For a restaurant operator with a white-tablecloth steakhouse that serves $375 Rosewood Ranch wagyu porterhouses, hosts $1,200-per-person dinners featuring ultra-premium LVMH wines (including Château Cheval Blanc and Château d’Yquem) and has brought in guest chefs from Casa Julian, Rockpool and Borgo Egnazia for exclusive events, Daniel’s Miami proprietor Thomas Angelo unironically says he thinks a lot about “approachability.”

Angelo, who runs Gioia Hospitality with his daughter Kassidy, is quick to talk about Daniel’s bar menu, the restaurant’s under-$20 cocktails, its specially priced Miami Spice menus and how it discounts its 2,000-selection wine list by 25 percent at lunch.

“Yesterday, we had 195 lunches in the restaurant,” Angelo tells Observer. “We did $15,000 for lunch and sold $5,000 in wine. Value is super important. You have a top 5 percent that will come in and don’t care how much they spend. They’ll buy a bottle of Petrus. But that’s 5 percent, maximum, of your guests. Everyone else is looking for value in today’s world, with higher gas prices and higher food prices. We have a wine list with many bottles under $100.”

Even at the top tier of Miami dining, balance matters. So at La Sponda, which Gioia Hospitality and culinary director Danny Ganem are opening at Ugo Colombo’s Vita at Grove Isle luxury residential development on September 19, Angelo has a similar formula in mind.

“It’s really important to me that there are pastas on the menu that are under $50 that are still great,” he says.

Ganem, who also runs the kitchen at Daniel’s, has one clear goal with his cooking: “We want to wow the guests,” he tells Observer. “Our goal is to create an experience where people finish their meal, and they say, ‘Wow.’ The cooks understand that everything that is being done is to wow the guests.”

Daniel’s, which is ranked No. 40 on the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants and is No. 9 in North America and No. 1 in Florida on that list, has ascended to the top of the Miami meatery scene. La Sponda will serve beef of the same quality. Ganem says that sourcing the best ingredients is the first part of his wow-factor process.

“I spend a lot of time throughout the week curating the steaks at the restaurants,” he says. “We’re bringing in, for example, Mayura Station wagyu from Australia. It’s cattle that are fed chocolate. We have another one, Sir Harry, that gets fed citrus, and you find those notes. We just continue pushing. There’s always another ranch that people are talking about, so we bring in the beef, and we taste it.”

At the 120-seat La Sponda, Ganem has also been blending different sauces to make lobster pasta during R&D. He’s been working on cannelloni with short ribs and Vacche Rosse cheese. La Sponda will serve caviar pasta and truffle-topped pasta with the option of white truffles when they are in season.

But again, Angelo, who grew up eating Italian-American food in the Bronx, cares a lot about value.

“If you only have things that are hyper-expensive, what you have is a special occasion restaurant,” he says. “We’re in a residential community on this island where you’ve got guests who’ve purchased these 65 beautiful units, and they may come three, four times a week. They may come with their friends on Saturday and want a beautiful porterhouse, a beautiful steak with black truffles or caviar. Or they may come on Monday and have an incredible chicken dish or cavatelli pomodoro.”

Angelo mentions how Scarpetta’s spaghetti pomodoro has always been its best-seller, so dialing in the perfect tomato sauce is probably even more important than sourcing truffles or caviar. Angelo pays close attention to what he experiences at other restaurants, and he tapped Martin Brudnizki Design Studio for La Sponda after admiring its work at Thomas Keller’s Surf Club. 

Angelo’s family is from Puglia, and La Sponda is on a guard-gated 20-acre island in Biscayne Bay near Coconut Grove, but he’s thinking beyond “coastal Italian” at his new restaurant. He wants the food at La Sponda to reflect many parts of Italy.

“We want to have the regional cuisines of Italy, and I kind of charged Danny with coming up with dishes that would represent all of Italia, not just Puglia,” says Angelo, who’s traveled extensively around Italy with Ganem and wine director Daniel Bishop. 

La Sponda will feature delicate crudos and colossal wagyu bistecca Fiorentina on a menu that also showcases spaghetti alla chitarra al tartufo with Burgundy truffles, cultured butter and Parmigiano espuma; linguine all’astice with Maine lobster, fennel, ginger wine and pomodoro; and branzino alla Vernaccia with Taggiasca olives, potatoes, tomatoes and basil. Ganem’s team will make fresh pasta daily and also use extruded pasta to serve dishes true to their Italian origins.

