You've heard of barflies. Well, I'm more of a bar chameleon. I like the beautifully dysfunctional joints where the beer is cheap, the décor seedy, the people sweaty and the bartenders are more like crazy uncles than mixologists. But I also swoon over bars with swank, where the only sweating is over details and the fancy bottles behind the bar actually get opened, then poured with an appreciation and understanding of the art of alcohol.
In between are a lot of places that pretend to be one or the other. We end up with bars that don't dive deep enough to have character—or characters. Or pseudo chichi lounges, where the only thing they really understand about top shelf is that the prices should be higher. I'd rather stay home and drink Schlitz.
I was in a high-end mood the other night, and Olives was in my sights because it had just reopened after renovation. (Seems Chef Todd English inherited a space that Bellagio had originally earmarked for a California Pizza Kitchen. He made the best of it—so much so that he could finally justify hiring someone like internationally known designer Jeffrey Beers to reshape it into something that was truly him.) While it lies in heart of the tourist trade, Olives has always lured locals, too. And now there's more room for both, as English doubled the bar's length.
I bellied up about 20 minutes before the opening hour of 5 p.m., but everybody was much too polite to tell me to wait. So I felt obligated to order something from their pricey drink menu, concocted by master mixologist Michael MacDonnell. Not being a big cocktail guy, I kept it basic and ordered a mojito. At $12, I needed to run a tab to deflect the pain.
I'll spare you the interior design tour. Suffice to say, the place is drop-dead spectacular—from the dark, textured, intimate dining space to the marble bar that ends with a small, oval ice pit containing a few bottles of champagne and the trunk of a tiny tree that rises up, candles sprouting from the ends of its branches.
I was more into watching the new staff scurry into action, prepping for a seemingly crucial night of making lasting impressions. At a nearby partition, a small meeting was going on. Behind me, MGM-Mirage boss Terry Lanni was talking to a chef. Perhaps some super moguls would be dining here tonight. Or maybe the restaurant had been incurring suspiciously high Brie expenses. I couldn't tell. At one point, I saw Lanni bend over and peel something sticky off the base of the bar and throw it away. How could so many minions miss that? That's why Howard Hughes invented micromanagement.
Everyone in the place was micro-oriented that night. The mixologist was bouncing from task to task. At one point, he took the time to move a series of cocktail glasses over a fraction of an inch. I watched Tanya in particular, sharply dressed in her black, shimmering bartender's uniform. She applied her red lipstick and blotted the extra with a cocktail napkin. Then she engaged me in pleasant conversation, ending with, "Let me know if there's anything else you need."
Just as she said that, a terrible crash came from behind the partition, where the meeting had just adjourned.
"Oh ... my ... gosh," Tanya said, repeating it another time under her breath, with more than a little concern for the dish dropper.
"Somebody just get fired?" I joked.
A second customer arrived. Tanya began to pour a Heineken into a V-shaped pilsner, then abruptly stopped. She held up the glass in the late-afternoon sunlight, rubbed it, shook her head, then dumped the beer, ditched the glass and started over. Hey, I would have finished that!
I was still working on my mojito when Amy and her friends arrived. They ordered wine and Amy ordered the Fusion, a snappy cocktail MacDonnell had recently invented. It was $14. I tried it. Very, very nice. I asked Amy if she wanted to try mine. "Nah, it's just a mojito," she said. "Yeah, you're right," I replied, then asked Tanya for a wine list.
As I fretted over my decision, Amy interjected, "They'll let you sample, you know."
Soon after, sipping a $12 glass of Chardonnay, I began to weigh the value of it all. The wine was fantastic, the atmosphere invigorating, the service charming ... but at what cost? Most people who come here don't flinch at buying drinks that come with double-digit price tags. If I don't flinch, I have someone back home who flinches for me.
Right around that thought, a server silently slid a complementary basket of breads and tray of olives between Amy and myself. I counted seven types of bread and four varieties of olives, plus a couple of olive purées for scooping. There ended my inner debate. Olives is one of those pricey places on the Strip where I feel like I'm getting what I was about to pay (a lot) for. In a world of drive-through this and processed that, why not, at least once in a while, taste the essential ingredients of life—bread, wine, olives—at their best? Too often we forget how to live.
The clincher came an hour or so later. After we added a few bold Spanish reds to the tab, Amy said the heroic words that tipped the scales of justifiability in Olives' favor for all time—not to mention save my ass back home.
"I'm just going to charge this."
Phil Hagen studies bars the way other men study the law, but with tastier results. E-mail him at
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