A small but select group of chefs, such as Grant Achatz of Chicago's Alinea and the British star Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck, are making this a hot trend. Ferran Adria, who owns a restaurant called El Bulli, in Rosas, Spain, is the Louis Pasteur of molecular gastronomy. He spends half the year in a lab, monkeying around with stuff like sodium alginate, which allows liquids to form beads, machines called dehydrators for powdering oils and other Popeil-like contraptions.
This sort of cuisine, if you want to call it that, hasn't yet surfaced in Vegas, but it's getting close. So the question becomes, can this food work in a tourist economy? Time will tell.
Luckily, there are plenty of other options on the menus here, in a room that manages to be innovative at breakfast, lunch and dinner. The dining room, located on the hotel's fifth floor, has views of the hotel pool, and a warm, slightly generic feel.
Tables, which feature natural wooden tops, are either at tall booths swathed in brown upholstery, or free-standing, flanked by plush chairs. A series of floor-to-ceiling curtains add a touch of class, and there is a luxurious marble floor, so you know that no expense was spared in the room's design. One Sunday evening, my wife and I sit in the back of the restaurant, facing a spray of fresh flowers. Soon we are nibbling on a tomato-crusted ciabatta roll, hot from the oven, and on a tiny ceramic spoon holding beef tenderloin topped with, yep, effervescent beer powder. It's an acquired taste. Odder fare follows.
One dish, gargouillou of young vegetables, is a mishmash of 12 vegetables on top of a trio of colorful vegetable purees, with the occasional dollop of foam and the addition of a sweet and salty parsnip cake. What's a gargouillou? It's a made-up term invented by a French chef named Michel Bras, an alchemist chef that Hammer admires. How does it taste? Alternately muddy and delicious.
Along with the vegetables, we have a delicious dish called new-style Tasmanian salmon pad Thai, composed of "noodles" that are made from pure shrimp, peanut, lychee, rapini and the capper, hunks of salmon cooked by simply being splashed with hot oil. It's incredibly good, but will it play with the blue hairs from Idaho Falls? I think not.
Later, we graduate to roasted Colorado lamb shoulder on a bed of smoked maple syrup, cranberry miso, peppered bacon and rosemary air (they spray a rosemary scent onto the dish), which causes my wife to shrug. I focus on my poached and roasted poussin, with whispers of Parmesan. Poussin turns out to be game hen, here prepared with braised leek and paprika, brushed with Parmesan foam. It's nothing too strange, and in this context, the dish seems almost medieval. Dessert can be something like flexible chocolate mousse, which can be converted into different shapes. Don't look for whipped cream. Instead, the accoutrements run to items such as Merlot-soaked berries, Conundrum wine-soaked basil and apricots and a blood-orange sorbet studded with Pop Rocks and sprinkled with sea salt. Whew!
Hammer is constantly retooling the menus, though, and there are several more familiar options for breakfast and lunch. At lunch, don't miss the soup tasting, four mini-cups of soup like mushroom and a hearty turkey noodle, or a number of top-drawer sandwiches, such as a Cuban-style braised pork sandwich on an inside-out Hoagie roll.
I would have loved my Argentinean chicken sandwich, filled with chicken confit, peanuts, cucumber, olives, sprouts and fresh spinach, if the roll had been less cottony, but at least I ate the filling. There are burgers, too, from a classic cheeseburger to a $50 Kobe beef burger, topped with Kobe short ribs, foie gras and black truffle.
At breakfast, Hammer serves what is easily the most creative breakfast menu in town without bending the rules relentlessly. Breakfast sandwich, for instance, is two soft eggs, crisp prosciutto, roasted tomatoes, frisee and Gruyere cheese—sort of a yuppified Breakfast Jack. Elvis Pancakes, meanwhile, are a stack of dollar-sized cakes layered with peanut butter, Nueske's bacon and bananas. Vegans have tofu Benedict, poached tofu, grilled eggplant, mushrooms and avocado on sourdough bread, smeared with olive oil Hollandaise. Perhaps the most conventional meal is Petaluma eggs and Nueske's meats, a choice of bacon, ham or sausage, plus Kennebec potato home fries, or fresh seasonal fruit.
Platinum is betting that the convention crowd isn't conventional when it comes to food.