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.