And like at Daniel’s, La Sponda will host special big-ticket wine dinners.

“We’re already lining up Antinori and Gaia to come,” Angelo says. “And Danny’s got a little secret we can’t announce yet, but he’s got a relationship with a three-star Michelin chef who’s very famous in Italy, and we’re working on something.”

That said, Angelo very much wants to attract new customers who might not yet know much about pricey wine or Michelin stars.

“When I went out to eat in my 30s, I wasn’t buying $2,300 of wine,” he says. “I was looking for bottles that were $45 and $50. Cultivating that younger guest is important to us.”

La Sponda, located at 5 Grove Isle Dr., Miami, FL 33133, will initially open for dinner on Wednesday through Sunday.

“I think the most exciting thing you can do is re-envision classic formatting in a way that has real perspective and real depth,” chef Jake Tyler Brodsky tells Observer.

At Cafe Charmant, which Eugene Remm, Tilman Fertitta and Catch Hospitality Group are opening with Brodsky in the West Village on Tuesday, September 15, the goal is to create a different kind of brasserie. Remm has been to Keith McNally’s Pastis hundreds of times, but he wants Cafe Charmant to be “nothing like Pastis.”

“Pastis is phenomenal, and it already exists,” Remm tells Observer. “The worst thing we could have done is just create Pastis on Bleecker Street. It would have been my nightmare. And then this conversation would come with some rolling eyes and be like, ‘OK, so you just took Pastis, put it in this cool place, put your little spin on it, and that’s cute. Congratulations.’”

So Brodsky, a native New Yorker and former boxer who cooked at Eleven Madison Park and then ran the kitchen at Palm Heights in Grand Cayman, is delivering a globally inspired and free-spirited coastal take on brasserie cuisine. 

Brodsky is making tuna tartare that’s a “bit less composed, a bit more free-form” with luxurious chutoro, Jimmy Nardello peppers, olives and saffron aioli. This “fun and casual” version of tuna tartare, which comes with chips and is a nod to how people eat in Marseille, is a statement of purpose. Brodsky doesn’t want the formality or fanciful frills of Eleven Madison Park at Cafe Charmant.

“I don’t want to be told where my carrot was grown,” he says. “I don’t want things to be fussy.”

Remm fell in love with Brodsky’s food when he vacationed at the Palm Heights resort.

He asked the staff about the chef who created the menu and learned that Brodsky had recently departed the hotel after seven years there. When Remm tracked Brodsky down to discuss working together, the chef was traveling the world as he pondered his next move. 

Brodsky went to Southeast Asia and then to Japan, Korea, Marseille and Capri. He tasted local ingredients and cooked at pop-ups. He spent almost eight months traveling, and it turns out this was perfect R&D for Cafe Charmant.

Cafe Charmant has a dish called crispy shrimp Polynesian. The inspiration for the dish came after Brodsky held a pop-up in Capri, following a trip to Vietnam.

“I was kind of like, oh, the world of a stuffed squash blossom meets the kind of way Vietnamese people eat shrimp with a lot of fresh herbs,” Brodsky says. “So we have a hoja santa leaf and a very simple wild shrimp farce. It has some seasoned peppers, and then you have a squash blossom fanned out over the top. That gets put in a really delicate, beautiful tempura batter. When it comes out, we put some acacia honey on it and this blend of green sansho peppercorn, pink peppercorn, fennel and fennel pollen.”

For steak frites, Brodsky is making tamarind chutney and using it instead of white wine in the base of Cafe Charmant’s peppercorn sauce. Cafe Charmant’s version of Milanese involves American-grown Ibérico pork in a mojo brine and yassa onions cooked down with Scotch bonnet peppers, lemon juice and mustard. Brodsky’s moules-frites merges aji amarillo with crème fraîche. His duck pastels feature a Trinidadian-style curry with fresh coconut milk. 

Brodsky likes the idea of elegant food that can get a bit messy. He’s clearly a chef who understands that all kinds of elements blend in New York.

“Being in New York, there are all these influences, and you’re around a ton of culture,” he says. 

And, of course, the diversity of the city itself is a primary ingredient at impossible-to-book destinations like Torrisi and Tatiana. Speaking of impossible-to-book, Remm and Catch Hospitality Group have been on a tear at The Corner Store, The 86 and Or’esh (another culture-blending wonderland that people are clamoring to visit). It’s been a remarkable run of perpetually packed restaurants since The Corner Store opened in September 2024. 

