Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY AMANDA MARSALIS (PUCK) SO MANY DINNERS… SO LITTLE TIME Wild mushroom risotto Wolfgang Puck Spago has a prime Forum Shops location. the one that started it all KICKED OFF A DINING REVOLUTION. BY JOHN CURTAS | PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRYAN HAINER "I TWENTY YEARS AGO, A HOT YOUNG CHEF NAMED WOLFGANG PUCK BROUGHT HIS RESTAURANT SPAGO TO THE STRIP—AND never knew where to eat when I came here to watch the fights," is how Wolfgang Puck describes why he decided to open a branch of Spago in Forum Shops, and thus boldly go where no great chef had gone before. The year was 1992. Puck had spent the past decade taking California by storm and, in the process, redefining America's notion of what a great restaurant could be. Still, the move was a gutsy one. The suc- cess of the brand-new mall was considered a long shot, and many a naysayer—including Puck himself—thought that Las Vegas was hardly ready to embrace his world-class, cutting-edge cooking, even in a restau- rant as casual as his. "It was all steakhouses and 'Continental' restaurants, and it wasn't that good," he says of our dining scene 20 years ago. "People 80 VEGASMAGAZINE.COM The rumblings of Spago Las Vegas's success shook the gastronomic ground in the Mojave Desert. would tell me how the casinos give away all these comp meals and how it wouldn't work, but [Forum Shops developer] Sheldon Gordon told me, 'Just you wait— thousands of people will come.'" Gordon may have been a prophet, but neither he nor Puck had the slight- est inkling of the seismic shift they were about to cause: Two months after its doors first opened, the rumblings of Spago Las Vegas's success shook the gastronomic ground in the Mojave Desert, and the whole world of fine dining felt the shudder. Spago Las Vegas officially opened on December 11, 1992, but at first things were far from earth-shaking. "The first three weeks were very depressing," Puck says. "The Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote a nice article [about our opening], and I thought we'd be turning people away, but that night only 60 people showed up." Little did he know that the cavalry was about to show up in the guise of a rodeo. The National Finals Rodeo cow- boys, to be precise, were some of the first guests, jumping straight from their bucking broncos to the one gourmet restaurant in town with a national reputation. As grateful as he was to see all of those 10-gallon hats, Puck quickly discovered that Las Vegas still had a ways to go in appreciat- ing first-class restaurants. He still chuckles remembering: "When they saw the open kitchen, they all thought it was a buffet and lined up and started ordering burgers and ribs." continued on page 82