AUTHOR BIO: Mei Chen has worked for nearly a dozen start-ups in as many years, taking her to several West Coast cities. While she’s sure her current day job is permanent, she also has her eye on Carmel.
Emeril Lagasse has been a Las Vegas chef since celebrity chefs first began turning the Strip into their own expensive food court. His latest restaurant heads in the other direction.
Meril is now open at M Resort Spa Casino in Henderson, well south of the resorts where Lagasse made his name in Las Vegas. It’s his first restaurant in the valley outside the Strip corridor, and it arrives as the M Resort finishes a major expansion that nearly doubled the size of the hotel.
Boudin balls
The restaurant is named after Lagasse’s daughter and follows the Meril he opened in New Orleans in 2016. The idea is similarly personal: a casual restaurant built around the food Lagasse likes to eat, without requiring every dish to stay within the borders of Louisiana.
There’s still plenty of Emeril in at Meril. Barbecued shrimp comes with rosemary biscuits. Boudin balls are filled with pepper jack cheese. Shrimp-and-andouille gumbo and a seafood boil keep the menu rooted in the cooking that made Lagasse famous.
Barbecue shrimp
Then come crispy Gulf shrimp tacos with sambal aioli, mussels with piri piri and chorizo, blue crab linguine with Calabrian chile butter, and buttermilk fried chicken with tzatziki. Breakfast begins at 6 a.m. with Bananas Foster French toast, barbecued shrimp over a grit cake, and pineapple upside-down cornbread with bacon marmalade.
Gulf shrimp tacos
Blue crab linguine
That range makes sense at M Resort, a casino built on Las Vegas Boulevard but far removed from the most famous section of it. Meril has 220 seats, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a terrace overlooking the resort’s pool and the desert beyond. It’s open for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night meals on weekends.
Lagasse still operates Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House at MGM Grand and Delmonico Steakhouse at the Venetian. Those restaurants belong to the era when a famous chef’s name above a casino entrance was enough to make news.
Meril has a different job. It needs to serve hotel guests, certainly, but also a fast-growing part of the valley where diners increasingly expect worthwhile restaurants close to home. For one of the chefs who helped define dining on the Strip, Henderson is now the more interesting bet.
Cameron Rolka and Sarah Welch opened Umbo, a 25-seat oyster bar in Traverse City.
By MARIA RODRIGUEZ
