Bradley Ogden, chef/owner
Bradley Ogden
Caesars Palace Hotel
3570 Las Vegas Blvd. S.
Las Vegas, (702) 731-7410
I remember the days when people went to Las Vegas for one of two
reasons: Hard-core gamblers went to play blackjack or to hit the
roulette tables; the more cultured went to see Liberace, perhaps
sneaking out to feed a one-armed bandit during intermission. Today,
Liberace has gone on to that piano-shaped
swimming pool in the sky,
but let it be remembered that it was he who brought the first
death-defying stunt to Vegas - playing Rachmaninoff while wearing
30 pounds of sequins. I dare those slackers at Cirque du Soleil to
top that.
The gambling is still there, of course. But there's a better reason
to go to Vegas these days:
food. It all started when Caesars Palace
invited
Wolfgang Puck to open a Las Vegas edition of Spago back in
1992. The race was on. Las Vegas now has a higher concentration of
superchefs per square mile than any other city in any other desert
on the planet. These days, a celebrity chef without a Las Vegas
restaurant is like an
NBA star without an endorsement contract.
One of the most recent culinary beacons to illuminate the Strip is
California's
Bradley Ogden. I first ate Brad Ogden's food when he
was a twentysomething prodigy helming the kitchen at San
Francisco's tony Campton Place, fresh off an extended stint at The
American Restaurant in
Kansas City. Ogden's food was unpretentious,
delicious, and refreshingly American. His great vision, in fact,
has been to transform American
comfort food into transcendental
nourishment for both the body and the soul.