Chef Lanny Chin has only been in Las Vegas for about six years, but he’s already become a mainstay in the local culinary scene, on and off the Strip. Since relocating from Cleveland, he has served as executive chef of PKWY Tavern and Clique Hospitality’s Apex Social Club, and opened Greene St. Kitchen at the Palms as chef de cuisine. He was also tapped to helm the much-anticipated Slanted Door at the Forum Shops at Caesars, which opened briefly before the pandemic hit. Oh, and he’s a Chopped champion, too.
These days, you’ll find Chin Downtown at Vegas Test Kitchen, where he’s serving up ramen goodness at Slurp Society. The Weekly caught up with the Ohio transplant to chat about what makes the Vegas food scene unique and some lessons we can learn from these challenging times.
What excites you about the Las Vegas food scene right now? It’s super diverse. Cleveland has a great food scene, but in a lot of ways, chefs are doing the same thing. In Vegas, I feel like there’s so many great people going in different directions. And the chef community here is great, super supportive of each other. Everybody just wants to do really good food, especially in a situation [like] Test Kitchen. Every week I see different chefs coming through and supporting all the different concepts there.
In your opinion, what makes a good ramen bowl? The broth is key; it’s everything. Mine is a little bit different. I make a chicken base, I make a pork base and I blend them. Then I season that. It’s sort of a hybrid of a tonkatsu broth and a shoyu broth. It’s very pork-y—a lot of pork fat, super rich—but then I season it with a fair amount of soy sauce as well. It’s a little bit nontraditional, but that’s OK.
What kinds of food did you eat growing up? My grandfather came over from China with my great-grandparents, and the rest of my family is [from] West Virginia, so it’s a very eclectic mix. We spent pretty much every Sunday at my grandmother’s house, eating together as a family, so those are very comforting flavors I grew up with. On my mom’s side of the family it was a lot of comfort food, things like stuffed cabbage, meatloaf, classic Midwest comfort foods. If I could open something that married those two [cuisines] in one restaurant, I think it’s worth exploring. To me, the best meals are meals that make me feel comfortable, make me happy.
The restaurant industry has been hit hard by the pandemic. What have been your biggest takeaways from this time? Probably my health. I took my health very seriously this year, and I’ve lost, at this point, about 65 pounds. I feel great.
From a professional standpoint, I’ve come to the realization that there’s literally nothing that separates me from people who have multiple restaurants or multiple concepts. Up until this last year, I’ve never thought to myself that I want to own my own restaurant, or, you know, my own little restaurant empire. And that has completely changed. Now I’m at a point in my career where I want those things, and I want to be able to provide jobs to the community, provide super positive work environments for people and afford myself a certain quality of life.
I love being in the kitchen, but I’m nearing 40 years old. There’s only so long a chef can be on the line, working 16, 18 hours a day, and I don’t know [at] what age I’m not going to be able to do that anymore. But at some point, I need to have a different plan, and I think now is the time to start acting on it.
This is a great town to do that in, because Las Vegas attracts a kind of pioneering spirit. Absolutely. We have a lot of people who are very passionate about great and interesting food and trying new and different things. On the Strip, there’s a different mindset: Even if you grew up in the Midwest with limited food options, here you’re on vacation and you’re more likely to try something different. You feel like that’s the right time to do it, and you’re kind of out of your comfort zone. There’s this really great opportunity to do good food, whether it’s for locals or the tourist base. I think the more you slowly push those boundaries, the more you can educate people, and that’s really exciting.
What do you think will be the lasting impact of this moment in the restaurant industry? The biggest thing from the pandemic is, people were able to adapt, change a business model, figure it out and come up with creative solutions, instead of letting the situation get the best of them. I think that moving forward, people are going to look at opportunities like this and say, you know what, we did it once, we can do it again. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be exactly what you want to do. But you’re going to make it work.
