It’s not uncommon, is it, to bump into a familiar face thousands of miles from home. I once slammed an unexpected shot with the assistant manager of my local Sainsbury’s on the Khaosan Road in Bangkok. Some months later, I got back to my hostel in Phnom Penh to find an old classmate at the bar eating braised celery.
Lo, a similar situation occurs on Wednesday night in the ballroom of the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas. A sip of my cocktail and suddenly Tomos Parry, the chef, appears in a Burgundy suit. I say hello. And fine, it is the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards, so this might be unsurprising — Parry’s London restaurants Brat and Mountain both appear in the 51-100 list, a lauded buffer to the 50 — but it still feels epochal to be in an air-conditioned room of a desert resort, cameras flashing, canape trays surging about the place, and to see a chef more usually found cooking amid the flames of a Soho hotspot. We talk tacos.
The fact is, these happenings, that might and should be anomalous, are par for the course in Las Vegas — a city where a buoyant sense of adventure blends so dutifully with that of the roundly blase; indulgence is performed with such regularity it straddles near-apathy. It’s mad but somehow completely chill at the same time. You can get married, fire a few rounds out of a machine gun, and watch wrestling all along the same little street. And none of these require anything other than an ID and a touch of joie de vivre.
Which is why I suppose the 50 Best awards work so exquisitely well here. It’s a city built for hedonism; the congregation of hospitality professionals makes perfect sense. After the reception, in that grand and sweeping ballroom, and after the countdown in a theatre in some other part of the resort, we gather in the Encore Beach Club.
The star chefs from the winning restaurant, Disfrutar in Barcelona, arrive to the reverberation of a booming speaker system. More than one attendee describes them as rock stars
The star chefs from the winning restaurant, Disfrutar in Barcelona, arrive to the reverberation of a booming speaker system, much cheering, and a row of women dressed in black, each holding up a letter to spell the restaurant name. More than one attendee describes the Disfrutar brigade as rock stars.
Further in, chefs and restaurateurs perch around a swimming pool, cooling in the evening heat, and everywhere are people cooking mushroom tostadas — each dainty morsel hiding shots of mezcal beneath — or dishing out osso buco risotto while humming to the tune of Tequila.
Over there? That’s sommelier Billy Wagner from Berlin, handlebar moustache beneath Dickensian hat. Janaina Torres, Brazil’s biggest culinary star today and with a leopard-spot tattoo running down the entirety of her left arm, is posing for the cameras; and, oh, there’s a Quebeci journalist who I last saw on an autumn train heading out of Vancouver.
The place is buzzing. On giant screens we admire snaps taken earlier in a photobooth disguised as a fridge; about us, lights of casinos, neon signage from afar reflects on towering hotel glass and cascades across the pool (which, by the way, I cannot believe has remained unplunged into).
Later, in some other corner of the five million sq ft hotel, is an after party. I had hoped for Señor Frog's but this will do. Kol founder Santiago Lastra, ever-optimistic, ever-charming, is poised. He’s excited about his upcoming restaurant on Heddon Street, Fonda: “I’m a Mexican chef, but I’ve been in London for a while now, and I love it, and the food scene is exploding. I think there’s a lot more to come. There’s more from me too”.
That’s another thing about Vegas: a resolve to be excitable. It’s infectious. Before I leave, an unidentifiable man — not from our party — has just lost a fair whack on Blackjack. He spots us all and ambles over. “Your chips are down” I say.
“Not at all,” comes his reply. “I have work in an hour.” I check my watch. Ah, good. 50 Best is long gone, and I am due to file.
