Las Vegas’ long-term relationship with New York Times best-selling cookbook author, celebrity chef and Food Network TV host Giada De Laurentiis has gotten pretty serious over the past 10 years.

De Laurentiis brought her star power to the Strip in 2014 with the debut of her first restaurant, Giada, at the Cromwell. From the start, the spot had an opulent glow, with sweeping floor-to-ceiling windows inviting in the noonday light and a sprawling view of the bustling city streets below. On any given day, scores of patrons pack the place for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In its first year, Giada welcomed more than 250,000 visitors, and those numbers have yet to dwindle.

“This restaurant put me in a different league. I think it opened people’s eyes to me in a way that created a little more respect,” De Laurentiis tells the Weekly during a busy Saturday afternoon brunch at Giada. “When I opened this restaurant and people came to eat here, they were like, ‘Wow, she might be the real deal.’

“I think it’s my looks, I think it’s my size—all of those things played into this image that people created. [The restaurant] dispersed some of those images.”

Ahead of Valentine’s Day, we caught up with De Laurentiis to chat about her fondness for her first restaurant and her favorite date dishes.

Giada was the first restaurant you opened, and it’s celebrating 10 years on the Strip in 2023. That’s almost like a first love for you, right? Oh, yes, I say it’s like birthing a baby. We built this space from scratch. It was a two-floor parking garage. I had seen several other spaces before I saw this one, and I stood on the second floor, looked right where you see the Bellagio fountains, and I thought, if I can put windows here and they can open up to the Strip on a beautiful day, the rest will just come.

This restaurant has been the site for hundreds of marriage proposals. Did you ever imagine it becoming such a backdrop? I had romance in mind. I wanted elegance. I wanted them to see people making pizzas and getting bread out of the oven and prepping antipasti, then the bar would be around the other side. That was a concept that was brand new to the Strip, because 99.9% of all the restaurants start with the bar. I wanted it to feel warm, cozy and incredibly inviting. I found that with a lot of restaurants, after eating on the Strip for a while, I started realizing they’re very masculine. They’re very cold; they’re intimidating. I wanted the exact opposite

Sounds like you had a great eye for detail. I think that’s part of being a woman, No. 1. Secondly, I think it’s because it was my first. It’s like I was decorating my own home. I remember them sending me chairs to my house so I could sit in them, and glassware. I would hold the different silverware to make sure it was comfortable in a woman’s hand, because our hands are smaller. So yeah, the details to me are very important.

Valentine’s Day is approaching, and food is a known love language. What are some of your favorite dishes to recommend? When I think of Valentine’s Day, first of all, I think of stuffed pastas. I think of delicate, beautiful little packages that burst with flavor. We have tortellini with a lemon-scented ricotta with a nice medallion of short rib in the middle, then a short rib and Parmesan broth that goes around it with candy beets. It gives it that elegance. We also have a cacio e pepe and it comes in a smaller Pecorino wheel. Wouldn’t it be fun to do like a Lady and the Tramp moment with the spaghetti where you share it out of the same portion in the Pecorino wheel? We sell a lot of those, and I think for that reason, because it’s very romantic.

The other thing I love about Valentine’s Day is our desserts. We have a heart-shaped Chocolate Amore. The base of it is a chocolate chip cake, then it’s a caramel panna cotta with a white chocolate shell on the outside, and we’ve colored it red on the outside with some raspberries. It is so beautiful and decadent but light. It melts in your mouth like a cloud almost.

What about your own recipes? Any current favorites you’ve been working on? I just did a little spin on amatriciana. I have a digital platform called Giadzy where we sell imported Italian products, so I’m always creating recipes with ingredients I get from Italy. I was making one the other day and trying to take things people already know like amatriciana, which is a very traditional Roman dish, and giving it a little spin and using ingredients we import.

Certain types of tomatoes, a lot of little baby Datterini tomatoes, which are sweeter, to make a really sweet quick sauce. Caper leaves right now are my thing. Here at the restaurant, I fry capers; they’re these salty little nuggets, and we put it over different dishes. Right now. I’m creating all these recipes with these caper leaves, which are dried in the sun and salted. They’re like chips, really.

In your 2021 book Eat Better, Feel Better, you took a hard look at your own eating habits and how they were affecting your health. What compelled you to look inward? Most of the time, when people aren’t feeling great, you can see it on the outside. I got lucky; you can’t see it on the outside, but I certainly feel it on the inside. I traveled a ton, and I think when you travel a lot for a 20-year period, it takes a toll on the system and on the body. Changing time zones, the planes, you’re aging, and I had a child—it’s a lot. I started realizing I just don’t feel good. I just can’t do this anymore. I have to figure out how I can feel better, especially when you’re on camera a lot.

When you have to have that kind of energy all the time, the camera sucks a lot of energy. I realized something’s got to give here. It was 10 years of figuring it out, which is why when they approached me for that book, I thought, this is the only kind of book I can write at the moment, because this is truly the journey I’ve been on. Sugar was a big problem. I love sugar, and I leaned on it a lot over the years to give me the energy I needed. I think people believe chefs can eat anything they want all the time, but actually we are some of the most sensitive people.

Were any of your own colleagues candid about going through a similar situation and how your book helped them? Oh yeah, because a lot of my colleagues are men. Men don’t want to admit to those things ever, God forbid (laughs). For me, it was about explaining to people that when I’m on the road, I give myself a break. But when I’m home, I’m really, really careful. This life is about balance. It isn’t about depriving us of everything all the time. I was trying to tell people there’s a way of making this work, but you’ve got to pay really close attention. And we’re all different, so something that works for me isn’t necessarily going to work for you. Having said that, there might be something in here that does.

What other books are you currently loving right now? Spare by Prince Harry (laughs). I think maybe millions of people at this point are so curious about what the hell is going on and what he’s experienced. I’m one of those people, I guess. It’s a little embarrassing to say.

You’ve got to run to your other restaurant, Pronto at Caesars Palace. Anything else you want to say before you go? I’m just honored to be here after almost 10 years as a viable, successful restaurant. It’s an honor, especially in such a tiny hotel. The team that I have here—without them this would not be possible. A lot of them have been here since day one, and that’s f*cking remarkable in this town.

GIADA Cromwell, 855-442-3271, caesars.com. Monday-Thursday, 5-9:45 p.m.; Friday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-2:45 p.m., 5-9:45 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!