Remm calls Observer when he’s on his way to a team lunch on The 86’s one-year anniversary on a September Friday. For Remm, all this success is a purely New York story.

“I try to mitigate my travel, and that’s the beauty of what I’m doing,” Remm says. “I live in the West Village, and I want to walk to work. If you want to scale a business and you have an entrepreneurial spirit but you want to also be close to your family, there’s no better place that has density, diversity and the epicenter of all things, tourism and business and arts.”

Remm knows his hot spots are hard to get into, but he wants to have restaurants that guests will want to visit again and again for the food and the vibe. He went to Eleven Madison Park once and felt mentally fatigued and struggled to make conversation during the third hour of the meal, but he’s been to the more relaxed NoMad Bar dozens of times. He knows what his comfort zone is.

“I love that the tasting menu is dead,” Remm says. “I don’t ever want it again.”

Brodsky shares a similar sensibility. He learned a lot at Eleven Madison Park, but he didn’t love the food there. 

“I think you can introduce people to a lot of things that sometimes can seem stuffy or foodie in a way that’s a bit easier and more digestible,” he says. “I think a reinterpretation of the bistro or brasserie is more exciting than what classic fine dining is considered right now.”

Cafe Charmant, located at 340 Bleecker St., New York, NY 10014, will be open Tuesday-Saturday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Dry-aged fish guru Liwei Liao has influenced how elite chefs all over the country serve seafood. Now Liao, who’s sold fish to restaurants run by Dominique Crenn, Wolfgang Puck, Aitor Zabala, José Andrés and Enrique Olvera, is launching his own high-end restaurant inside his new Joint Seafood fish market in Los Angeles.

The Butcher’s Counter at Joint Seafood’s Arts District location will debut on Friday, August 14, with a $280, 10-plus-course tasting menu.

“I want to do it because it’s fun,” Liao tells Observer. “But I’m also doing it because there’s only so much I can share with other chefs. I need an outlet to share myself. This is an outlet for me to understand my ingredients better and to portray them in my words, because I keep creating the pen and the paper for chefs, but I never do the writing.”

And as is befitting of a fishmonger whose seafood has been on the menus of three-Michelin-starred restaurants like Atelier Crenn and Somni, Liao is using the highest-quality ingredients.

“I think the perfect way to explain this would be that I don’t do food-cost math,” Liao says. “I’m literally working from the inventory that all these other restaurants order from, so I have access to the best shit.”

For example: “We’ll start with an oyster and then lead into an uni crostini, where the best uni that week is going to go on my French omelet and house-made milk bread,” Liao says. “I’m always going to have a sashimi dish that’s broken down from beginning to end in front of the guests. I’ll break down a whole Ōra King salmon and cut its belly out just to serve at the Butcher’s Counter.”

The fish might change from week to week, but the format of the menu at the eight-seat counter will always include a couple of starters, soup, salad, two main courses and four hand rolls. 

“I’m going to pick those special small silver Japanese fish that I will incorporate into hand rolls, like sardines or kamasu, which is baby barracuda,” Liao says. “I will incorporate those in a very non-traditional way.”

Liao, who is Taiwanese-American, isn’t trying to compete with Japanese restaurants. He wants to do something different. At the Uoichiba hand roll bars he has inside Joint Seafood in Sherman Oaks and the Arts District, he serves toasted lox bagel hand rolls and wagyu cheeseburger hand rolls. The Butcher’s Counter is a new way for him to showcase his point of view and his insatiable appetite.

If you ever go out to eat with Liao, you’ll probably notice that he orders a lot of meat. He loves steak, Korean BBQ and fried chicken because it’s not what he’s sampling at work every day. So he’s serving Westholme Wagyu—dry-aged in-house, of course—at The Butcher’s Counter.

“If I do all fish, I will drive myself crazy,” says Liao, who’s also been hosting monthly block parties at the new Joint Seafood with food from restaurants like Tacos 1986, Heng Heng Chicken Rice, Fuegos, Frank ‘n’ Frank’s, Souu LA and Porto’s.

It makes sense that a purveyor who spends countless hours thinking about rarefied ingredients enjoys ragers with food from quick-service restaurants. This is how Liao lets loose.

At its core, dry-aged fish isn’t about frills. It’s the opposite of gilding the lily. It’s about purity and enhancing the essence of an ingredient.

“Our main goal is to purge impurities,” Liao says. “Dry-aging removes the blood, the slime, the water content that makes fish spoil quicker and develop those fishy flavors. If you remove all those impurities, you have a protein that is a lot cleaner. And when it has that clarity, you can taste the fruit notes of the salmon, the flavors that are otherwise hidden. What I’m actually trying to do is present fish in the most simple way.”

