Latest news with #StubbornSeed
Eater
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Eater
The 7 Most Anticipated Las Vegas Restaurant Openings, Summer 2025
It's been an impressive year for Las Vegas's dining scene. So far, 2025 has introduced restaurants that have immediately soared to must-visit territory, like Jeremy Ford's Michelin-starred Stubborn Seed, a new food hall that not only revitalizes the trend but introduces a slate of big-deal regional fare, the latest in the highly-anticipated James Trees culinary universe, and a lakeside stunner with serious seafood prowess. The back-half of the year is equally exciting, with restaurants on deck attached to famous names, long-awaited restaurants that are finally inching toward openings, and steakhouses with Michelin-recognized talent. Here are seven openings to look forward to this summer in Las Vegas. Projected Opening: July 2025 Major Player: Fabio Viviani Celebrity chef and Top Chef fan favorite Fabio Viviani brings his signature flair to Summerlin this summer with the debut of ai Pazzi, a modern Italian restaurant at JW Marriott Las Vegas. The opening is part of a sweeping culinary revamp at the resort and Rampart Casino in partnership with Fabio Viviani Hospitality. Expect handmade pastas, fresh seafood, indulgent entrees like lobster linguini and bistecca alla Fiorentina, and comforting starters like a crostino topped with roasted woodland mushrooms, gorgonzola fondue, and black truffle prosciutto. On Top Chef , Viviani earned praise for his soulful Italian cooking approach — and meatballs were part of his repertoire. So it's fitting that Fabio's wagyu meatball makes the menu, plated with tomato sauce, whipped ricotta, basil, and grilled bread. Dessert leans decadent — think sticky toffee pudding and roasted white chocolate tiramisu — while the cocktail list leans Italian and lively, with the Montenegro Nights that blends Old Forester 100 bourbon with vanilla and caramel syrups and citrusy Amaro Montenegro, garnished with a toasted marshmallow. Projected Opening: Summer 2025 A dedicated smash burger joint is landing on the Strip this summer. Naughty Patty's will open at the Cosmopolitan just steps from Block 16, serving up crispy-edged burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches fried in mayo, furikake-dusted fries, and over-the-top ice cream concretes. It's the only burger-focused restaurant at the resort, filling the gap left by Holsteins, which closed in 2024 after a 14-year run (thankfully, it later reopened downtown). Expect a tight menu starring thin patties with caramelized edges, yuzu-sesame sauce, and classic toppings — plus chili-style hot dogs and avocado add-ons. Smash burgers are trending across Vegas, from Sorry Not Sorry's packed pop-ups to Yukon Pizza's weekend specials; Naughty Patty's brings that craveable crunch to the heart of the Strip. Cosmopolitan executive chef Mark Crane says they're not just riding a trend: 'The flavor you get — and the speed — is what makes it stick.' Projected Opening: Summer 2025 Major Player: José Andrés José Andrés's acclaimed Bazaar Meat is migrating from the Sahara to a brand-new 10,000-square-foot space at the Venetian's Palazzo tower. Since its 2014 debut, Bazaar Meat has wowed diners with playful small bites — think crispy chicken-bechamel fritters served in a sneaker — and a dining room filled with roaring open-fire grills, jamón ibérico, and dramatic antler chandeliers. Its new home, part of the Venetian's $1.5 billion reinvestment, will sit beneath Lavo in the former restaurant-cum-car museum Dal Toro Ristorante. The new digs decked to impress, meaning it will be a more than suitable home for 15-course tasting menus of Andrés classics like caviar-filled crispy cones, cotton candy-swathed foie gras, and Japanese A5 wagyu beef prepared tableside on an ishiyaki stone. Projected Opening: Summer 2025 Rare Society, the acclaimed live-fire steakhouse from San Diego chef Brad Wise, is bringing its bold take on classic steakhouse fare to southwest Las Vegas. Opening at UnCommons, the 160-seat restaurant will feature signature steak boards loaded with dry-aged, in-house butchered cuts, roasted bone marrow, and homemade sauces — all grilled over American red oak. The menu also branches out with dishes like gochujang-glazed bacon, lamb lollipops, and miso-glazed carrots, plus sustainably sourced seafood and throwback desserts like creamy bananas Foster cheesecake. Designed by GTC Design, the space will blend retro glamour and mid-century modern flair with wood paneling, a marble bar, and plush leather accents. With Michelin recognition for his earlier restaurants Trust and Fort