Hospitality industry veterans express awe at the casino city’s success in luring away consumers of opulence
LOS ANGELES — Piero Selvaggio calls it his “Las Vegas experience.” It was opening night at Valentino, the Venetian hotel version of his successful Santa Monica restaurant, when a high roller sent his butler to buy some wine to go with dinner. Twenty minutes later, Selvaggio had sold the man more than $4,000 worth of rare Burgundy and vintage Bordeaux.
“In less than half an hour,” said Selvaggio, one of the Los Angeles area’s leading restaurateurs, “I was able to see things I would never have imagined possible.”
Call it the “Vegas Effect.”
The relentless demand for luxury has contributed to a rise in prices for Kobe beef and palm trees, wiped out exclusive wine stock, lured wealthy Asian tourists away from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills with more exclusive boutiques and kept touring Broadway shows such as “Avenue Q” and “Spamalot” out of Los Angeles.
It is siphoning top talent and thousands of workers from throughout Southern California. And everything–from specialty produce from the Santa Monica Farmers Market to ordinary items like toilet paper and lumber–has to be imported from somewhere, usually Southern California.
“When you go to Las Vegas, you have a sense that spending–it’s almost easier, looser–and you feel that it’s part of the pleasure,” Selvaggio said. “The opulence and the variety and quality at the high end in Las Vegas is much, much bigger than Los Angeles. Los Angeles cannot even vaguely compete with this.”
Las Vegas has been a city of superlatives. For years it has been the nation’s fastest-growing city. It has the largest job growth rate: 7.4 percent in 2005 with more than 62,000 jobs created this year. It has more hotel rooms than any city in the world–133,000–and more conventions and trade shows than any in the United States.
Where to make a name
Fashion designers, restaurateurs, hoteliers, superstar chefs and Broadway producers all want a presence in Las Vegas, because as L.A. nightlife impresario Amanda Demme said, “If you’re known in Vegas, you’re known everywhere.”
Lee Maen, a partner in Innovative Dining Group, which owns trendy restaurants in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, including Boa and Sushi Roku, agreed: “As much as L.A. influences the Vegas market, the Vegas market influences other restaurants across the country.”
Las Vegas’ shopping concourses house so many exclusive boutiques that the L.A. luxury market looks almost second tier by comparison. When Oscar de la Renta looked west, he opened his third store in the world in Las Vegas, not L.A.
The Manolo Blahnik and Dior Homme boutiques in Las Vegas are the second locations outside New York. Overall, Las Vegas experienced four times the retail and trade growth that L.A. did in the last year, according to Ross DeVol, director of regional economics at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica.
More wealthy visitors from the Far East, who are so cherished by L.A. tourism officials, are skipping Rodeo Drive altogether in favor of Las Vegas, DeVol said. “These are high rollers who stay multiple nights at high-end hotels,” he said.
“This would be a direct challenge to Beverly Hills and South Coast Plaza,” said Jack Kyser, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.’s senior vice president and chief economist. “And now there’s direct airline service from Asia.”
Broadway skips L.A.
Los Angeles also lost at least two popular Broadway shows. This year, billionaire hotel mogul Steve Wynn is leading the city’s efforts to bring first-run Broadway productions to Vegas permanently. Thanks to his exorbitant offers–$5 million for “Avenue Q” and $10 million for “Spamalot”–the shows won’t tour the region, blacking out theaters in the L.A. area. In addition to Cirque du Soleil’s wild success in Las Vegas, “Mamma Mia!” and “We Will Rock You” have become Vegas hits.
While the restaurant scene is going through a cool period in L.A., Vegas is sizzling. The list of celebrity chefs with Vegas outposts reads like a Who’s Who of the culinary world: Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Julian Serrano, Thomas Keller, Michael Mina, Tom Colicchio, Charlie Palmer.
This year, more restaurants opened in Nevada than in any other state in the nation, according to the National Restaurant Association, thanks in large part to the competition among Las Vegas’ luxury hotels. Once there, restaurateurs often find the city provides a near non-stop supply of big spenders.
“Obviously there’s an advantage when you have 15,000 people every night going to a show, a 400-room hotel that’s booked all year round at 100 percent occupancy,” said celebrity chef Bradley Ogden, who moved to Las Vegas from the Bay Area to open Ogden’s in Caesars Palace in 2003.
Kobe beef–the rich, Japanese-style delicacy–is in short supply all over the U.S., in part because of demand in Las Vegas, where tourists consume tons of it each week.
Snake River Farms in Idaho, the largest American Kobe producer, has watched its Vegas business explode in the last five years, said Shane Lindsay, general manager of sales.
“It has grown from a minor player to perhaps our most significant market,” he said.
Deep pockets, fine vintages
There are 14 master sommeliers in Las Vegas; Los Angeles has none, according to the Court of Master Sommeliers. And the casinos, with their 50,000-bottle cellars and deep pockets, said Selvaggio, “have literally wiped out the finest Burgundy and Bordeaux, the finest of California, the finest of Italy, the finest of Australia and Spain.”
“In terms of niche wines,” said Jack Robertiello, editor of Cheers, a restaurant trade magazine, “a lot of it ends up in Las Vegas because of the buying power of the casinos and places like Aureole or other destination restaurants.”
About the only thing that’s not booming in Las Vegas is manufacturing: The city still imports nearly all its resources from California. Ogden and many other chefs said most of their fresh produce and fish comes from the Santa Monica Farmers Market and the Santa Monica Seafood Co. The seafood company’s Las Vegas business has grown so rapidly in the last five years, said its director of sales, Tim Metro, that the company now trucks fresh food from L.A. six nights a week to 75 chefs along the Strip.
Source: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-12-02/news/0512020159_1_las-vegas-vegas-market-boutiques/2
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