This focus on optimizing seafood has turned Liao into a game-changing fishmonger. You can taste Joint Seafood’s fish at Andrés restaurants like Zaytinya in Las Vegas and at Puck restaurants like Cut and Spago in Beverly Hills. Michael Cimarusti of three-Michelin-starred Providence in Los Angeles credits Liao for turning him on to dry-aged fish. Zabala’s Somni, the only other L.A. restaurant with three Michelin stars, serves Liao’s sardines. Olvera’s Damian in Los Angeles has used Liao’s branzino, barramundi and striped bass for its pescado a la talla.

Before Crenn started buying Liao’s tuna and black cod for Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, she popped by Joint Seafood to learn about the dry-aging process.

“She visited the shop by herself just to meet me and understand what we do,” Liao says. “That’s the kind of chef she is.”

Liao is always eager to share ideas and tell chefs how he thinks they should prepare certain fish. But ultimately, what restaurants buy and how they use these ingredients isn’t his call.

The Butcher’s Counter is about Liao finding his own voice. It’s also about letting the ingredients tell the story. Liao, with just two cooks alongside him, and his wife, Iris Chen, handling the front of the house, knows it’s important not to overcomplicate things. This is his tasting menu, with his ingredients, and he’s preparing every dish himself. 

Guests will see him cutting 16-day dry-aged salmon and hand-toasting nori. They’ll see him mixing ultra-premium Yukitsubaki rice that they will enjoy at the end of their meal.

“If you were to cost out what we do for this meal, it should cost way more than $280,” Liao says. “I’m doing it for fun because so many people are not doing what I think they should be. I’ve spent years talking to so many chefs about how to use this or that. This is the first time I get to do what I want to do.”

The Butcher’s Counter at Joint Seafood, located at 600 E. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, will serve its tasting menu every Friday in August and add Saturday service in September.

This year’s Tales of the Cocktail conference in New Orleans was a boozy wonderland that also felt like a world-class food festival.

At Absolut Tabasco’s Château Turkey and the Wolf, Tim Flores and Genie Kwon’s Kasama showcased its distinctly Chicago-Filipino point of view by serving Italian beef lumpia with sweet chili giardiniera. Kasama (which became the world’s first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant in 2022) was part of a lively indoor-outdoor bash that also featured Stockholm’s Tjoget pouring cocktails like the Spicy Peaches, with olive oil-washed Absolut Tabasco, sherry, peach liqueur, apple and lime juice, last Monday. A couple of days later, Mei Lin was in the Château Turkey and the Wolf trailer, wearing a Chain/Arby’s 13 Hr Drip Fit as she built tom yum fried soft-shell crab baos. Turkey and the Wolf chef-proprietor Mason Hereford made sure there was an ample amount of his famous fried bologna sandwiches and chicken pot pie empanadas at this three-day pop-up.

Château Turkey and the Wolf, which also featured drinks from New York’s Bar Snack (named Best U.S. Cocktail Bar at Thursday’s Spirited Awards) and food from New York’s Dame and chef Nini Nguyen, was one of many New Orleans gatherings that amped up the idea of drinking food last week.

With changing consumer habits and health consciousness contributing to a decline in alcohol sales, many liquor brands hope to grow their business by working closely with prominent chefs and restaurants. And New Orleans, which hosted the North America’s 50 Best Restaurants announcement in May and the Bocuse d’Or cooking competition this past Sunday, is an ideal destination for these collaborations. 

So last Wednesday at two-Michelin-starred Emeril’s, chef E.J. Lagasse cooked alongside Pujol chef Enrique Olvera and Californios chef Val Cantú at a Tales of the Cocktail dinner that featured José Cuervo Reserva de la Familia cocktail pairings from Handshake Speakeasy. Last month, Californios in San Francisco became the world’s first three-Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant. And Olvera’s two-Michelin-starred Pujol in Mexico City has long been known as a standard-bearer for modern Mexican food.

Other Mexican hospitality heavyweights were also in the mix at Tales of the Cocktail. Earlier on Wednesday, chef Francisco “Paco” Ruano of Guadalajara’s Michelin-starred Alcalde teamed up with chef Sue Zemanick at Michelin-starred Zasu for a lunch with Reserva de la Familia (the official tequila partner for the Michelin Guide in the United States and Mexico). 