Oak, Wise is sure to the light the scene on fire. The country's only Michelin-starred Korean steakhouse is headed to the Las Vegas Strip. Cote, the acclaimed New York restaurant known for its A5 wagyu, in-table grills, and 1,200-bottle wine list, will open at the Venetian as part of the resort's $1.5 billion renovation. The Vegas location promises all the signature favorites — like steak-and-egg tartare with caviar — served in a striking, Rockwell Group-designed space with a dry-aging room, DJ booth, and skybox-style private dining rooms overlooking the action. The restaurant will take over more than 10,000 square feet in the resort's waterfall atrium with a design that founder Simon Kim describes as 'stadium-style,' with tiered rows of seating expanding upwards and outwards from the ground-level bar. While the in-table grills evoke Korean barbecue, Cote firmly occupies steakhouse territory, with servers taking over the cooking, meticulously arranging and rotating delicate cuts of American wagyu beef, and ferrying lusciously thick-cut pork belly bacon to tables. Major Player: Gabriela Cámara Chef Gabriela Cámara, celebrated for her acclaimed Mexico City seafood restaurant Contramar, is bringing her celebrated coastal cuisine to Las Vegas with Cantina Contramar at the Fontainebleau. Designed by award-winning architect Frida Escobedo, the restaurant will serve the signature dishes that built Cámara's Mexico City seafood destination into must-visit dining — like tangy tuna tostadas and grilled whole fish splashed with vibrant red and green salsas. Partnering with Bertha González Nieves, founder of Tequila Casa Dragones and the first maestra tequilera, Cantina Contramar will also feature an exclusive tequila tasting room highlighting ultra-premium spirits. The Fontainebleau first announced the restaurant back when it opened in December 2023. While the resort has been stingy with updates, Cantina Contramar is still expected to open this year. Major Player: Happy Lamb Hot Pot Copper Sun, the first fine dining concept from the global Happy Lamb Hot Pot chain, is coming to Resorts World Las Vegas with an upscale hot pot experience that features its signature eight-hour bone marrow broth and a curated selection of premium meats exclusive to the Las Vegas location. With sleek black-and-white interiors and private dining rooms, Copper Sun aims to give a luxurious, communal dining experience that blends Inner-Mongolian tradition with a touch of Vegas grandeur — all poised over simmering and oil-dappled pots of fragrant broth that bubble and boil thin strips of marbled beef and toothsome strands of noodle. A cocktail menu will lean botanical, inspired by the herbal ingredients found in its broths. See More:
Miami Herald
13-06-2025
- Miami Herald
Miami's hottest new bakery is in a parking lot. Get there early if you want to try it
The hottest bakery in Miami isn't located in the hottest part of town. You won't find it in Brickell or Little River. It's not tucked away in a hidden speakeasy in Wynwood. You won't even find it in the bountiful strip malls of Kendall or Westchester, where tiny spots have been known to thrive. Instead, you'll find Ophelia parked beneath a few shady trees in a lot between office buildings on busy South Dixie Highway. You'll also find it on wheels, in a mini RV. The impossibly cute mobile bakery is the creation of chefs Ana De Sa Martins and Juan Viera, both veterans of Jeremy Ford's Michelin-starred Stubborn Seed restaurant in Miami Beach. They opened Ophelia's doors — or rather, its serving windows — just two weeks ago, and already have amassed a passionate customer base eager for the pastries within. 'It's very homey,' Viera says of the RV, which he designed. 'It feels like a dollhouse.' Arrive when the window opens at 8 a.m. if you want a shot at the bakery's most prized items. Take your pick from the day's offerings: banana walnut bread, chocolate babka, cinnamon rolls, classic chocolate chunk cookies or sesame guava cookies. There's even a olive oil lemon cake with blueberries, a specialty De Sa Martins, who grew up in Venezuela, perfected as executive pastry chef at Stubborn Seed that's also served at Ford's restaurant Salt & Ash in the Florida Keys. There are savory options, too, courtesy of Viera: broccoli hot pockets and Calabrian cheese rolls, for example, as well as a gloriously dripping, flavorful, must-have egg and bacon sandwich on an English muffin. You can order a variety of coffees, too. Viera, who grew up in Miami and worked as a chef at Stubborn Seed, says the menu was built on nostalgia. 'I grew up in a house with a single mom and two kids, so breakfast was often an Egg McMuffin,' he says. 