Incentive - February 2008 - (Page 76)

TRAVEL LAS VEGAS Batali and Wolfgang Puck, sports bar The 40/40 Club from music mogul Jay-Z, retail and convention space, and a Canyon Ranch SpaClub featuring Aquavana water massage treatments. The Best the Big Cities Have to Offer Including a Batali- or Puck-branded restaurant on-site is practically required in Vegas these days. Chefs have become a new type of rock star in Vegas, as the city has capitalized on America’s heightened interest in high-end dining, turning the Vegas food scene into one of the city’s biggest draws. Restaurants from Food Network stars like Emeril Lagasse and Batali as well as established, but not quite household-name, chefs like Michael Mina and Tom Colicchio, all offer a range of quality dining options for visitors. And this doesn’t mean just marquee names are opening restaurants there. Last year Caesars brought in Rao’s, a famous Italian restaurant from East Harlem, known for its delicious menu and exclusivity. They brought out the owner and duplicated the menu verbatim, trying to create the exact same New York Italian experience in Vegas. Such efforts, which have intensified recently, have helped Las Vegas create an image as an authentic dining city, Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak elevates the traditional steakhouse but still keeps the menu simple midst of another wave of development, its biggest yet, with $30 billion to $40 billion being spent in the upcoming months on new properties and the creation of almost 40,000 new rooms. The largest of these developments is CityCenter, by MGM MIRAGE. Slated for completion by the end of 2009, this $7.8 billion project includes a hotel-casino, two boutique hotels, more than 2,500 luxury residences and a 500,000-square-foot retail and entertainment space. Travelers roaming through the center’s vast courtyard, surrounded by manicured vegetation, glassy skyscrapers and an array of shops and galleries, will feel as if they’re walking through the downtown of a futuristic metropolis. The main entrance has even been modeled after New York’s Park Avenue, according to Gail Fitzgerald, the vice president of hotel sales and marketing for CityCenter. “A lot of thought was given to ‘what would be the best use of the property?’ ” says Fitzgerald. “We had this land and fabulous location on the Las Vegas Strip, and we knew we could build another sprawling resort or we could be a little more environmentally conscious and make it more dense. Therefore, there’s multiple buildings and [it is] built vertically.” Following the opening of CityCenter will come Echelon, a similar, if slightly less massive, city-within-a-city development, slated to open in 2010. Echelon also brings a multi-building urban aesthetic with four hotels, a casino and the 175,000-squarefoot meeting and convention space, the Las Vegas ExpoCenter, on the 63-acre property. “They’re trying to utilize the property that they have to its fullest and provide the Incentive travelers will find plenty of big city buys during leisure periods. customers basically all of the amenities that they’re looking for within that area,” says Jeremy Handel, spokesman for the LVCVA. Handel points to the newly opened Palazzo Resort Hotel Casino as offering a similarly comprehensive menu of services, if less consciously “city-like.” A sister property of, and adjacent to, the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, the resort includes restaurants from chefs including Mario mentioned in the same sentence as New York or San Francisco. As Incentive recently reported, in November, Michelin released its first Las Vegas guide (making it only the fourth American city to be Michelin-rated), granting French restaurant Joël Robuchon at the MGM Grand the rare honor of three stars. Earlier in 2007, AAA awarded four restaurants its prestigious Five 76 | Incentive | February 2008 | incentivemag.com http://www.incentivemag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Incentive - February 2008

Incentive Magazine - February 2008 Editor’s Note: Archie and the Boys In The News Cover Story: On The Ball Incentives Incentive Primer: How to Use Sporting Events Incentive Interview: Jim Avery on Doing the Right Thing Employee Empowerment Motivates and Pays Dividends Hospitals, Nurses Win With Flexible Scheduling Legal Ease: Safety Programs and Unions Case Study: The Weitz Company Retains Its Boomers Potentials: Here and Now Star Power in the Kitchen Awards: Gift Card Trends for the New Year Travel News The Manhattanization of Las Vegas Classics Renewed: Monaco and France Advertiser Index Off The Cuff: Tumi’s Mike Landry

Incentive - February 2008

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