A&E

[The Incidental Tourist]

If ‘supper clubs’ are the future of the Las Vegas Strip, we’ll have some more, please

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Brian Newman, performing at NoMad’s After Dark
Photo: Brian Friedman / Courtesy

The most exciting thing about the current supper club trend on the Las Vegas Strip is that it’s not really about supper clubs.

That term likely inspires images of old-school Vegas—casino dining spaces with vintage decor where you can enjoy cocktails and food and great live entertainment without paying for a ticket. There certainly are fragments of that experience at various venues that have popped up on the Strip during the past two years, but like the resorts that host them, these destinations are too special and different to fit together under a single banner.

The common thread running through Mayfair Supper Club at Bellagio, NoMad Library at Park MGM, Delilah at Wynn and Superfrico at the Cosmopolitan is an innovative effort to appeal to the ever-changing desires of Vegas visitors. These places are built to be restaurants first, but also definitely more than just a grand dinner, shrewdly targeting those who want a fabulous night out on the Strip without having to move from bar to restaurant to nightclub or show. You’ve been able to have it all without leaving your hotel resort for a long time; now you can do all the Vegas in a single venue.

Delilah’s Wagyu beef Wellington

The NoMad restaurant wasn’t originally designed to do it all. It opened as part of the NoMad Hotel project at Park MGM in 2018 in partnership with Sydell Group and acclaimed restaurateurs Daniel Humm and Will Guidara. Now known as the NoMad Library, the dining room was all about the food, while the adjacent NoMad Bar offered entertainment and cocktails.

But the striking and luxurious space has evolved. thanks to Brian Newman After Dark—a rip-roaring afterhours jazz party engineered by Newman, the New York City musician and bandleader of Lady Gaga’s Jazz & Piano residency nearby at Dolby Live. He’s in town when Gaga is, and sometimes when she’s not, and he’s always bringing local and visiting singers, musicians, burlesque artists, magicians, comedians and others to join him in a wild, spontaneous, incredibly sharp show that usually starts after midnight and runs past 2 a.m.

“He’s always appreciated that sort of old Vegas style, and I knew that was a goal of his doing the show here,” says singer Jaclyn McSpadden, a veteran of Vegas shows who has become an After Dark regular and also performs at Mayfair. “It’s that whole idea of the Las Vegas lounge, where people used to hang out until the wee hours and just love being there because it’s such a beautiful room. I didn’t realize at first that all those books are from the Rockefeller family’s personal library.”

McSpadden’s cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” with Newman and his band is becoming legendary. And there are special late-night cocktail and food menus at NoMad during the show.

The entertainment at Mayfair is much different—it’s tightly choreographed and escalates throughout the evening: from an ambient jazz trio, to a full-on production show onstage in the middle of the glamorous dining room, to a high-energy, almost clubby musical experience bolstered by Bellagio’s fountains erupting in the background.

Mayfair opened around New Year’s Eve rolling into 2020, and for a while during the pandemic, it was the only live performance of its kind happening on the Strip. If it set the current standard for combining food and entertainment, it blew that standard away recently, when the Lío Ibiza cabaret from Spain took over the entire venue to bring a very international, slightly naughtier, endlessly engaging presentation to Las Vegas.

Delilah, which made its debut over the summer after pandemic delays, serves up similar upscale cuisine in an equally opulent environment at Wynn. Its stage is at the end of the room, and the venue is set up in a very theatrical way, in addition to being one of the most beautifully and expensively designed restaurants in the country. Different pop, jazz and soul artists play the Delilah stage during dinner, but later, there’s no telling who might pop in. So far, everyone from Justin Bieber to Jim Gaffigan to John Fogerty to 50 Cent to Tiffany Haddish have visited. Strip celebrity hunters should look nowhere else.

And then there’s Spiegelworld’s first restaurant, Superfrico, a colorful Italian joint in the former Rose. Rabbit. Lie. room at the Cosmopolitan that shares a space with the spacey Opium theater. There’s unexpected and random entertainment popping up all over the restaurant throughout the night, not to mention a hidden ski lounge-themed bar. Having an amazing meal and walking a few steps to catch a hilarious variety show has never been so easy, but both Superfrico and Opium also feel as unpredictable as it gets on the Strip.

And that’s the real trend behind these venues—it’s big, well-designed fun that feels like it just happened magically. Each spot executes that phenomenon in their own way, and it’s fascinating.

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Brock Radke

Brock Radke is an award-winning writer and columnist who currently occupies the role of managing editor at Las Vegas Weekly ...

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