Food critic and restaurant-guide author Al Mancini responds:
It’s hard to blame the casinos for jumping on bandwagons; I actually blame the public! People have a tendency toward conservatism or, to put it less politely, for behaving like sheep, so if something's popular and trendy -- or even just advertised as such -- the herd tends to gravitate to it, which means the casinos are going to go to give them what they want, or think they want. Although Las Vegas is home to myriad fantastic stand-alone family-owned restaurants of all ethnicities, year after year it was Olive Garden that garnered the popular local vote for "Best Italian," with Red Lobster the pick for "Best Seafood," for example. These days, thankfully this seems to be changing, with Henderson's mom-and-pop restaurant Annie's Gourmet Italian, and Aria's American Fish, respectively, coming out on top in the 2013 R-J "Best of" awards. Hallelujah!
For the longest time (and for much of it deservedly so), people thought of "Las Vegas dining" at worst as oxymoronic and at best as defined in terms of steakhouses and buffets. To this day, you’d be hard-pressed to find a casino that doesn’t offer both of those options, in part because it's expected, while when the tapas concept swept the country, everyone and their dog was suddenly offering some form of "small-plates" option. And so on and so on.
When it comes to gourmet-burger joints, an ongoing fad, I’m kind of proud of the fact that the concept was born (albeit accidentally) here in Las Vegas. While Mandalay Place was being built, their planned burger concept fell through. Bereft and burger-less (heaven forfend!), the property turned to Hubert Keller, who was prepping to open his gourmet Fleur de Lys (since converted to the less formal Fleur), for help. Originally, Keller was merely brought in to consult, but the famed chef, known for his charmingly unorthodox tendencies (the 59-years-young Keller is a late-blooming but avid DJ, not to mention being the celebrity chef who infamously used a dorm-room shower to cool pasta on "Top Chef Masters," for example) decided it would be fun to actually own and operate the joint himself. Foodies scoffed at the idea of a French chef of his caliber opening a hamburger joint, but Keller had the last laugh when it turned out to be a huge success. Within a year, every chef in America was dying to create their own burger concept. And today -- quelle surprise! -- they all seem to have one.
The "gastropub" trend is a bit more troubling, I'll concur, since the two concepts it combines are pretty much mutually exclusive. A traditional British pub is a down-to-earth drinking hole, where the focus is firmly on the beer and the edible options often don't run much beyond a bag of chips or a packet of peanuts; "gastronomy," on the other hand, is the study and enjoyment of fine cuisine.
The term originated in England, which some years ago opted to shake off its reputation for questionable cuisine, transforming many a former down-and-dirty sawdust-on-the-floor pub into something more akin to a posh winebar, with fancy food. Visit a gastropub in the U.K. and you're far more likely to find Thai green curry on the menu than fish & chips, which has only served to complicate the concept's transition to American shores, where there's a confused schizophrenia about whether or not to serve the types of classic cliched English fare that the U.K.'s gastropubs were endeavoring to distance themselves from. Often what results is a messy hybrid that doesn't hit the mark pub-wise or gastronomically speaking.
The food at my favorite Las Vegas version, Public House at the Venetian, has more French and French-Canadian dishes on the menu than it does English, so by rights it should more accurately be called a brasserie (but, since that's not the "in" term right now, it's a "gastropub.") Michael Mina’s new Pub 1842 offers things like a lobster roll topped with popcorn, a hamburger with peanut butter and potato chips, and chili verde – none of which sounds terribly English or pub-y. In reality, the only thing these venues tend to have in common is a decent craft-beer selection.
So, after tapas, gourmet burgers, and gastropubs, what’s next? Your guess is as good as mine. It could be anything from sandwich shops (Tom Colicchio tried with WichCraft, but it never really caught on), to "cronuts" (the croissant-donut hybrid that's so red-hot in New York right now, people have been photographed sleeping on the street outside vendors' doors so as not to miss out. Yes, really -- they make the whole cupcake frenzy of recent years look distinctly lukewarm).
House-made charcuterie was gaining steam for a while, but the Southern Nevada Health District has done a good job of squashing that particular trend (while the unfortunate recent chorizo-induced salmonella incident probably didn't help.) Perhaps it will be a beverage: port wines, grappa, fernet branca? Take your pick. All I can promise you is that once one casino scores a hit with a concept, everyone else is guaranteed to jump on the bandwagon. And, since whatever the new fad is will, by definition, be something new and unfamiliar to them, you can bet your bottom bagel, blini, or baklava, that casinos will turn to their "celebrity chefs" (another cliché-of-a-concept all of its own) to hold their hands when they jump.
