There. Now those of you with short attention spans can go check a sports score or IM a buddy. For the rest of you, here’s the full story.

If you don’t know who Emeril Lagasse is you must not eat or watch television or read. This is the third Vegas restaurant for the Food Network star, joining the seafood specialties at Emeril’s in the MGM Grand and the steaks of Delmonico’s at The Venetian. Table 10 doesn’t have a specific focus like those two eateries, instead it blazes new trails into fresh American cuisine while celebrating some of the dishes and flavors that made Emeril famous in the first place.

Of course, Emeril isn’t actually in the kitchen slaving over a hot stove, but you’ll still be in very capable hands under the guidance of Chef de Cuisine Jean Paul Labadie. Labadie has worked alongside Lagasse since 1994, first as a cook at Emeril’s in New Orleans and working his way up to Chef de Cuisine at Emeril’s in Las Vegas. In other words, this guy knows his way around a kitchen.

And what comes out of that kitchen is remarkable. This is the kind of place where you could put down the menu and just tell the waiter to start bringing you stuff. We didn’t sample every last item they were serving but we tasted a lot of it and there wasn’t a single bite that I regret. Everything was bursting with flavor, fresh as if it had just come out of the ground or the ocean or the pasture hours before we ate it, and elegantly and intricately constructed.

We began with a couple of items from the “cold starters” section of the menu. The grilled and chilled scallops came on a bed of hearts of palm and arugula tossed with black truffle vinaigrette and Portobello mushrooms. Serving scallops chilled is surprising but successful here and the mushrooms were a smoky, robust delight. The “Baby Bibb” salad featured tangy pickled red onions and was sprinkled with their own bacon.

A side note about that bacon, because, well, it’s bacon and as we know everything tastes better with bacon. Here they make their own, curing the pork belly for a week with Granny Smith apples, black pepper, and honey then smoking it over hickory wood. They do all this, mind you, so they can do things like put bits of it on the Baby Bibb salad. Attention to detail, that’s all I’m saying.

A trio of items from the “hot starters” menu came next including steamed Prince Edward Island mussels with more of the bacon in a saffron broth; a miso marinated black cod served on a bed of rice noodles in tamari broth; and a wilted spinach salad that immediately won my hard to win heart. The husky, deliciously dark flavor of the duck confit that topped it mixed perfectly with the silky goat cheese and a malted vinegar dressing.

The petite sirloin filet came in a bowl of black-eyed peas and rice, which gave the already juicy steak an even more extravagant taste. And fans of seafood cannot go wrong with the roasted Mediterranean sea bass, stuffed with crabmeat relish and tomato fondue.

Or you could go for something from the rotisserie. They have chicken and pork loin but we sampled the lamb, which was much more subtle than lamb sometimes is and that’s a good thing.

Don’t miss the sides section of the menu, especially the baked lobster macaroni and cheese (as good as it sounds) and the mini Yukon gold potatoes served with kale and onions.

The rest of the menu is filled with more tempting sounding dishes, from New Orleans inspired cuisine like Pasta Jambalaya served with jumbo gulf shrimp, plenty of fresh seafood like a grilled Atlantic salmon done with homemade chorizo sausage and tortilla hash, hearty Angus steaks, and much more. We’re glad the Chef was picking for us because we don’t know that we would’ve been able to pick for ourselves.

Oh, and don’t forget about dessert. We certainly didn’t. We sampled a bunch of things and they were all amazing but the winners in my book were the lemon crème brulee that had a blueberry jam foundation, the “almost flourless” chocolate cake, and the star of the show malasadas. What are malasadas, you may be asking? Well, they are basically donut dough, pounded flat and filled with white chocolate chips, then rolled into a ball, deep fried, and rolled again in cinnamon sugar and served with warm vanilla bean cream. We want more and we want them now.

All this good food and a comfortable, casually upscale environment (dark woods, funky lighting fixtures, an exhibition kitchen, and display cases full of pantry staples and chef’s jackets), superb service, and – are you sitting down? – affordable prices.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, unlike most of the other high-end restaurants in Vegas, this is a place where you can have a world-class meal without needing a world-class bank account. That’s not to say it’s cheap, exactly – this isn’t McDonald’s. But with starters mostly in the $8-13 range, most of the entrees from $25-38, and sides and desserts all under $10 you could do a full meal with wine, tax, and tip for under $75 per person (although you could easily spend more). I dare you to find a restaurant of this caliber and pedigree in any Vegas hotel that can beat those prices. They have an even less expensive lunch menu if you’re so inclined.

I could go on forever about how much I loved this restaurant, but I suppose I’ll let the rest of you go off and check your stock prices and e-mail. But be sure to file Table 10 under your “favorites” list. It’s certainly on mine.

Palazzo
3327 Las Vegas Blvd. S.
702-607-6363
website
Hours:

Question: You spend a lot of time critiquing the hotels in Las Vegas. If you could build your own hotel, what lessons would you incorporate into it to make it better for visitors?

Answer: I’m going to take a “money is no object” tactic on this – if we’re going to dream, we might as well dream big.

First, I’d make the hotel easy to access from the parking garage. I know that Palazzo’s underground garage was expensive and only happened because there was no place else to put it, but it is a model for how to do parking right. I’d make sure that there were multiple ways to get upstairs from escalators to elevators and would make it so you could go directly from your car to the hotel tower without having to change elevators.

I’d also make it so that you don’t have to traipse through the casino to get to your room. This goes against conventional wisdom but there are few hotels in Vegas that do it this way (Planet Hollywood, Mandalay Bay, Monte Carlo) and they are doing just fine. If people want to gamble, they’ll find the casino without forcing them to walk through it.

Next, I’d make the hotel more manageable by breaking it up into multiple towers surrounding a central core. I’m all for the bigger is better way of thinking, but instead of putting 4,000 rooms in a single tower that then requires long walks, I’d put them in several smaller towers so you could get in and out quickly.

Each of those towers would feature a different room product – from relatively basic accommodations in one tower up to luxury suites in another. And I’d price those rooms fairly and consistently – no more of this $99 one week and $499 the next. If a room can make a profit at $99 a night then that shouldn’t change just because there are more demand for the room.

I’d also be sure to focus on a broad mix of price points on things like entertainment, nightclubs, shopping, and especially restaurants. Regarding the latter, I’d stack it up with lots of low-cost (but good) options like Capriotti’s sandwiches and still include some of the fancier restaurants for those with the budget and inclination to take part in them.

And finally, regarding the gambling I’d strive to make my casino the “loosest” in town. Winning people are happy people and happy people will want to come back again and again. I’m not saying I’d give away the store – I’m not crazy, I want to make money.

But I guess that’s the overall “theme” of my hotel: I’d rather make a little less money and provide a really fantastic experience than make boatloads of money by pricing most normal people out of the option of ever visiting.

Of course that's easy to say when it's all theoretical. Maybe if I had the billions of dollars it would take to build something like this, my outlook would change. Anyone want to give me billions of dollars to find out?

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