Restaurants see vibrant scene growing in downtown Las Vegas

It seems like a graduating class.

Another group of restaurants has opened in downtown Las Vegas — primarily in the Fremont East corridor — and the enthusiasm of the owners, managers and chefs is hard to miss.

“Downtown is a cool place; it’s really starting to be a hip place,” said Bradley Manchester, chef/owner of Glutton at 616 E. Carson Ave. “It’s getting cleaned up, and I really wanted to be part of what’s going on down here.”

Glutton was at the head of the new pack, opening April 10. Manchester said he was attracted by the energy downtown, and wanted his restaurant to feel like it was on a street in San Francisco, Chicago or Portland, Ore.

“That was really important to me, in what the concept of the restaurant was going to be,” he said.

Cities in other places, and downtown’s ability to eventually capture the spirit of them, also was an attraction for VegeNation chef/owner Donald Lemperle, whose restaurant opened April 22, also at 616 E. Carson Ave.

“I’m from New York, and I kind of like the urban environment over here,” Lemperle said. “There’s a little bit of a vibe.”

There’s more of a sense of community downtown, said many, including Brandon Trahan, chef/owner of Zydeco Po-Boys, which opened June 15 in the same building as Glutton and VegeNation.

“I’ve been here for seven years, and I’ve worked on the Strip and I’ve worked in Summerlin, and I live in the southwest part of the valley,” Trahan said. “Every time I come downtown — and maybe because of the Downtown Project and knowing some of the people and hanging around — I felt like part of the community, which I didn’t as much in other parts of the valley.”

Trahan said the Downtown Project’s initiatives to develop new businesses downtown also attracted him to the location.

“With all of the development going on down here, I thought it was a good opportunity to get in, I guess, while there still was a chance to get funding and do something downtown,” he said.

With so much going on, are the business owners a little nervous about competition? No, they said; each one described the new development as “exciting,” with a couple of them reiterating the adage, “A rising tide raises all boats.”

“It’s exciting for me to see local chefs open restaurants downtown — getting out of the corporate world, if you will, and stretching their legs,” Manchester said. “It’s exciting to be a chef/owner downtown right now. Las Vegas is really starting to catch up to what’s going on around the United States.”

Some of the new restaurants come from not-so-new names. Therapy, which opened Thursday, is owned by a partnership between the family of political power broker Sig Rogich and investor Jared Weiss.

“Sig Rogich, as a longtime resident of Las Vegas, wanted to be part of revitalizing the downtown area — bringing something downtown that the locals can call home,” said Roger Seaholm, regional vice president of operations of MotionCorp, which developed Therapy. “More of what you see in some of the more established older cities.”

Ryan Doherty, a partner in Corner Bar Management Group, which opened Itsy Bitsy Ramen & Whisky in collaboration with the Downtown Project in mid-April, was an early adapter whose belief, and stake, in downtown has grown. Doherty said he first became involved in the Downtown Project as part of the print team behind the “magalog” of Zappos, founded by eventual Downtown Project creator Tony Hsieh, who bankrolled the project’s $350 million investment in redeveloping the Fremont East corridor.

“Tony had spoken to us about the downtown renaissance; that was when it was just an idea,” Doherty said. “We said, ‘We’d love to be part of it. Maybe someday we’ll do something.’ ”

The first something would be Commonwealth, a lounge that opened in December 2012.

“We liked the building — the corner location,” Doherty said. “We started envisioning the rooftop,” which became an open-air bar.

And then the building just off the corner of Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard, which had been a hookah bar, became available. Doherty and his partners heard that it was to become a Steak ’n Shake — complete with drive-thru.

“Nothing against Steak ’n Shake, but it’s just a chain restaurant,” he said. They started bidding for the property.

“We were thinking we’d have two corners, that it would be controllable from a brand standpoint,” Doherty said.

Park on Fremont — its name inspired by a leftover sign found on the property that instructed customers to, yes, park on Fremont — opened in April 2013.

“Then we just fell in love with downtown,” Doherty said.

“Downtown reminded me of where I grew up,” he said. “I was an inner-city kid, on some level, in Boston. We took public transportation, didn’t have to go very far for anything. When I moved here I lived in Seven Hills; I never walked anywhere.”

In much of Las Vegas, Doherty said, we tend to implode our history instead of preserving it.

“It does have some character, and I like being around the little history that we have,” he said of downtown. “There’s an attraction there. There’s a romance.”

Alex Epstein didn’t choose her downtown location, but she’s emphasizing its history through the new Siegel’s 1941 at the El Cortez, where Epstein is vice president. Siegel’s 1941, which opened June 15 and whose name refers to the year the hotel opened, grew out of the Flame Steakhouse and Cafe Cortez, which themselves had replaced Roberta’s Steakhouse and Careful Kitty’s cafe. It’s named after Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, an early owner of the El Cortez.

“Obviously, downtown dining has changed, not only in our fellow hotel and casino competition, but also Fremont East has exploded with restaurant options,” she said. “What we had offered was really traditional — a steakhouse and a coffee shop. We wanted to offer something that was a little more contemporary, a little move evolved.”

Siegel’s 1941, she said, serves upscale comfort food in a brasserie-type setting. And the historical reference, she said, was a natural.

“At the El Cortez, we always say we don’t have a lot to sell,” she said. “We have our rooms, our value and our location. Most of the value is the history that we have as the oldest continuously operating casino and the only casino on the National Register. We really value that.”

Like Epstein, Doherty said they gave a lot of thought to the competition before opening Itsy Bitsy Ramen & Whisky.

“We wanted to stay away from anything else that was downtown,” he said. “We didn’t want to try to do something better than somebody else was doing, we just wanted to do something different than anybody else was doing.” The restaurant was named for the appearance of a ball of ramen before it’s cooked.

What does everybody else bring to the party?

“It’s a 100 percent plant-based menu,” Lemperle said of VegeNation. “What I call global street food; it really makes you feel good.”

At Glutton, it’s “how we source our ingredients,” Manchester said. “All of our ingredients are sourced locally or regionally.”

“We developed our place with a social-plate atmosphere,” Seaholm said. “Sharing makes us stand out.”

“It’s rural Cajun Louisiana,” Trahan said. “I’m from southwest Louisiana, so my cooking isn’t necessarily what you’d find in New Orleans.”

Next up: Flippin’ Good Burgers and Shakes, which is scheduled to open in mid- to late August and whose mission should be obvious.

“We can’t welcome it enough,” Doherty said of the new competition. “I wish there were 20 more coming.”

The area, he said, is “probably two years from being good and five years ahead of being great. We like being in the infancy state.

“Right now you can kind of make a night of it, but four or five bars does not a barhop make. Once there’s 10 new restaurants, 20 new bars, it really does become East Village, Gaslamp. It’s exciting.”

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