“We’re very excited to work with chef Paco and to drink way too much tequila before I have to work tonight,” Zemanick told the crowd.

The flavorful dishes coming out of Zasu’s kitchen, like tuna crudo with leche de tigre and grilled baby octopus with prune salsa matcha, paired nicely with the top-shelf tequila. Ruano brought out smokiness, sweetness, earthiness and beefiness in a licorice mole dish with green plantain atole and tongue, beef tendon and heart pastrami that was accompanied by a glass of Reserva de la Familia’s new Private Cask Collection Edition No. 2: Mole Cask. This is the first-ever tequila finished in mole-seasoned barrels.

The Mexico-themed revelry continued Wednesday night as L.A.’s Tacos 1986 served carne asada, pollo asado and hongos on handmade corn tortillas and handmade flour tortillas while Bar Mauro and Mixteca poured Don Julio cocktails at Diageo’s House of Agave. It was part of a whirlwind summer for Tacos 1986’s Jorge “Joy” Alvarez-Tostado and Victor Delgado, who had just flown back to the U.S. after a pop-up at Taqueria Super Macho in Hong Kong.

During Tales of the Cocktail week, New Orleans chef Ana Castro was enjoying her own whirlwind. Castro hosted an 1800 Tequila dinner at modern Mexican darling Acamaya (which, along with Emeril’s and Dakar, reps New Orleans in this year’s North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list) and added an extra day of daytime service at her new Casimiro. 

Acamaya, where we and other Tales of the Cocktail attendees (including a group overheard sharing stories about getting lost after drinking too much last year) pregamed before the Ode to the Bowl kickoff party, is a beautiful example of how cultures blend in New Orleans. 

At Acamaya, Castro riffs on New Orleans food with soul-warming dishes like blackened drum Veracruz-style that pop with the flavors of tomatoes, olives and pepperoncini. Castro serves little blue crab claws (also known as crab fingers) with spicy green salsa instead of the more conventional Thousand Island dressing. She rounds out her menu with crowd-pleasers like shrimp costra (which has a terrific crispy layer of cheese) and a smoked hamachi al pastor tostada that’s so popular she knows she probably can’t ever take it off the menu.

Another memorable meal we had last week underscored the point that New Orleans is a city where simultaneously recognizing your surroundings and your heritage can create special experiences. Take chef Arvinder Vilkhu’s Saffron, a modern Indian restaurant that serves curried seafood gumbo and roasted Gulf oysters with curry leaf alongside uncompromising traditional curries like pork vindaloo.

Saffron was recommended to us by everyone from Kerry Seaton-Stewart of New Orleans fried chicken institution Willie Mae’s to Ode to the Bowl co-host Marc Rose. Seaton-Stewart, who makes great gumbo herself at Willie Mae’s (which hosted a Bacardi event featuring Bombay Sapphire during Tales of the Cocktail), told Observer that she appreciates Saffron because the restaurant is true to itself but also true to New Orleans.

“They’re representing themselves,” Seaton-Stewart told Observer. “The gumbo is curry-based. When you go to Saffron, you’re like, ‘OK, I can get a little gumbo out of this.’ But I also feel their culture, and I love it.”

It takes moxie to make Indian-influenced gumbo in a city where gumbo and local seafood are everywhere, including at the most celebrated dining institutions. Two of our other best meals in New Orleans, for example, were the gumbo and barbecue shrimp at The Wine Bar at Emeril’s (where we drank a delightful Viet-Cajun margarita and a deeply refreshing imperial sencha and rooibos iced tea) and the gumbo, blue crab beignets and pan-roasted redfish at chef Justin Devillier’s La Petite Grocery. But one thing we realized after eating around the city during Tales of the Cocktail is that chefs in New Orleans cook with confidence, whimsy and a lack of fear. 

Seaton-Stewart and Observer discussed the vibrant New Orleans dining scene while sipping Mujen shochu cocktails at Byron Puck’s Beyond the Vine event last Tuesday. Beyond the Vine is a new culinary and cocktail series that is bringing in renowned bars for collaborations at Wolfgang Puck restaurants. Angel’s Share at Spago Beverly Hills on August 14 will be followed by Employees Only at Cut New York and Paradiso at Cut Las Vegas.

“The world of mixology has grown so much, and it’s a blessing to be here during Tales of the Cocktail and showcase what we’re trying to do with bringing food and cocktails together,” Byron Puck told Observer as he and a team that included culinary director Tetsu Yehagi put the finishing touches on prime filet sandos and crawfish cones. “I think Tales always deserved a portion of it to be dedicated to food, to chefs. And I feel like it’s the entire hospitality community’s job to put cocktails in a great light.”

