Chef Oscar Amador Edo grew up on the outskirts of Barcelona in a cooking family and owned and operated three successful restaurants in the city before taking the plunge and moving to Las Vegas in 2016.
After a brief stint in the kitchen of Le Cirque at Bellagio and launching a food truck making sandwiches, with a partner he opened Edo Gastro Tapas & Wine on the western edge of Chinatown (Jones and Spring Mountain). It immediately earned several local “restaurant of the year” awards. When Edo opened his second eatery, Anima by Edo (Russell and Durango), it was quickly named Best Restaurant of 2023 — in the whole country — by Yelp. Edo himself was also a finalist for a 2023 James Beard Outstanding Chef Southwest award and a semi-finalist for the same in 2024. With all the attention on this chef and his food, we spent an interesting evening sampling the offerings at Anima.
John Curtas, top Las Vegas restaurant critic for the past 30 years and author of our series Eating Las Vegas, recommended “all the appetizers and any pasta.” So we loaded up on the charcuterie of cold cuts and cheeses ($28) and the accompanying Catalan olive-oil bread ($8), artichoke salad ($23), beef tartare ($23), Peruvian scallops crudo ($21), octopus ($27), truffle cavatelli ($29), Bravas potatoes ($12), sprouted cauliflower ($18), and rhubarb-jam lemon-cream pistachio-powder mille-feuille dessert ($14).
If nothing else, it was a lot of food for one person. (Kidding; there were three of us.)
The charcuterie was fantastic, especially the very French and Italian cheeses, though the bread was a bit pedestrian.
We also adored the octopus and cauliflower.
And we liked the cavatelli pasta (that came with a huge beef bone filled with yummy marrow); if we ever go back, octopus and cauliflower will fill the whole bill.
The three of us were less impressed by the tartare, artichoke salad, and raw scallops, while two liked the potatoes and one didn’t. The dessert was good, but it sounded better than it tasted.
With two drinks, the bill came to $227 before tax and tip — very expensive. But in the end, it was worth it to see what all the fuss is about. We mostly saw it, though not entirely.