Chinois, or called by its longer name, Chinois Las Vegas, was the second Wolfgang Puck restaurant to open in Vegas, a few years after the groundbreaking Spago in 1992.
The prototype, an Asian-fusion restaurant in Santa Monica called Chinois On Main, so excited Los Angeles critics when it opened in the late '80s that the genre spread like wildfire. Today, the influence of the Chinois style of cooking is nearly everywhere, from Albertson's to Little Buddha to your favorite local Asian joint.
In spite of this popularity, few places get it right. I still vividly recall my first meal at the original Chinois, where then-Chef Kazuto Matsusaka (who now runs a wonderful little restaurant called Beacon in Culver City, in LA County) created fare like foie gras with pineapple and sizzling catfish, along with the creative Mr. Puck.
Our Chinois, ably attended by Corporate Chef David Robins, and several Puck alums including Joseph Bennett, has always echoed the original idea, though it has had to bend slightly to accommodate the masses by offering more sushi, and less cutting-edge Asian fare. Puck's concept was simply to combine European and Asian cooking techniques and ingredients, but with a heavy bias toward the East.
This place, incidentally, does get it right. They've recently anointed Terence Fong executive chef. Fong, who previously worked at Osaka and Gatsby's at the MGM Grand, is a native Hawaiian with a Chinese background, Japanese cooking experience, and French training. Needless to say, he knows all of those genres like the back of his sauce pan.
The only caveat is that, more and more, Chinois Las Vegas has morphed into an almost purely Asian restaurant, with occasional forays into dishes such as salmon or grilled beef, but even then, with distinctly exotic flavors. California, California, wherefore art thou?
Look on tables and you see a mostly young crowd drinking beer or sake, eating handrolls, sashimi, plates of Chinese noodles and wok-fried entrées. I'd be thrilled to see the Puck conceits of yesteryear, the foie gras, curried oysters and grilled Mongolian lamb chops that still wow 'em in Santa Monica. I guess they don't play in Vegas.
If any chef can resurrect this kind of fare, Fong should be the ticket. The look of the restaurant hasn't much changed, a casual downstairs with a sushi bar backed with crazy quilt tiles designed by Puck's partner, Barbara Lazaroff, and a more elegant upstairs, reached by a sweeping staircase and not open at lunch or on certain weekday nights.
I like to come here for lunch to eat fare like the restaurant's good sushi; spring-rolls filled with chicken, peanuts and vegetables; Hong Kong noodle soup stocked with a mixture of pork, shrimp, chicken and egg noodles; and the restaurant's seminal Chinese chicken salad, a dish Puck invented that today is as popular as the tuna fish sandwich.
Lots of people start their dinners with sushi, although Japanese dining protocol prefers sushi come toward the end of the meal. All the usual suspects are here: uni, or sea urchin, spicy tuna rolls, California handrolls. Hey, you've done this before.
Two of my favorite appetizers from the dinner menu are lettuce wraps and duck pancakes. The former is a sort of Chinese taco, using the hollow of a lettuce leaf as a vehicle for minced chicken and Chinese vegetables, while the latter is best described as a Chinese burrito, with duck meat and Hoisin sauce shoehorned into ultra-thin scallion crêpes.
The menu's Chinois Classic Entrees is where the real action is. Shanghai lobster is one of the best dishes in town, a whole steamed lobster, taken out of the shell, in a light curry sauce and flanked by steamed jasmine rice and crispy deep-fried spinach.
A nice, grilled Szechuan beef reminds me of something I ate at one of Fong's former restaurants: a 12-ounce rib eye brushed with a suspiciously sweet sauce of caramelized shallots that I found myself brushing off. Alongside is a pile of Kermit the Frog-green puréed potatoes, colored by wasabi paste. One mouthful goes a long way.
But the restaurant's real piece de resistance is the sizzling whole catfish. I brought two young ladies from Vancouver—of Chinese ancestry, I might add—with me for dinner and I couldn't believe how they oohed and aahed when they saw the fish. Vancouver is widely reputed to have the best Chinese food in North America but this fish still impressed them. Why not? Crisp-skinned, stuffed with ginger, wok-fried, dribbling ponzu sauce and flanked by dry, fried, Chinese-style green beans, the fish, easily a foot and a half in length, turned heads as it was carried through the dining room, exuding steam and fragrance. The flesh turned out to be buttery soft, flaking away from the bone without a struggle.
Fong, Robins, Bennett, look away. Wolfgang isn't a household name for nothing.