Las Vegas designer restaurants

“There are budgets in Las Vegas — it’s not a blank check. But on the other hand, if there’s an idea that’s over the top and unbelievable, you have a real opportunity to sell it,” says Jeffrey Beers, who designed Rumjungle, Red White and Blue and China Grill at Mandalay Bay as well as Daniel Boulud Brasserie at Wynn. “If it’s great, somebody will fund it.”

To wit, what Vegas offers these chefs is the chance to build that restaurant of their dreams, the one they never could have conceived of when they were financing their original ventures by mortgaging their homes. The arrangements vary depending on the property — MGM Mirage and Wynn own and build most of their restaurants, whereas the Venetian leases the space — but by and large the results are the bigger, bolder, more ambitious realizations that chefs could only fantasize about earlier in their careers.

“Very, very few independent restaurateurs could ever afford something of this level of quality, scope and design,” says Paul Bartolotta, whose $10 million Ristorante Bartolotta di Mare includes mammoth terracotta jugs and crystal chandeliers that hang down the center of a curved staircase heading to a dining room that offers outdoor seating next to waterfalls and a koi-filled lake. “Nobody could afford the level of drama you have here if it weren’t a part of something like this resort.”

That’s not to say it always works. At Wynn, the Mediterranean Italian eatery Corsa Cucina by chef Stephen Kalt saw underwhelming traffic when it opened in 2005. Thomas and Wynn decided the place was too closed off and dark, and by year’s end walls were knocked down to open the bar area up to the casino.

MGM Mirage The French maestro considered by many to be the greatest living chef shocked the cuisine world in 2006 by opening his first American eatery not in New York or San Francisco, but at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Since many of these restaurants are Vegas versions of eateries from elsewhere, there’s always a debate about whether to try to recreate the original with some Vegas touches or to go in a totally different direction. Craftsteak at MGM Grand, for instance, recreates the look of Craft in New York with the steel-mesh separating the booths and the naked light bulbs hanging in rows in the main dining room. Aureole, though, bears no resemblance to its namesake in New York.

Most are hybrids. Tao Asian Bistro, a 42,000-square-foot restaurant-nightclub-lounge, is one such example. The original Tao on East 58th Street in Manhattan was a quarter of the size and doesn’t have a nightclub, but some of the key design features — a 20-foot-tall Buddha as a centerpiece and a worn-looking brick wall — are meant to evoke facets of the New York original. Yet even in some of those details, there’s a Vegasizing aspect; the Vegas Buddha, Tao owner Richard Wolf says, “is sexier, the waist a little curvier.”

“This is the project of our lifetime,” Wolf says of the $20 million venture, mimicking a sentiment commonly heard from other restaurateurs these days. “It’s the biggest, most challenging restaurant we’ve ever done. To build in Las Vegas, where anything is possible — that is the highlight.”

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