Earlier that day, we popped by the Maison Perrier lounge (where buzzy bars like L.A.’s Vandell were invited to pour) at the conference. That’s where Nestlé Waters and Premium Beverages director of client marketing Jayne Portnoy told Observer that she’s been coming to Tales of the Cocktail for more than a decade, and it definitely feels different now.

“It’s really exciting to see that the culinary part of Tales of the Cocktail is now the same caliber as food and wine festivals,” Portnoy said.

On Monday, cocktails from CureCo.’s Neal Bodenheimer (a New Orleans fixture who is co-chair of the Tales of the Cocktail board of directors) and Kirk Estopinal were paired with chef Andrew Zimmerman’s crispy clam toast and tortilla Española during a preview of Mildred’s at the new Warbler boutique hotel. (Zimmerman previously ran Chicago’s Michelin-starred Sepia for 16 years.) On Tuesday, Baileys Irish Cream and po-boy shop Two Sisters offered fried shrimp and relief from the hot weather with frozen drinks, like a boozy take on a Shamrock Shake from L.A.’s Real Charmer.

The presence of so many hospitality players at Tales of the Cocktail is why inKind, which has funded more than 8,000 restaurants, including Willie Mae’s and Tacos 1986, decided to sponsor Ode to the Bowl for the first time this year. Meanwhile, Tacos 1986, which now has taquerias in New York and Las Vegas in addition to its Los Angeles portfolio, is already thinking about going bigger at Tales of the Cocktail in the future.

“We’re like, ‘Damn, if we get invited again, let’s do more pop-ups,’” Alvarez-Tostado told Observer. “Let’s do events at different restaurants.”

“I landed from Hong Kong at LAX at 11:15 a.m. Monday, and then 10 hours later, I was back at LAX to fly to New Orleans,” Delgado told Observer. “It’s hard to put words to it. It’s really surreal. We’ve never really partnered with an alcohol brand before because we’re not in the alcohol business.”

Being at Tales of the Cocktail might change things. Is this the first step toward creating a Tacos 1986 cantina?

“If anyone wants to have that conversation, let’s have it and see where it leads,” Delgado said.

The Tales of the Cocktail conference, which started on Sunday and concludes on Friday in New Orleans, is the bender of benders. It’s the biggest annual gathering for the bar industry. The world’s most prominent bartenders and operators show up to see old friends, accept awards, try new products, find inspiration, negotiate deals, consider trends, discuss the future of hospitality, recruit talent and work with liquor brands to pour at events all day and all night. 

Tales of the Cocktail is also, with the possible exception of the World Series of Poker, the ultimate summer camp for degenerates. It’s a week where some responsible bartenders carry tags with their names, contact info, place of employment and hotel they’re occupying, just in case they need some help finding their way back. 

Tales of the Cocktail is a celebration of hospitality professionals who usually spend their nights taking care of people and watching other people rage. The conference is an important week of work and networking for many, but it’s also a week when adults can party nonstop with childlike glee, in a city that was built for this kind of revelry.

Marc Rose and Med Abrous, who run Los Angeles-based hospitality company Call Mom and have a portfolio that includes The Spare Room, Genghis Cohen and La Dolce Vita, understand this energy better than most. On Sunday night at New Orleans bowling destination Fulton Alley, Spare Room (the Best American Hotel Bar at the Tales Spirited Awards in 2020) threw its annual Ode to the Bowl party to kick off Tales of the Cocktail.

This booze-fueled bowling competition attracted close to 1,200 guests. Rose and Abrous, with help from inKind, Diageo and Peroni, curated a spooky Friday the 13th theme for the 13th edition of their strikes-and-spares bash. Ghoulishly dressed bartenders served Don Julio cocktails, Tanqueray clarified Bloody Marys and an espresso-martini-inspired dessert with Mr Black coffee liqueur and coconut cream pudding topped with gummy worms.

“This is like the first day of camp,” Rose, who was dressed like post-murder-spree Patrick Bateman, told Observer. “Everyone is just so excited to get back together. And every year, people like to remind everyone, ‘Hey, this is a marathon, not a sprint.’”

“It feels great because everyone is so fresh and invigorated,” Abrous said.