'So I love eating an English muffin breakfast sandwich. A lot of things here are nostalgic for us. Like the hot pockets. They remind us of our childhoods growing up.' Opening the bakery was a labor of love for the couple, who met at Stubborn Seed. De Sa Martins had been there since 2020; Viera, who had also worked at The Surf Club in Surfside, was there for two years. Both helped the team open Beauty and the Butcher in Coral Gables (which Ford is no longer associated with). De Sa Martins said that though she learned a lot at the restaurant, she had started to wonder about the future. 'I worked hard for that company,' she says. 'At the same time, I'm 32, and a little voice was telling me 'Why don't you start something of your own?' It felt like it was time to do something.' A torn Achilles tendon that kept Viera off his feet for a couple of months gave him time to consider the idea, too. He felt he had lost his drive for fine dining and started cooking at the now-shuttered Union Beer Store in Little Havana. On her days off, De Sa Martins popped over to help him run food. After one insanely busy night of service, they realized they were enjoying themselves and not feeling burned out. 'We were like, 'This is super fun!' ' Viera says. 'We weren't exhausted. At a fine dining restaurant, after service, you're just beat up. But we were thrilled this was so much fun.' The Union Beer interlude kicked off the search for a brick-and-mortar spot, always a difficult process in Miami's expensive and ever-shifting culinary landscape. The couple was skeptical at the idea of a food truck, but then they landed on the idea to have a vintage RV designed by Viera built instead. 'We weren't sure what to expect, but we were super happy,' Viera says of the outcome. The couple starts work early every morning — De Sa Martins says she gets up at 3 a.m. — to prepare. They make the pastries in a commissary kitchen early in the week and bring them to Ophelia on the days it's open by 7 a.m. What they also didn't expect was immediate popularity. Neighbors out walking their dogs stop by — and return. Cars pull up as well: early morning workout fanatics on their way home from the gym and random drivers who just wondered what was happening in the parking lot. Even more often, customers spotted the bakery on wheels on social media and just had to give it a try. Lines form quickly, especially on the weekends, and sought-after items like the cinnamon rolls sell out quickly. The items are so alluring, many customers are perfectly happy eating breakfast in their cars, even though there's a shaded outdoor table. The crush of business has been disconcerting but welcome. 'I'm glad it happened this way,' De Sa Martins says. 'It's a good problem to have. What business doesn't want to sell everything they make? But we were not prepared. We thought it would be low key, because it's summer, and now we can't keep up with production.' Viera says they're considering limiting the number of cinnamon rolls people can buy — 'People come in with four different orders to deliver to friends, and we're honored they're doing that, but it's not fair for the other people in line.' He says the menu will change seasonally. There's a mango Danish on the horizon, this being mango-mad Miami, and they're playing with the idea of creating a strawberry Zebra Cake with red and blue stripes for the Fourth of July. And, having learned at Stubborn Seed that evolving is key to success, they're already thinking ahead. 'We're starting to think about what the next step is going to be,' De Sa Martins says. 'We're not going to be in a trailer forever.' Ophelia Where: 2140 S. Dixie Highway, Miami Hours: 8 a.m.-1 p.m. Thursday-Saturday Updates: @ on Instagram
Eater
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Eater
The Cult of Las Vegas's Oyster Bar
What's the toughest table to get in Las Vegas? Maybe it's Mother Wolf, that juggernaut of modern Roman cuisine inside the Fontainebleau, or Stubborn Seed at Resorts World, the latest opening from a Top Chef winner who seems to actually be making good on his potential. One would be forgiven for guessing an old standby like Joël Robuchon, or a newcomer like Gjelina at the Venetian, a Los Angeles export grilling yu choy and other sundry dishes that embody California cuisine. But you would be way, way off. The toughest seat is actually the 24-hour Palace Station Oyster Bar, where devotees are queued up at all hours of the day and night to taste its Cajun- and Creole-style seafood dishes. The 18-seat Oyster Bar, which turns 30 years old this fall, has a fervent cult following and there are no reservations. There's