Food food glorious food, and taste-lovers in Las Vegas are licking lips expectedly. The threatened culinary strike at the Caesars, MGM and Wynn empires that was due to start yesterday was called off. WYNN LAS VEGAS’ divine Delilah, above, will therefore be full, as it always should have been.
Mind you we know that running restaurants inhouse is not for the faint-hearted, at least in New York and also in London. Funnily enough, one of London’s finest gourmet hotels, THE STAFFORD, has gone the other way. In addition to its inhouse facilities it runs a freestanding restaurant, Norma, in Fitzrovia, about two miles from the hotel. Norma has just achieved the highest rating for an Italian restaurant in the UK in the latest Harden’s Guide – which reveals, by the way that there are 54 restaurants in London and 56 elsewhere nationally are now charging more than £150 a head. Nothing by New York standards but enough to feed ten in Johannesburg.
In UK, there’s a big push to drink English wines, including bubbly. The PIG hotels now have their own label, from grapes from Bee Tree Vineyard in East Sussex, owned by Sugrue South Downs’ Dermot and Ana Sugrue. There is THE PIG Reserve, a 2019 sparkling cuvée (PR for short) and a Lobster Shed Pink, a 2018 sparkling rosé (LSP). Yes, they are less expensive than Champagne: hotels’ selling price is £15 per 150ml glass and £69 per bottle compared with £22 or £110 for Bollinger Special Cuvée.
One can be quite sure that the UK’s best-known restaurateur, Jeremy King, will be self-toasting in something splendid. It has just been announced he will partner with THE SAVOY to take over its nearby Simpson’s in The Strand. This is, he says, the last great restaurant around.
