LAS VEGAS — In a bar that was as dark and sexy as Sodom and Gomorrah’s VIP Room, I looked at the party next to me and saw one reason that we sat in the highest-grossing restaurant in the world. Five men, four of whom were in their 20s and 30s, had just received three bottles of liquor, mixers and ice from a ravishing, raven-haired cocktail waitress dressed like she’d torture us all later.
For the right price.
I glanced at the bill as she delivered silky comments while strategically bending over. The price for three bottles of alcohol, mixers and ice: $1,874. One kid signed for it without flinching or calling his banker or the cops.
I gulped and ordered a martini. As house music pulsated in my skull like a brass band trying to get out my ear, I wondered why that huge image of Ho Chi Minh on the wall was smiling at us. Or was he actually laughing?
Three weeks ago I returned to my old stomping grounds for some R&R&R (rest and relaxation and raging). I lived in Las Vegas from 1980 to 1990, and I’d had plenty of the, quote, Las Vegas Experiences, unquote. Space prevents me from listing them. So do libel and obscenity laws.
But in the ’80s, through staying up for 2 1/2 straight days, chasing divorced cocktail waitresses to Lake Mead and back, through walking out of dive downtown saloons as the sun comes up, I’d never had a Las Vegas Experience as I did that night at Tao.
Tao brings in more money than any restaurant on Earth. It annually grosses $66 million. That’s $5.5 million a month, or more than $180,000 a night. That’s a lot of mixers. In actuality, only $32 million comes from food. That doesn’t mean Tao’s menu is cheap.
It means Tao has managed to morph a restaurant, a rollicking bar, an over-the-top nightclub and a seductive pool/ beach scene into 44,000 square feet of one-stop adult shopping.
The concept works fabulously. Yet it’s difficult picturing Tao in this setting. Tao is in the Venetian Resort, right in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip. This means you walk over a schlocky “Grand Canal” where some gondolier from Santa Monica is butchering “Volare,” into Tao, where you’re surrounded by Buddhas and women whose attire would get them tossed right out of St. Mark’s Square.
The restaurant seats 400, and even calling two days early I could secure a reservation for 11:15 p.m. only. Already the scene looked like New Year’s Eve. Music nearly made the walls bend. Women who made the cast of “Sex and the City” look like Buddhas paraded around in shoes nearly as expensive as the drinks.
“You have no idea,” said Alissa Conte, restaurant general manager at Tao. “It’s definitely Vegas. Men in nightclubs, they’re well off, and a lot of Europeans will spend $30,000 in one night on alcohol. A bottle of Cristal is $1,500. It is what it is. People love it. It’s a nightclub. It’s a big party.
“We do that well.”
But I came to eat first, and I exhaled when my signature martini — Stoli with a splash of Chambord — was only $11. I was seated not far from a 20- foot Buddha reclining over a koi pond. The Buddha comes from Thailand, and the calligraphy on the ceiling comes from China.
The food comes from Thailand, China and Japan and is just gimmicky enough to be interesting. One rule of thumb in high-end restaurants: The food had better be good and it had better be filling. It was both. I had a healthy cut of Chilean sea bass covered in a miso gaze with wok vegetables for $34 and a pork spring roll with Thai chili sauce for $11. It was really good, but I was lucky the nonstop 1,000- decible music pouring in from the adjacent bar affected my hearing more than my taste.
Tao calls it “vibe dining,” and prices range from the soy-ginger-glazed salmon with udon noodles and spinach for $24 to the 2 1/2-pound Maine lobster with black bean sauce for $48.
The waiter, who, like Conte, came to Tao when it opened three years ago, was terrific, revealing secrets from Tao’s deepest closet. Like the time a staff member checked in on a family in the VIP room and saw them all smoking pot. Or the time a woman with, oh, $3,000 of alcohol in her, fell into the koi.
Or when the porn and electronics conventions overlapped and two porn stars were seated next to bespectacled men with pocket protectors. The men knew the women’s names from the Internet.
Despite seating 400, it’s no banquet hall. It’s spread over three floors and shares space with the nightclub — the one that features 300 hand-carved monks and candles.
Near the end of the meal, a hostess came and stamped the inside of my wrist. It got me into the nightclub. It didn’t comp the $30 cover charge. It just got me through the VIP line. So I passed. Instead, I found myself at the bar, listening to an Englishman in an expensive British suit giving me a detailed rundown of Las Vegas’ call-girl scene.
And no, I didn’t ask the cost.
Post reporter John Henderson writes about food he encounters around the world while covering sports and travel.