also nothing exclusive about access, nor is there a dress code: It's literally in the middle of the casino floor, where the slots bisect the table games. And although it's certainly not cheap (it's serving seafood, after all), it's not cost-prohibitive, meaning its customers are a mix of tourists and locals. Las Vegas is a city rife with contradictions, so it's no surprise that its most exclusive restaurant is simultaneously one of its most inclusive. It also sits within one of Vegas's most populist casinos, on an expanse of land just west of I-15 on Sahara Avenue, awkwardly positioned between the Strip and Downtown. The location, simultaneously inconvenient and yet a short drive from nearly everything, embodies the term 'neither here nor there.' It's a spot that's so seemingly unremarkable, in fact, that its decades of success don't make much sense to the casual observer. ('People thought he was crazy,' says Lorenzo Fertitta, son of Station Casinos founder Frank Fertitta Jr., referring to the location of his father's venture.) Hopefully, a picture is beginning to come together. You're in Vegas, hungry in the infernal heat, dodging F1 construction and checking out whatever ads or emojis happen to be emblazoned on the Sphere that day. Walking into Palace Station, there's the familiar waft of cigarette smoke. Dragon Link and other creature-themed slot machines call out ( 'Buffaloooooo!' ), but there's a hint of something else floating in the air — tomatoes, cream and... is that sherry? The aromas intensify as you go deeper into the belly of the building. The first thing you'll notice is the marquee: 'Oyster Bar 24/7,' with a little anchor on the side. The faux chalkboard lettering on a half-octagon that wraps around above the bar has a distinctly '90s Bar Louie feel, but don't let that dissuade you. Past the stanchions cordoning off Oyster Bar from the rest of the casino is a long line of people on one side, like theater patrons waiting for the latest hot off-Broadway show. Behind the bar, there is an entrancing performance: Cooks and servers rhythmically rotate behind billowing clouds of steam, pouring drinks and arranging oysters in circles atop crushed ice. Oyster Bar's most popular dish is not, in fact, the fat Gulf oysters as big as computer mice, but rather the pan roast. And while plenty of people get oysters or a shrimp cocktail on the side, or maybe an order of the herbaceous gumbo or heady etouffee, most people come for the pan roast. Oyster Bar goes through 33,000 gallons of it annually. The counterintuitively named dish, which may originate with Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York, conjures an image of a chicken in a pan, roasting in the oven. Put this out of your head. Instead, imagine a bisque — a thick, creamy, shellfish-based seafood soup, a rustic base for huge floating hunks of seafood. Anchored by tomatoes and cream, girded with an aromatic sofrito that tastes of the holy trinity of Cajun cooking, the pan roast has an undertone of garlic and a nutty fruitiness, akin to brandy or fortified wine. It should be eaten with a spoon, but some larger chunks of shrimp, crab, and lobster may need to be forked out. Served with white rice and a basic chunk of bread, the pan roast can also be eaten with a side of noodles. Rice is the correct choice, however, as the surface tension allows the base of the roast to envelop the rice, creating a creamy crustacean porridge. Let's be clear — this is not revelatory fine dining. I remember, after first having the pan roast, feeling even slightly underwhelmed. At the end of the day, it's 'a jazzed-up bisque,' in the words of specialty cook Bob Higdon, who's worked at Oyster Bar for the last 25 years and has a seemingly endless repertoire of droll quips and one-liners he delivers to patrons. But a day later, I felt an unfamiliar tug. The taste had almost instantly grown on me, like I'd been eating it for years. And now, sitting here writing this piece, the slow burn has grown into a bonfire: I want to go back. I can't wait to go back. 'I tell people all the time,' Higdon says. 