When the Weekly caught up with chef Mark Andelbradt, who recently opened Naxos Taverna at Red Rock Resort, he was waxing poetic about his trip to the restaurant’s namesake Greek island on the Aegean Sea, where the freshness of ingredients—from the produce to the seafood—is the stuff of legends. After all, there’s a temple there dedicated to Dionysus, the Greek god of good food and good times.
“I’m on this rocky road going up this hill on a little 4-by-4 that I rented, and I’m like, wait a second, that looks like fennel to me,” Andelbradt recalls. “As a chef, you can just brush your hand across an herb and you can tell exactly what it is. And sure enough, it was the most herbaceous, anise-scented fennel I’d ever seen in my life.”
Such was the chef’s inspiration for the recently opened Naxos Taverna, which features seafood-forward Greek cuisine that’s so fresh, you’ll swear you can hear the sound of the sea from the patio, just beyond the 13-seat Kallisto Oyster Bar. (The more casual Kallisto is just as abundant with seafood as Naxos, offering more than 25 varieties of fish and slow-cooked pan roasts of lobster, shrimp or crab.)
Almost everything on the menu is meant to be shared, so start your meal with items from the raw bar, along with dips and spreads to create your own mezze plate. Seafood, flown in several times a week from the Mediterranean and other coastal locales, is the star here. The hamachi ($19), prepared with lemon, Sicilian capers, pine nuts and olive oil, is a good amuse, while oysters ($14 for three) come in East and West Coast varieties. The dips and spreads ($7 each) are tempting bites that come with piping-hot house-made pita—light, airy and addictive. The tzatziki, muhammara and houmous are the trio you should not miss.
Delectable as that pita is, don’t fill up, because there’s much more to explore. On the small plates section, the kataifi wrapped prawns ($23), served with kalamata olive aioli, are big flavor, with shredded filo dough encasing U-13 jumbo shrimp for an irresistible bite, The zucchini and eggplant chips are compulsively snackable ($16). There are also fresh salads—the produce is closer to home, with most coming from California farms—including a shaved fennel salad with yogurt-poppyseed dressing ($18) and baby beets ($19) with spiced yogurt.
To truly experience the depth of the seafood program at Naxos, order a whole fish for the table (market price). It’s prepared one of two ways: over live charcoal-fired grills or salt-baked, which essentially steams the fish. Both methods focus on flavors and textures, and selections vary daily depending on what’s flown in.
This simplicity of preparation is at the heart of Greek cuisine, Andelbradt says. “Greek food is not overly complicated. It’s your mom’s cooking; it’s your grandparents’ cooking,” he says. “When you break a cuisine down to its simplest parts, it’s really just about cooking from your heart. And what better place to cook from than with great seafood, a lot of vegetables and olive oil that we source from Greece ourselves.”
Meat lovers also won’t feel out of place here. There are grilled steaks and chops on the menu, including a very Greek spinach and feta-crusted tenderloin ($48). And end your meal with the baklava cheesecake ($12), made with pistachio filo and accompanied by strawberry sorbet. Dionysus himself would approve.
NAXOS TAVERNA Red Rock Resort, 702-516-8888, naxosredrock.com. Sunday-Thursday, 4-10 p.m.; Friday & Saturday, 4-11 p.m.
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