The 13th Ode to the Bowl was a wildly lively party with “senior prom” photos, Lizzie Borden-themed axe throwing, theater-sized candy, air hockey and guests dancing next to bowling lanes as the DJ played “Heads Will Roll” and “Fuck the Pain Away.”

But Vay Su, the co-founder of buzzy new Los Angeles bar Vandell, was focused on one thing only: A bowling competition he was determined to win. 

While others were getting inebriated, Su knew he had to concentrate on hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness. A Los Angeles team had never won Ode to the Bowl, and Su took his responsibility seriously when Rose and Abrous asked him and fellow Vandell co-founder Shawn Lickliter to captain this year’s squad.

“I think for the first time ever, L.A. has a shot,” Abrous told Observer as the competition began.

“I was trying to lock in and trying to keep the team focused,” Su, who avoided alcohol at Ode to the Bowl, told Observer. “I can drink free alcohol anytime I want. I’m going to do my best to win.”

Powered by Acqua Panna, Perrier and a deeply competitive nature (which Rose knew about because he was in a fantasy-football league with Su), the Tipsy Toes team of Su, Lickliter, Xavier Sosa (Superba), Donald Lancaster (The Spare Room) and Erin Schaeferle (Mr Black) defeated teams from Miami, Nashville, Las Vegas, Chicago, London, Texas, New Mexico, New Orleans, New York and Canada. Teams featuring bar legends like Kate Gerwin, Joshua Wagner and Touré Folkes were all trounced by the L.A. upstarts.

It was the beginning of a huge week for Vandell, which has established itself as the best new bar in Los Angeles with market-driven creations like a smoked tomato mezcal cocktail, a banana bourbon cocktail and a pineapple tequila cocktail. The Los Feliz bar is one of the four finalists for Best New U.S. Cocktail Bar at Thursday’s Tales Spirited Awards. Su, Lickliter and a Vandell team that includes Joey Bernardo and 2018 Spirited Awards American Bartender of the Year Yael Vengroff were also invited to pour at events for Johnnie Walker, Perrier and Hendrick’s, as well as the please-no-photos, starts-at-11:59 p.m. Strip & Guzzle event at Rick’s Cabaret this week.

Su and Lickliter are also hosting their own event, a Wednesday poolside barbecue with canned cocktails from Vandell and L.A. spots like Daisy, Thunderbolt, Capri Club, La Dolce Vita and many others.

“I definitely want to bring attention to Los Angeles and take care of our L.A. community,” said Su, who’s seen the Los Angeles hospitality industry suffer through a pandemic, Hollywood strikes and devastating fires in a city where the costs of operating a small business keep increasing. “I talk to my peers, my friends, and L.A.’s been struggling in general. I’ve got friends that run amazing bar programs, and they’re doing really cool shit, but it’s just not busy.”

So it’s important, for multiple reasons, that L.A.’s sprawling collection of top-tier bars gets national and worldwide attention. It’s also important for these bars, Su believes, to spread the word about one another. He wanted to throw a party with canned cocktails, so everyone could enjoy the gathering, have conversations and eat local barbecue from The Joint without worrying about being behind the bar.

“Any way to connect the industry and make Los Angeles stronger as a city, I’m up for it,” Su said.

He’s not stressing about Thursday’s awards ceremony because he knows he’s making memories and meaningful connections, whether Vandell wins or not.

“I’m super excited to be representing Vandell and L.A., but I’m not too nervous about it,” Su says.

“I’m just happy to be in the moment and kind of soak it all in. Because you know, rookie of the year, you only get one chance at it.” 

On the other hand, a bowling trophy is something you can win again. Rose and Abrous are already thinking about ways to make next year’s Ode to the Bowl more over-the-top.

When Observer spoke to Rose and Abrous the afternoon after Ode to the Bowl, they were working out at the New Orleans Athletic Club. They are hospitality veterans who know that it’s important to detox before the retox.

“We try to get a workout in every day,” Rose tells Observer. “The ritual is really important for us to make it through the week. It kicks off the day properly. There’s a steam room. There’s a sauna. There’s a cold plunge. But the best thing about it is that, on the way out, there’s a bar in here. So you could have a martini right after you get everything out of your system. You start putting it right back in.”

Addison, which maintained its status as San Diego’s only three-Michelin-star restaurant when this year’s stars were announced on June 24, has a new kind of glow.

On May 26, William Bradley, the founding chef who’s been at the helm of the restaurant since its 2006 debut, unveiled Addison’s first major makeover. Bradley, who constantly thinks about his restaurant’s identity and sense of place, tapped California design firm Bishop Pass to modernize Addison with lightness and brightness. The space feels warmer now, with champagne-colored accents and gold metalwork juxtaposed with original elements like rosso marble columns and exposed wood beams.

