Taste

[The Spectacle Circuit]

Bazaar Meat goes further overboard with its new dessert cart

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Dessert is served, in a pleasantly gaudy way.
Photo: Sabin Orr / Courtesy
Andy Wang

The new dessert cart at Bazaar Meat is a showstopper, a pleasantly gaudy yellow display with white-and-red wheels and all kinds of sweets inside. It’s transporting, the kind of presentation that might make you think of Willy Wonka or a carnival or the last time you consumed a high dose of edibles and ended up wanting to order every single thing at a fancy bakery.

It’s filled with three-dozen kinds of little treats—cream puffs, eclairs, bonbon, two-bite tarts, cakes and cookies. When you choose what you want, the desserts are put into a fancy box with words like “chicharron” and “s’more” printed on it. The words are reminders that you are in a José Andrés restaurant, which crafts luxurious experiences out of unlikely ingredients and combinations.

Do you want a hit of raspberry, ginger and cardamom in your eclair? Bacon with strawberries and cream in your caramelized puff pastry? White chocolate with a bright-green cilantro filling? Of course you do. No restaurant in Vegas does spectacle as well as Bazaar Meat. I remember speaking to Andrés months before he opened the restaurant at SLS in 2014. It was already clear then that he wanted to redefine the steakhouse, that he had grand plans to set Vegas ablaze with his “Game of Thrones-like open kitchen.”

So he’s got astounding suckling pigs from Salamanca, Spain, roasted in a wood-fired oven, as the main event on his menu. He’s proud to serve big ribeyes from older Holsteins, steaks from Northern California dairy farm Mindful Meats that have an intense depth of beefiness. It took more than two years for Andrés and his team to source this meat, trying more than 500 cuts along the way. That’s some kind of devotion to your craft.

I can’t think of a better place to ball out with a group than Bazaar Meat, and it definitely helps to have a big group if you’re saving room for all the desserts. But Bazaar does dainty as well as it does gargantuan, making it easy to put together a meal of creative little bites like the spherical Ferran Adrià liquid olives and the foie gras cotton candy. This truly is a restaurant that offers different levels of splendor.

I remember a three-hour meal at the bar a couple New Year’s Eves ago, when I drank salt air margaritas and liquid-nitrogen cocktails before enjoying a caviar flight and a ribeye. I’ve met friends here for drinks and ended up going through plate after plate of cured meats. I’ve crashed other people’s dinners and eaten the wild boar sausage they couldn’t finish. I don’t think there’s a wrong way to eat in this restaurant.

You should experience the dessert cart, but don’t worry too much if you’re full by the time it makes its way to your table. You can still have the server fill up your box, then you can try a couple things and just close the box and take everything else with you.

Tags: Dining, Food
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