'I said, 'You're not going to hate me now, you're going to hate me next week when you're sitting at home and get that flavor in the back of your mouth.'' And he's right. That's exactly what happened. Beyond the pan roast, there are a few things you need to know when dining at Oyster Bar. First, you'll be asked to select a spice level, 10 being the highest. Most people who like spicy food can probably swing a 7 or 8 without feeling like they've made a grave mistake. Otherwise, stick to a 4. Spice can always be added in the form of the off-menu lava sauce — a tangy, chunky mixture of hot peppers that you can feel burning your mouth before the spoon even reaches your lips. You have to ask for it specifically, and it's only for showoffs and true masochists. Second, the entrees are a huge amount of food, especially with the rice. Finishing a pan roast solo is a serious undertaking. The leftovers are worth keeping if your hotel room has a microwave and/or fridge. Third, don't bring the kids. Oyster Bar is literally a bar, and they can't seat anyone under 21. Also, you won't get the exact recipe, so don't ask. ('You don't ask the Colonel for 11 spices,' says Higdon.) And finally, be ready to wait. The story of the wait, and of Oyster Bar, starts in 1976 with Fertitta Jr., who discovered a demographic that had not fully been tapped into: a casino that catered to Las Vegas locals, not tourists. (Indeed, he opened as simply The Casino.) Oyster Bar came along in October 1995. While there may have been a Cajun joint or two around town at the time, this particular style of New Orleans cooking hadn't quite taken hold in Vegas. Emeril Lagasse, he of the onomatopoetic catchphrase, didn't open New Orleans Fish House at MGM Grand until the following month. Today, there are plenty of Cajun options in Vegas, mostly off-Strip, mostly of the crawfish or seafood-boil variety. In the summer of 2000, something had changed. 'That's when I noticed the lines.' Oyster Bar was opened, in part, as an apparent nod to Fertitta Jr.'s origins in southeastern Texas, near the Louisiana border. 'That kind of food is very prominent around there,' says Dave Horn, general manager of Durango casino and former GM of Palace Station. 'I think it's a real easy tie-in that they said, 'Okay, you know what? We should bring this here.'' Interest in the restaurant ramped up slowly. 'It was a cult following at first,' says Horn, who was a valet attendant for the casino at the time. He posits that Oyster Bar's rise in popularity coincided with the rise of online culture in the mid-1990s. 'That's when you have the internet start to come alive,' Horn recalls. '[There's] that five-year period where people can start to talk about things on the internet or Palace Station can put something out there.' By the time Horn came back for his second stint at Palace Station in the summer of 2000, something had changed. 'That's when I noticed the lines,' he says. The line is an amalgamation of different cities, states, and countries, where folks of every shape and size stand and wait for one of those 18 coveted seats at the counter. The line can take as long as five hours to get through ('Super Bowl weekend a couple years ago,' says Higdon). The line is, in some ways, the defining characteristic of the Oyster Bar experience. A blessing and a curse. Okay, it's mostly a curse. Lines are unpleasant. But decadeslong Oyster Bar customers seem to think it's worth the wait — or, at the very least, they've convinced themselves of that truth. Gina Bruno, a flight attendant visiting from the Washington, D.C., area, has been coming here for the past 20 years. 'It's like a camaraderie,' she says. 'You stand in line, you talk about what you're gonna eat, and it's just a whole experience.' But she is also frank about the line, which she and her dining companions had been standing in for about two hours. 'It sucks,' she says, laughing. 'It's worth the wait,' says Barry Bryant, who works in entertainment in Atlanta. Bryant, who also has been coming to Oyster Bar for two decades, says he makes the trip every time he comes to Las Vegas. 'It's not too fancy, it's casual and it's different — it hits different.' Anitra Baker has been a fan for even longer — 25 years. She typically visits from California every year on her birthday. 'You can't get the same taste anywhere else,' she says. 'I can't find it anywhere else. I literally come all the way from San Francisco to get it.' 'I can't find it anywhere else. I literally come all the way from San Francisco to get it.' I've been to some restaurants where there's a vague feeling that the wait was somewhat manufactured, or intentional. As in, staff could have done more food prep or planning ahead of time if they'd wanted to, in order to cut down on wait times. That's not the case here. Oyster Bar cooks move as quickly as possible, turning all the seats at a rate that approaches once per hour, 24 hours a day. With only 18 people being served at a time, each pan roast, gumbo, or bouillabaisse taking around 8 to 10 minutes to cook, and just six jacketed steam kettles to prepare them, the cooks are limited in how quickly they can serve those customers. The kettles resemble small woks and sit in a row behind the counter in a setup that looks literally steampunk — tubes and pipes wriggling out of the counter to spew cold water or feed jets of hot steam into the containers. There are numerous advantages to cooking with these kettles: being able to boil cold water in about 30 seconds, not having to constantly wash pots and pans, and keeping the kitchen cooler because there's no open flame. But the biggest advantage is the evenness and consistency of the temperature. 