Michael and Jenna Morton, the Las Vegas hospitality power couple behind La Cave, Crush and One Steakhouse, have opened their first neighborhood restaurant. And what a neighborhood restaurant it is. At Morton Group’s Nudo Italiano in Southern Highlands, chef William DeMarco celebrates his Long Island roots with crowd-pleasing, family-friendly Italian-American food that you want to eat again and again.
The top-tier meatballs and stellar sausage pizza (with ricotta, chili flakes and the kind of crust that fights back just enough when you bite into it) are wondrous reminders of what can happen when a talented chef bets the house on red sauce. Nudo’s bucatini and shrimp scampi pops with Calabrian chili and a generously correct amount of garlic. Habit-forming chicken Francese over linguine is perfectly egg-battered, strikingly lemony and delightfully buttery. For dessert, there’s raspberry cheesecake “spaghetti and meatballs” with chocolate truffle orbs and white chocolate that’s grated like Parm at your table. This place is a lot of fun.
In recent years, powered by chefs including James Trees of Esther’s Kitchen and Brian Howard of Sparrow + Wolf, Las Vegas has seen its off-Strip dining and drinking scene get bigger and bolder. At the Town Square development, where Howard had an eclectic restaurant called Nu Sanctuary 15 years ago, you can now eat comforting Vietnamese food at a new outpost of Pho Kim Long or enjoy theatrical cocktails and chef Todd Mark Miller’s contemporary steakhouse fare at the vibey new Guest House.
At Town Square’s new Tamba, chef Anand Singh has a live-fire kitchen with a charcoal grill, Josper oven, tandoor and wok station that he uses to make modern Indian food and a lot more. You can and should come here for juicy fire-kissed kebabs and standard-setting curries like butter chicken and achari okra dopiaza. You’ll probably want to pair your meal with wine, sake or Giuseppe Gonzalez’s cocktails that are inspired by Indian royal history. But you should also know that Singh’s life and travels have taken him to places including the Maldives and Mexico. So there’s deeply personal all-over-the map food at Tamba, including a fierce Madras tuna laap that very much tastes like top-tier Thai street food but is an original creation all its own.
Another transporting all-over-the-map destination in Las Vegas is the new Doberman Drawing Room in the Arts District, the neighborhood where Trees recently relocated Esther’s Kitchen to a larger location and also opened Bar Boheme. At Doberman Drawing Room, a moody cocktail bar and members club that feels like an old mansion with curios from another era, famed mixologist Juyoung Kang is serving show-stopping drinks like a sweet, savory, spicy and creamy tom kha fizz and the Marilyn and Madness combo with two different Rosa vermouth cocktails side-by-side. (For a extra hit of cheekiness, see if you can find the photograph of Corner Bar Management boss Ryan Doherty in an antique cabinet.)
You can also come here for martinis with caviar-stuffed olives and the Nine Countries cocktail that merges mezcal with yuzu kosho. Like New York’s celebrated Double Chicken Please and buzzy Los Angeles newcomers Daisy Margarita Bar and Bar Benjamin, Doberman is adept at creating drinks that taste like dinner and also drinks that taste like dessert. If you want to eat here for real, tinned mussels and sea salt kettle chips with terrific sour cream and caramelized onion dip are nice ways to start. You can get caviar with your dip, too.
Casual off-Strip dining is also leveling up at hot spots like the new Southwest Las Vegas outpost of Nana’s Green Tea, a popular Tokyo-born cafe with beautiful matcha parfaits and soul-warming dishes like soboro don and chicken katsu curry. The cutlet game is also strong at the new Cheongdam Food Hall on Spring Mountain Road at Durango Drive, where Namsan Tonkatsu serves Korean cutlets right next to where Curry Ya serves Japanese cutlets.
There’s a lot to explore at this food hall, including Broken Coffee (which makes lovely signature lattes like a mocha latte, an organic hojicha latte and a strawberries-and-cream latte), the buzzing Smile Shota all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant, grab-and-go Korean food at Market Green Table and machines where you can make packaged ramen. As always, a lot of the fun in Vegas is about choosing your own adventure.