A&E

Taking a Netflix tour of the Las Vegas Strip’s culinary scene

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Best Friend
Photo: Audrey Ma / Courtesy

If you’ve been missing dining out at some of the city’s most iconic Strip restaurants, at least you can catch them on Netflix. Binge-watch now, feast later.

The Chef Show Season 1, Episode 15: Wolfgang Puck

Jon Favreau and Roy Choi struck up a deep friendship when the chef served as the culinary consultant on Favreau’s 2014 film Chef. Then they hit the road for this buddy travelogue, with the first stop at Cut at Palazzo. Favreau makes an omelette with morels for Wolfgang Puck, with the chef offering words of wisdom like, “What’s the most important thing a chef does? Taste the food.” They then make signature cuts of steak, including Kobe, Hokkaido Snow Beef and wagyu. The episode ends with a decadent reimagined banana cream pie, with a presentation so beautiful you’ll be hitting that rewind button.

The Chef Show Season 1, Episode 16: Border Grill

Favreau and Choi move farther south on the Strip, where they spend a rollicking half hour with the ladies of Border Grill, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger. They learn to make two kinds of ceviche, the Peruvian and Baja. Milliken and Feniger make everything look so effortless, chopping and dicing about a million ingredients while regaling the hosts with stories about how they met years ago at a Chicago restaurant. Then they make sweet potato and black bean tacos—throwing tortillas on the grill like dollar bills—before making their signature Yucatán pork. “Our food is very messy,” Milliken says. “It’s really not about the looks; it’s about the flavor. And good food is juicy.”

The Chef Show Season 1, Episode 17: Best Friend

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Roy Choi (Amy Harris/AP)

The duo cap off their Vegas romp at Choi’s Best Friend at Park MGM, where the chef gives Favreau an insight into the spot’s particular look. “This is my whole life in a restaurant,” he says.

“There are hidden touches to everything that my life has been up until this point, especially the last 10 years.” They then proceed to make Best Friend’s greatest hits, including uni dynamite rice, elotes, grilled fish with ponzu sauce, spicy pork barbecue (Choi’s best dish, he says), a fried bologna sandwich, an LA bacon street dog and dumplings.

Ugly Delicious Seasons 1 and

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David Chang (Jon Estrada/Special to the Weekly)

David Chang’s Ugly Delicious riffs on everything about food—from its history to its present-day iterations, with social commentary thrown in. Each episode focuses on one topic or type of food, as the chef travels the world, poking his head into different kitchens. In Las Vegas, he stops at Beijing Noodle No. 9 (Season 1, Episode 7: “Fried Rice”), where Chef Li Yu spins and stretches bolts of flour into noodles. “The key to this restaurant, from Day One, has always been authenticity,” says Caesars Palace president Gary Selesner. In Season 1, Episode 3 (“Homecooking”), Chang stops by Momofuku at the Cosmopolitan. “Home cooking, or what I call ‘ugly delicious’ food, has now become the food that I want to make in the restaurant,” he says, then makes a baked cod—a peasant dish of fish, potatoes and peppers. Later, he goes to his mom’s house for some real home cooking.

Chef’s Table Season 4, Episode 1: Christina Tosi

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Christina Tosi (Cosmopolitan/Courtesy)

Chef’s Table is the gold standard in food documentaries. The music is dramatic, the cinematography epic. Every episode is an aspirational culinary journey of mouthwatering proportions. Christina Tosi, who founded Milk Bar in New York City (with an outpost at the Cosmopolitan), bakes treats that pay homage to the nostalgia of birthday parties and state fairs. And now we know how she stays in shape with all those cakes and cookies: she runs—a lot. “I know maybe this cookie isn’t the thing that’s going to round out my diet for the day, but it’s what’s going to bring me joy, and reminds me that life’s too short to worry about how many cookies I ate today,” she says.

Chef’s Table Season 2, Episode 4: Enrique Olvera

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Enrique Olvera (Wynn/Courtesy)

Enrique Olvera, of Mexico City’s Pujol —named to the prestigious “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list (theworlds50best.com)—was about to bring high-end contemporary Mexican cuisine to Encore—in conjunction with Chef Daniela Soto-Innes and Santiago Perez—before the shutdown. If you want a preview of their restaurant Elio, check out this episode, which showcases Olvera’s vision and artistry. His signature dish is his mole madre, an ever-evolving sauce that’s been cooking for years and features more than 100 ingredients. “Mole is chaos,” Olvera says. “There’s ingredients from all over the world, and when you put them together, it makes sense. They become Mexican for some magical reason.” That’s some magic we can look forward to when Las Vegas opens back up again.

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