Life is Beautiful goes local with food offerings this year

The Life is Beautiful Festival may taste just as good this year, but it’ll be without the out-of-town chefs who made appearances in years past.

The demonstrations and guest-chef-in-the-kitchen events that characterized the first three years of the festival will be absent this year. The Culinary Village, which has been a mainstay, will involve more than 40 chefs, restaurants, food trucks and other vendors spread over six locations throughout the blueprint of the festival Friday through Sunday in downtown Las Vegas.

“We’ve cut back on the chef demonstrations, but not so much on the offerings,” said Ryan Doherty, festival chief experience officer. “You still have some really great food.”

This year, Doherty said, the emphasis will be on Southern Nevada restaurants.

“We have some great chefs in this city — some of the best in the whole country,” he said.

Managing director Eve Cohen said the focus on all things local carries through the whole festival.

“We want to be sure visitors to our festival understand everything that’s fantastic and wonderful about Las Vegas, including our food,” she said.

In response to critics who say the fact that these restaurants are Las Vegas-based means they could visit them at any time, Cohen said the advantage is they’ll all be clustered in a relatively small area.

“It’s the same way that when you go to a music festival, you get to see 80 different bands over three days,” she said. “With 35 to 40 restaurants all in the same place at the same time, you get to choose your own adventure.”

Cohen said some of the festival’s earliest participants, including Nobu, RM Seafood and Rx Boiler Room, Honey Salt, Buddy V’s Ristorante and Fleur, will be back this year.

“These are guys who have been with us since Day 1,” she said. “They’re committed to what we’re doing and they’re some of the best this city has to offer.”

Doherty said the absence of Grills and Guitars, which had been held the night before the festival opened, was an issue of logistics.

“It’s a ton of work, and we expanded the festival this year,” he said. “Sometimes this stuff just comes down to bandwidth.”

One thing that will get plenty of attention this year is the beverage program. Andrew Pollard, beverage-development manager for Breakthru Beverage, said festivalgoers will have access to about 25 specialty cocktails in 20 to 30 areas throughout the festival where they’ll be able to get beverages. Strawberry Lemonade was the most popular beverage last year, he said, and that’ll be echoed this year by the Strawberry Blonde, which is Effen vodka with lemon juice and Jarritos strawberry soda. Rum in the Coconut will be Bacardi Coconut Rum and fresh coconut water served in a coconut, and the Festival Mule will be Effen vodka with lime juice and Barritt’s Ginger Beer.

“This is something we start working on the day after Life is Beautiful,” he said. “We’ll have a commissary of 25- to 30-person teams, full-production, back of house with portable refrigerated trucks, storing and managing inventories, backing and production lines, bottling and labeling lines.”

Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at Hrinella@reviewjournal.com. Find more of her stories at www.reviewjournal.com, and follow @HKRinella on Twitter.