Tableau Vivant
A charming, light-flled refitting of the formal Tableau now has a lively menu to match.
There is no better way to greet the warmer months than by sitting in an airy conservatory with a full view of a pool surrounded by warming bathers—and no danger of being splashed. Conservatory dining at its best strikes a coy balance between whimsical and elegant. big crystal clear windows let all the light in, though it should never get in your eyes. dishes are formal and, most of all, colorful in spring and summer, but not so overwrought that a fortuitous crop of garlic ramps or fiddlehead ferns couldn’t make a cameo appearance during their brief seasons. This kind of sparkling, well, tableau is what the restaurant Tableau has come to represent, and a vibrant new menu matches the feel of the room—now in its more playful, less formal second life. After a design perk-up, the menu, already beautifully sourced and thoughtfully considered, needed a chef to breeze in with whimsy and freshness. executive Chef Paul Zlatos was no stranger to Wynn. After training at Le Cordon bleu and starting his culinary career in Scottsdale, Arizona, he moved to
Las Vegas, where he served as chef tournant for Alex Stratta at Alex until the restaurant closed in 2010. He then helped to open Lakeside, working alongside chef David Walzog until 2012, when he decamped to California and Hawaii to be Oprah Winfrey’s personal chef—although he and the chefs who preceded him won’t disclose the details of their time with the Queen of All Media. At the end of 2014, Zlatos returned to Wynn to elevate the food to the level of Tableau’s perennially summer décor, and his newest dishes evoke happy memories for him. The new Acai Booster, for instance, a slurry of frozen berries studded with strawberries, banana, homemade granola, and orange blossom honey, “is one of my favorite things,” Zlatos says. “I’d walk down to the beach with my wife or kid and eat one of those and chill out. It feels like such an indulgence, but I didn’t want to go home and take a nap.” A server pours bright-green sweet pea soup around a little dome of blue crab, lemon crème, fresh mint, and baby carrots. Stir it around and all the bright flavors explode (softly) into the soup. A Caesar salad is deceptively unadorned; it’s the rustic crunchy and chewy croutons and deeply garlicky dressing that make it special—and minimalist in a way that no other Caesar can successfully claim. The grilled prawn salad, whose big juicy crustaceans sit atop crunchy quinoa, baby asparagus, Boston leaf lettuce, red endive, and a little quail egg, is a bright rainbow of a plate. And all of the new dishes follow Zlatos’s philosophy of simplicity: “You shouldn’t have to think about how you’re going to eat something. If you put three great ingredients on a plate and make it taste amazing, that’s half the battle.” The chef himself favors the soft and buttery Burrata—which appears for spring with smoked prosciutto, sugar snap peas, candied pecans, arugula, and aged balsamic. He’ll pair it with the season’s best tomatoes in summer, “and we might play with it—it could be apricots or grilled peaches or figs,” he says.
In fact, explains Roger Thomas, Executive Vice President of Design for Wynn Design and Development, the restaurant has evolved into the playful room diners experience today. And the new décor demanded dishes that are as colorful and effervescent as the space itself. “The original had a more formal feeling. It was the exclusive enclave of the cognoscenti at Wynn, tucked away and made exclusively for them.” While the pool view of the terrace hinted at garden informality, the materials—a carpeted floor in a large floral grid and wood finished with a textured paint—gave it a patina of age and dignity. The Louis XVI dining chairs were upholstered with a heavy fringe, and the windows were formally draped. “That vocabulary reminds us more of French formality than fun,” Thomas says. By the time Steve Wynn decided to perk up the room—open for breakfast, lunch, and weekend brunch—in the summer of 2012, the habits of Las Vegas diners had changed. Comfort was now the priority. Always a proponent of keeping the best things in the room, Wynn and the design team retained the bones of the place—the architecture, the bar with its rope-textured front. But off came the heavy drapes and out went the carpet, replaced by a translucent bronze solar shade that disappears into the ceiling when not in use and a checkerboard marble floor, its slightly more live acoustics creating just the right amount of convivial buzz in the room—for all the resorts’ guests. The original color of the windows would stay, however. Years earlier, Thomas sampled the green of the outdoor treillage at Petit Trianon, on the grounds of the palace of Versailles, and that is the very particular green you will see today. The ceiling was livened up with a saturated bumblebee yellow. What guests take away is a rich but open escape that feels as if they’re dining right by the pool—which one can actually do on the terrace immediately outside—but with all the niceties of an indoor space. And before guests could fall into a Louis XVI period piece, Thomas wiped away the formality of those chairs with a masked face on the back of each one, painted by Kazumi Yoshida and printed on Clarence House fabric that he had been saving for just such an occasion. “It’s a bit of comic relief in the room, provided as a foil for formality and classic architecture,” Thomas says. Now filled with Chef Zlatos’s lively dishes, restaurant and cuisine work in colorful concert to give you a sense of endless summer.