DISH ON DINING

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Famous Pizza and Moret

(Vegas Magazine – November 2007)
By Max Jacobson

New steak, pizza and Mexican joints are flooding the Vegas dining scene. You know the old adage, the more things change, the more they remain the same. But in this case, there are attractive twists all around.

Just a half-mile south of the 215 Freeway, Patsy Grimaldi’s Coal Brick-Oven Pizzeria – the pizzeria that made Brooklyn famous – has opened its doors. The pizza here is made in a traditional coal oven, and the crust is truly amazing: light, crisp, chewy and flavorful. The 25-ton handmade oven burns at a heat of nearly 1,200 degrees. Try the white pizza with garlic and anchovies, the terrific calzones or any of the salads. You’ll taste the difference.

Perhaps one of the city’s most impressive openings is The Light Group’s new Mexican restaurant, Diablo’s Cantina at the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino; it’s certainly the most popular. Diablo’s has been doing more than 800 covers daily and is turning people away in the evenings. Much of the credit goes to Light Group chef Brian Massie and his Mexican-American chef Noe Alcala, formerly with the Hard Rock’s Pink Taco. The innovative menu is stocked with dishes like the killer Mexican pizza topped with chorizo and roasted tomatillos, and the restaurant’s signature three-layer club quesadilla. And the design team did a bang-up job. The two-level restaurant faces the Strip and is great for people watching. Take a seat on one of the upper level’s huge wooden chairs with red cloth cushions under a corrugated-tin palapa, and you’ll feel as if you are in Mexico. The Ultimate Brownie Banana Split, served for dessert, comes in a glass bowl big enough for bathing a baby.

Finally Stack, the busy steak house inside the Mirage also from the Light Group, has unfurled a new bag of tricks. Massie loves finger foods, and offers such goodies as crunchy tuna tacos, miso-black-cod lettuce cups, mini Kobe chili-cheese dogs and his signature adult tater tots, to go with desserts like jelly-doughnut “Munchkin” holes. Massie calls his cooking “cool, fun food made small,” and we couldn’t agree more.