'You can let your stuff reduce without it burning the sauces,' Higdon explains. 'The whole surface of our kettle is the same temperature. It doesn't have a hot spot.' No hot spots mean uniform cooking, which means you don't get some pieces of seafood that are perfectly cooked and some that are rubbery and overdone. And no broken sauces, either. 'If you've ever had a scorched cream sauce, you know that's not good stuff,' he says. The cooking method also provides a bit of theatrics, which has been another part of Oyster Bar's lasting appeal. Ordering, preparing, plating, and consuming all happen within a couple feet of each other. 'There's no other setting you get like that besides hibachi, [where] you get to interact with your cook and they cook right in front of you,' says Paul Sanchez, the chef that currently oversees Oyster Bar. Sanchez notes that it takes a special kind of cook to make it work. 'I fell in love with it right away,' he says. 'The style of cooking, being able to talk to people from all across the world, interacting with guests. But a lot of cooks, they don't like that. You know, that's why they're back of the house.' Nothing has been able to dethrone the original Oyster Bar. Las Vegas is a place heavy on mimicry. When something in the city works, particularly in the food arena, imitators pop up left and right. And while that's certainly happened with Oyster Bar — even in the form of places opened down the street by cooks who quite literally used to work at Oyster Bar — nothing has been able to dethrone the original. (Station Casinos also has four other Oyster Bars at its different properties. I've heard they don't match the charm of the original.) Sanchez explains it this way: 'My theory is, in a chef's mind, you want to make things better, always want to take it to the next level. Well, here, it's not about taking it to the next level. It's about keeping the consistency... If somebody comes here from Hawai'i once a year, and this is the place to go, they come and order a pan roast. Next time they come, they want that exact same flavor profile.' In other words, nostalgia and sense memory are powerful aspects of food. And when people fall in love, they don't want a better, flashier version. They want what they had. 'If you try to recreate [the pan roast] and put it somewhere else, it won't work,' says chef David Chang, who has been beating the Oyster Bar drum for years. Chang estimates he's eaten there between 30 and 40 times. Trying to replicate the exact chemistry of a place like that, he says, is a futile exercise. 'Sometimes a restaurant like that works because it's the perfect balance of ingredients, of everything. From the ambience to the cigarettes in the air, everything works together.' 'I don't describe it,' Chang says. 'I just say, 'Trust the process and you'll be so happy.'' Even if that means waiting for an hour or two. Or three. Most of the day, there's no getting around the wait. There is one workaround — well, it's not exactly a workaround, but a path to a shorter wait. If you want a pan roast first thing in the morning, and let's face it, you might not after a night of Jägerbombs, try rolling in around 7 or 8 a.m. The line will likely be much shorter. But aside from that, the best bet is to come as a crew and rotate people in and out of the line. Someone waits while the other people go gamble, go to the sportsbook, or mall-walk the casino floor. Horn even recalls seeing people put in food orders while waiting in line, just to tide them over: 'They'd literally put in a pizza and a drink order... In my head I'm thinking, '[These are] people eating and drinking in the line to wait for a food and drink product .'' But the best thing to do is to embrace it. Give in to it. Come hungry and ready to wait, safe in the knowledge that the entire sensory experience of the Oyster Bar — the visuals of the cooking, the smells of the steaming seafood, the electronic din of spinning slot machines, the sardonic one-liners coming out of Chef Bob's mouth — all combine together in a way that is sui generis in the restaurant world. Like the symphony inside the pan roast itself, there's nothing quite like it. Sign up for our newsletter.
