Last night we had dinner at Emeril’s Delmonico Steakhouse at The Venetian here in Las Vegas. I thought we’d just have a normal reservation, but Lisa surprised me. She arranged, through a connection and personal friend of Emeril, to have dinner in the kitchen (see image), where one of the sous chefs personally catered to our needs and prepared a tasting of dishes—some of which were not on the menu and others which were prepared differently than the menu items.
We started out with Truffle Parmesan Potato Chips, which were a nice light start to the meal.
Next came an item that was not on the menu, but in my opinion was one of the most surprising and well-balanced tastes of the evening. It was prosciutto with mascarpone cheese and exacerbated strawberries marinated in balsemic vinegar.
The third course was Oysters Rockefeller baked in a small cast iron skillet. It had oysters, dijon spinach, three different bacons and parmesan bread crumbs.
Fourth was the grilled lamb T-bones in a red wine reduction, served with green onion au gratin potatoes. This was nice, but not my favorite.
The main course was filet mignon served oscar style with asparagus on a bed of crab mashed potatoes with a bearnaise sauce. This is similar to the menu item, but was a filet mignon rather than the sirloin.
Finally, we had some cappucino with two desserts—butterscotch creme brulee with white chocolate hazelnut cookies and one of my favorite desserts, banana cream pie. They were both awesome, but I particularly liked the banana cream pie. It was quite possibly the best I’ve ever tasted.
All-in-all, it was one of the most interesting food experiences I’ve had and the perfect start to the evening.
After dinner we had a few hours to kill before the Cirque du Soleil “Love” show. So we hit the Venetian casino where I promptly lost $100 playing craps. Awesome.
The show was pretty cool. Unlike most other Cirque shows, this was not a display of technical aerobatic or gymnastic prowess. It was more of a visual experience to compliment the Beatles’ mashup music. Quite honestly, I could sit there and watch paint dry as long as the soundtrack was kick-ass like this show’s. The music almost directly followed the CD/DVD soundtrack, which I was a little disappointed with. But there were some interludes of outtakes from sessions, clips of the Beatles’ press conferences and television and radio appearances.
There were a few cool moments which gave me an idea. They used silhouettes of the Beatles (they could have been actors, I couldn’t exactly tell) as performance clips of the band. There was also a cool scene of the boys crossing Abbey Road (using actors), trying to avoid traffic until they figured out that they controlled the traffic by stepping into the street, which created a cool stomp-like effect with traffic sounds.
The images of the Beatles were so powerful that I thought it would be cool to create a virtual Beatles concert using silhouetted images of the real Beatles from all of the recorded performances. The soundtrack to the concert would be done in a similar mashup-style like George Martin and his son did for this Cirque show. With slightly different arrangements of the music, it wouldn’t feel like we were just listening to a CD and watching old clips of the band.
It was a good show, though not as awe-inspiring as the other Cirque shows I’ve seen. The music set to that environment was worth the ticket price (which I didn’t pay, heh).
