Brett Ottolenghi, the ostentatiously earnest, honest, perpetually worried young proprietor of Artisanal Foods, a fancy-food purveyor in Las Vegas, wrote me by text message. “Thinking I’d try to cook with them before offering to chefs. But the pen I made isn’t working and they are escaping by the hundreds in my house.” Five minutes later, he wrote me again. “I think I’ll have to live among them. There is no way I can pick up this many. A Chinese chef might help me cook some tomorrow.” Las Vegas is among the top food cities in America, if you go by the number of superexpensive restaurants with famous chefs. Ten of the fifty highest-grossing restaurants in the country are on the Strip, and there are more master sommeliers in Las Vegas than in any other city in the country. Adam Carmer, the casino developer Steve Wynn’s first hotel sommelier, described himself to me as “the No. 1 maître d’ in town.” He says, “Other places, you might have four or five extraordinary restaurants in a state or in a country; here you have four or five in a hotel.
What do You think about Anything That Moves (2013)?