Time Out
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
What it's like to dine at Stubborn Seed from Michelin-starred chef Jeremy Ford
After winning season 13 of Top Chef, Jeremy Ford opened his farm-to-table restaurant Stubborn Seed in Miami Beach. Using produce from his own farm he created a rotating tasting menu based on seasonal ingredients that caught the attention of diners and food critics. In 2022, Stubborn Seed was awarded its first Michelin star. Now, Ford is in Las Vegas offering a seasonal tasting menu at his Stubborn Seed sequel inside Resorts World. We dined there. Here's what to expect. The restaurant is twice the size of the Miami Beach location with seating for 130. Ford partnered with Celano Design Studio on the space, which includes a three-tiered circular chandelier hanging over the bar. You'll also spot a crashing blue wave hand-painted on a curved canvas above the exhibition kitchen, where a team of chefs meticulously prepare Ford's modern American fare. Ford focuses on providing diners a vegetable-forward meal that mixes in proteins like salmon, Japanese yellowtail or Wagyu beef. He's sourcing ingredients regionally and locally, including using Vegas-grown Desert Moon mushrooms. The dishes are all artfully plated. Edible flowers top certain dishes, as do airy foams, while swipes of sauces ring the plate on others. Stubborn Seed opened in February with an eight-course winter tasting menu ($135 per person) that included sake and citrus cured Japanese yellowtail, uni panna cotta, and winter truffle ricotta gnudi with maitake mushrooms, buttery greens and crunchy pine nuts. The meal can be upgraded to the 'elevated experience' ($175) with add-ons such as a kaluga caviar macaron and Hudson Valley foie gras and black truffle tart. A wine pairing can be added for $70. A tight à la carte menu is available at the bar. Here guests can order some of those same tasting menu dishes individually or opt for items like Iberico ham fritters ($22), a Wagyu smash burger ($28) or barramundi with butter poached baby leaks ($33). Equally impressive is Stubborn Seed's beverage program. The restaurant's signature cocktail is called the Kill Dill. It's a fresh green cocktail that combines gin and the absinthe-like Dolin Génépy with cucumber, dill syrup and egg white. Other drinks are riffs on originals with Stubborn Seed's version of the old fashioned using black tea-infused whiskey and a negroni featuring ancho chile liqueur.
Forbes
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Jeremy Ford's Stubborn Seed Brings Its Playful Tasting Menus To Las Vegas
Stubborn Seed's "elevated experience" includes a caviar macaron. Stubborn Seed, Jeremy Ford and Grove Bay Hospitality's Michelin-star Miami destination, is ready to make a splash in Las Vegas. Tucked on the north end of Resorts World Las Vegas, steps from Brezza, Aqua and Carversteak, the new Stubborn Seed debuted in February. This is a modern American restaurant with playful seasonal tasting menus that start at $135, a good value for those who want a fine-dining experience that isn't overly fussy on the Strip. Upgrade to Stubborn Seed's $175 'elevated experience,' still significantly less expensive than the more elite tasting-menu restaurants in Las Vegas, to get sumptuous add-ons like a kaluga caviar macaron and a Hudson Valley foie gras and black truffle tart. Ford, who won season 13 of Top Chef, expertly plays with textures and temperatures as he serves uni panna cotta with yuzu gelee and orange kombu granita. It's a terrific combination of luxurious and refreshing, a proper introduction to the way Ford thinks and cooks. And as Ford has said before, Stubborn Seed wants to showcase 'every ingredient at its peak,' so the restaurant's winter menu in Las Vegas features winter truffle ricotta gnudi with maitakes and buttery greens. Stubborn Seed also makes the most of mushrooms as it amps up umami in standout dishes like pan-roasted barramundi with baby leeks, fennel, shiitake sofrito and a resplendent galangal green curry. Layering umami on top of umami on top of more umami and plenty of distinct savory notes is how Ford likes to roll: Westholme wagyu strip loin is prepared with brown butter soubise, Vegas-grown Desert Moon mushrooms, Marcona-almond-fermented soybean, crispy miso cabbage and chicken jus. There's a lot going on here, and it all works nicely together. Westholme wagyu from Australia gets the Stubborn Seed treatment. The Las Vegas Stubborn Seed, with its industrial-chic Miami roots, is a restaurant that's polished but not too polished, an upscale spot that has purposefully chosen to be loose instead of buttoned-up. It's part of an eclectic dining upgrade at Resorts World, where construction is well underway on Copper Sun, a high-end hot pot restaurant from the prolific Happy Lamb restaurant group. We hear that Resorts World will soon announce a noodle-focused pop-up from an East Coast chef as it keeps things moving with its diverse restaurant collection. Resorts World is where you'll find dining destinations like the plant-based Crossroads (where chef Tal Ronnen will host a collaboration with Rocco DiSpirito and Michael Voltaggio on April 17) and Genting Palace (which has raised the stakes for all-you-can-eat Vegas experiences with its Wednesday-through-Sunday seafood buffet, where guests can load up on crab and lobster and also enjoy Beijing duck). And for those who want to experience Stubborn Seed without ordering a tasting menu, there's also a tight à la carte menu with dishes like the barramundi with green curry, a double smash burger, whole roasted cauliflower and a smoked beef rib for two. Cacio e pepe cheesy puffs and a foie gras and truffle tart could be an over-the-top bar snack or the start of a transporting dinner. The whole point of Las Vegas, of course, is choosing your own adventure.