There’s also a reimagined lounge, with a metallic ceiling fixture, where Addison is accommodating walk-in guests for Champagne and a five-course tartlet tasting menu. Depending on your perspective, you can see this as an impromptu way to enjoy bar snacks (including one topped with turnip, A5, oyster and caviar) or you can see this as a rarefied bang-bang situation.

“We had one of our guests who’s been dining with us for many years,” Bradley tells Observer. “He actually was the first one and still is the only one who’s had the entire tasting menu and then went in the lounge and had the tartlet menu.”

Unlike many tasting-menu restaurants, Addison makes food that you crave again and again. The restaurant, even with its new design, is about familiarity and comfort. The layout remains the same, and so does the choreography of the staff presenting dishes and pouring wine at your table. The room is distinctly different, but it’s striking how the spacing between tables and the rhythm of dinner remind guests of previous visits to Addison. 

And while Bradley and his team are constantly tinkering with new dishes, there are Addison crowd-pleasers that are always on the menu, like the chicken liver churro, shellfish chawanmushi and the signature “eggs and rice” with N25 reserve caviar, Koshihikari rice, smoked sabayon and sesame. 

“Those are craveable dishes that people really, really enjoy,” Bradley says. “There’s a gentleman who’s eaten at Addison probably 25 times in the last two years, and he still says every time, ‘Can I get a double eggs and rice? And can you send me out with a bag of the churros so I can have them tomorrow night?’ I do give him a double rice upon request, but he’s never left with a bag of churros because the labor on those is a little too much.”

In 2022, Addison became the first Southern California restaurant to earn three Michelin stars. This came after Bradley admittedly spent years emulating fine-dining restaurants around the world, before realizing that he needed to find his own voice.

“I think the most important thing at the highest level is you have to have a style and food that has an identity,” Bradley says.

For Bradley, who was born and raised in San Diego, this identity is about being a top-tier expression of how people eat in Southern California. Bradley is a chef who thinks of Addison as a place where he creates cohesive albums and not just hit singles. Addison’s latest tasting menu brings together Mexican and Asian elements to tell a story about spending your life in San Diego.

The meal starts with tepache and ends with champurrado, which reminds Bradley of childhood Sundays spent eating at the homes of his Latino friends. Southern California is also rich in Asian food, so Addison serves barbecue shima aji, a riff on yakitori that weaves together gochujang and shiitake syrup. There’s quail in two parts: Addison’s version of quail egg drop soup with silken tofu before the main event of Cantonese quail with five-spice quail jus that’s spooned on your plate tableside. (Bradley says he spent eight years convincing elusive purveyor Brent Wolfe to sell him Wolfe Ranch quail.)

The flavors at Addison are simultaneously familiar and wondrous, and the temperature and textures of Bradley’s food complete the picture. His cooking is precise but not precious. The soup gives you that feeling of being in a Chinese restaurant and getting something that toes the line between pleasantly hot and a little too hot. The chawanmushi and the caviar with rice are also dishes that feel like warm hugs. As you scoop deeper into these dishes, the heat builds, the textures change, and the pleasure increases.  

“Something that gives you different temperatures and different textures feels luxurious,” Bradley says. “It’s very intentional. Precision is everything in those compositions. We really work through the execution process because I feel that cuisine of this new generation can sometimes be tepid. I wanted there to be dishes where, you know, hot food needs to be hot, warm food needs to be warm.”

Bradley never takes anything for granted. He says he’s “always surprised and always relieved” when his restaurant retains its three Michelin stars. And he knows that he can’t get those stars year after year without pushing harder and embracing change.

“At this point in my career, I actually really enjoy the evolution of the restaurant,” Bradley says. “I’ve always chased the mindset of, it’s very important to stay relevant.”

For the restaurant’s renovation, “We were really looking at the overall beauty and grandeur of the room and really trying to soften that and make it feel a lot more comfortable in a place that’s modernized,” Bradley says. “We softened the interior and just made it very cohesive with the cuisine.”

When your identity is based on being in San Diego, adding lightness and brightness makes perfect sense. And Bradley has had guests tell him that Addison looks, feels, smells and tastes different now.

“When the senses are heightened, the cuisine can be enjoyed to the full,” Bradley says. “It all goes back to that identity. We never want you to feel like you’re anywhere else but Addison.”

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.