Las Vegas’ culinary industry has taken a beating from the coronavirus pandemic, but you can’t quell the creativity coming from the kitchens. From pop-up concepts to cook-along series to ghost kitchens—not to mention the expansion of takeout offerings—chefs and restaurateurs have responded to the limitations of these times with aplomb.
Hospitality entrepreneur Jolene Mannina is front and center in the local restaurant industry, having pioneered some of the city’s most innovative food happenings. She’s also the founder of food-and-beverage ticketing platform Secretburger.com, which brings together chefs and food lovers for curated events.
Mannina’s latest venture is Vegas Test Kitchen, a commissary kitchen of sorts that took over the former Chow space Downtown. It essentially serves as an incubator, where chefs can test out food concepts and see how the public responds before committing to brick-and-mortar spaces.
“I’m part of a lot of conversations of things going on, and we could see, obviously, a lot of chefs are out of work,” Mannina says. “When you have all that time on your hands, you start to think to yourself, ‘Do I want to have my own restaurant? Do I want to go back to the job?’ You have time to take one step in that direction to figuring out if you want your own business. So if we’re gonna have a commissary kitchen, why not utilize the space to sell from there also, give them the opportunity to build a following. And if they decide to have a restaurant after, they’ve got a base to start with.”
Once the location was secured, it wasn’t hard to find chefs to take up the residency spots, Mannina says, though it was important to have diversity in cuisines with that many chefs under one roof. “We didn’t want anything competitive,” she says, “but we also want to make sure that they wouldn’t need the same equipment at the same time. So there’s a flow and an organization within that space.”
Vegas Test Kitchen’s lineup currently stands at seven: Sonia El-Nawal’s New York-style Bodega Bagel, Lanny Chin’s Slurp Society, Nina Manchev’s Banichka Downtown LV, Andrea Mclean’s Pop N Pies, Sung Park’s Sliced sushi, Yukon Pizza’s sourdough wood-fired pies and Crystina Nguyen’s Vietnamese-inspired This Mama’s House.
One could dine at Vegas Test Kitchen from morning to evening and always find something new. There’s seating inside the space and in the alleyway, and with pandemic protocols top of mind, a cashless, contactless system has been put in place. Scan a QR code on your phone, order and pay through the app, and you’ll be notified when your food’s ready.
“There’s no cash register or anything like that at the Kitchen,” Mannina says. “What that does is allow the chefs to focus on the food and not worry about anything else. And it also helps us, because we’re doing this on a budget, and it helped us eliminate a lot of front-of-house staff. We want to eliminate all the extra bodies in the space.”
As for how long each chef will stay, Mannina says everyone is just playing it by ear to see where things go. At this point, anything is possible, including re-creating the concept at vacant restaurants in other parts of town. Weekend pop-up events are also in the works to showcase even more chefs. Longer term, might this kind of communal space become a new model for a post-pandemic restaurant, where chefs can focus on cooking and less on the business side?
“There’s only a couple of things in the formula to make it work,” Mannina says. “And it’s definitely doable.”
VEGAS TEST KITCHEN 1020 E. Fremont St #120, vegastestkitchen.com. Wednesday-Sunday, times vary.
