Kris Yenbamroong, chef and owner of Night + Market at the recently opened Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, doesn’t want you to come with preconceived notions of what you think Thai food is like, even if you’ve had authentic Thai food in actual night markets in Thailand, or even if you’ve been to Yenbamroong’s original outpost in LA. He wants you to know that this iteration is very much a Las Vegas eatery.
What the chef does want you to bring to the brightly lit, sociable space are your friends—the more the merrier. The food here is meant to be shared family-style, which is exactly how he learned how to cook, originally from his grandmother, then at his family’s restaurant in LA and later when he moved to Thailand as a teenager.
The LA Night+Market, beloved by both crowds and critics, has been open for a decade, and while Yenbamroong originally sought to re-create the flavors he loved and learned to cook while he was in Thailand, he realized that didn’t exactly capture his personality in relation to the food he was making.
“It started to dawn on me that like, well, we’re not in Thailand, so I don’t know that I care to just replicate something that exists there. Like, maybe we could do something that’s got like an LA spin on it,” he says. “I was born and raised in LA. That’s probably a little closer to where my heart and soul is, so we started to tweak a couple things here and there, and then it just became more about not so much how closely it resembled this other thing, but how just cool and fun and delicious it was on a real gut level for people that haven’t even been to Thailand or don’t even know about Thai food.”
The expansion to Las Vegas feels like a natural progression of the idea of food as a function of place. “People coming [to Las Vegas] from all over the world … come in with a blank slate and an open mind,” Yenbamroong says. “Vegas, to me, has always been the pinnacle of that type of idea.”
A lot of the LA menu is here, including its most popular item, the crispy rice salad ($17), with soured pork, raw ginger, onion, peanuts, cilantro and chili. It’s a texturally complex dish that can only be described as a party in your mouth, electrifying every taste bud in a delightful and surprising way.
There are only-in-Vegas menu items here, too, starting with a seafood tower ($85-$190), something Yenbamroong has always wanted to present. “I personally love the raw-food culture in Thailand, and I also like the culture of raw bars in French brasseries,” he says. “So we’re starting off with two sizes of seafood towers—standard and magnum size. It has all the fresh seafood and some Thai dipping sauces along with it.”
Another creative menu item is the lobster pad Thai ($40), a decadent twist on perhaps the most familiar Thai dish in the world. This particular pad Thai that definitely needs to be shared to be truly appreciated.
Other standouts include the signature party wings ($12)—fried and glazed with three flavor sauces,—and the incredibly snackable pork toro ($10), a grilled fatty pork jowl served with a jaew chili dip. These (and the rest of the menu) pair perfectly with Night + Market’s James Beard-nominated wine program. Start with the pét-nat, natural sparkling wines, and see where the night takes you.
From the mini disco balls hanging from the ceiling to the bright-orange walls and the spacious center bar, a visit to Night + Market is a multisensory experience with food at its center.“It’s extra exciting for us to feed people who are just pumped to come in for the first time and say, ‘I’ve never had food like [this],’” Yenbamroong says. “That’s a really special thing.”
NIGHT + MARKET Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, nightmarketsong.com. Sunday-Thursday, 5-10 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 5-11 p.m.
Click HERE to subscribe for free to the Weekly Fix, the digital edition of Las Vegas Weekly! Stay up to date with the latest on Las Vegas concerts, shows, restaurants, bars and more, sent directly to your inbox!
