’re a giant player. Then they’ll kiss your ass. As to the restaurants, most of the big names above the door, they aren’t ever there. The chefs just have to be in town maybe a week a month and that’s it.” And yet they do well, I say. I want him to moderate his view. After all, I haven’t even started eating yet. I want the place to be good. I don’t want to hear this old guy’s cynicism.

“Sure they do well,” he says. “There’s 3,000, 4,000 people staying in the hotels. Where else they gonna go? Wolfgang Puck’s got five or six locations in Vegas now. He’s a good guy. But it’s a little commercial, isn’t it? That’s not about the food. It’s about the name.” He goes off on a long
rap about the outrageous markups on wine in the city—which I will discover to be the case in some places—and the way some of the fancier restaurants just plate up “three bean sprouts” and call it dinner. “You used to get a hotel room for $10. Now it’s $700. It’s crazy.”

I look back at the wall of photographs. “You used to feed the mob guys?”

He shrugs. “They weren’t them. They represented them.”

“Do they still eat here?”

He shakes his head, like I’m an idiot. “They’re all dead.”

S
o the old Vegas really has gone: not just dead, but buried, too. Instead I need to discover the new Vegas, which, naturally enough, means going to Paris, though only that bit of Paris located at the Venetian Hotel. I have a table at Bouchon, an affectionate rendition of the classic French brasserie by Thomas Keller, widely regarded as the best American-born chef in the world.

I always knew that Keller would be a part of this journey of mine, and more than once. At The French Laundry in Napa Valley and Per Se in New York, he partners soft-boiled eggs with black truffle purees and makes a mille-feuille of crisp green apples. He puts thyme ice cream together with extra-virgin olive oil and makes sorbet out of hibiscus. Anybody in search of the perfect meal will want a piece of that. Here at Bouchon, however, he (or his team, for Keller is either in California or New York tonight) does straight-up French brasserie food, which is something I have always loved. Asked once what type of food I would choose, if I could eat that and only that for the rest of my life, I chose a menu of French brasserie classics: of fruits de mer and steak frites, of cassoulet and pot-au-feu and rabbit in mustard sauce. Nothing else seems to me to speak so loudly or clearly to the appetite. I was excited about eating at Bouchon.

The walls of the restaurant are a studied shade of nicotine in a room where very few people smoke. There is a tiled floor. There is wood paneling
and engraved glass and mirrors and, before me, there is a perfect dish of fresh oysters on the half shell with a ramekin of shallot vinegar.

Of course, the whole thing is as authentic and cheesy as a movie set, but having wandered the Venetian Hotel for an hour before coming upstairs to Bouchon, I have concluded that notions of authenticity are a distraction in Vegas. Complaining that everything is artificial here is like wandering into a nunnery and chastising the residents for praying too much. You either engage with it or you go home, and I wasn’t about to go home. That said, it is still possible to acknowledge that a lot of modern-day Vegas is Olympic gold medal–standard silliness—though you can still enjoy it.

In the foyer of the Venetian Hotel, another 3,000-room megalith, men in red-and-white-striped shirts wearing straw boaters float about playing accordions as if it were a reasonable thing to do. There may be a traveling exhibition of works by Rubens on loan from the Guggenheim here at the hotel, but most people make do with the intricate murals on the walls and ceilings: of fat-clad cherubs and sunlit clouds and melon-breasted ladies in diaphanous gowns looking slightly startled to find themselves here.

Naturally, it is all irredeemably camp. Indeed, as I wandered the town over the next few days—past the centurions with their breastplates at Caesars, and the intricate marble floors and stuffed sofas at the Wynn and the display of giant handblown glass flowers by Dale Chihuly at the Bellagio—I was constantly pursued by that C word. Vegas redefines camp. It’s camp on anabolic steroids. Vegas, I eventually concluded, looks like it has been designed by a battalion of gay interior designers who were never allowed to hear the words “Enough, already!”

Try this: At the Bellagio there are stripy gold and copper awnings over every card table, like the place is the set for a Little Bo Peep story. I was dying to meet the hard-knuckled high roller who specifically wanted to drop a few grand at the Bellagio just because “they got them pretty awnings.”

During my predinner journey around the Venetian I stumbled across
the town square, a wide-open, cobbled space meant to replicate the feeling of Venice at dusk. It comes complete with water-filled canals that teem with gondolas for hire so that tourists who can’t make it to the real Venice can slip gently under fake bridges and past crowded pavement cafés and feel pleased with themselves. In the square, rather good opera singers are performing for the crowds, dressed in a sofa’s worth of brocade and velvet each. All of this is far away from the chuntering slots and card tables of the gaming floor.