Profile: Rick Moonen in Las Vegas

By JULIETTE ROSSANT In her Off the Menu column in The New York Times last month, Florence Fabricant noted that Rick Moonen is closing rm, his glorious seafood restaurant on East 60th Street. Moonen said that he is focusing on the opening of a new seafood restaurant in the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Thus spake one of this country's finest seafood chefs. I talked to Rick for more news, and this is his story. Rick started planning to open a restaurant in Las Vegas well over two years ago: restaurant consultant Clark Wolf originally approached him with the idea. Like many chefs, Rick thought he would spend a long weekend in Las Vegas each month overseeing the new place. Soon, however, he realized that that his New York customers were noticing his absence, and they were not happy about it. He made the difficult decision to close the New York restaurant and move to Las Vegas. Perhaps it wasn’t a very hard decision after all: "I am pinching myself, looking at a 16,000 square-foot restaurant," he confessed to me. "This is the biggest opportunity of my career." Actually he has two restaurants: a casual r bar cafe downstairs and the fine dining restaurant rm seafood upstairs. Both opened up on Valentine’s Day this year in the Mandalay Place, a new shopping and dining complex that stretches between the Luxor and Mandalay Bay on the southern end of the Las Vegas strip (both of which are now part of the MGM Mirage group). You can get to the restaurants from the casino floor, or you can avoid the casino and access it from valet parking -- an important detail for attracting locals who want to miss the tourist crowds, as any chefs who have opened in Vegas in the last decade will tell you. r bar cafe has 250 seats, a giant raw bar that features three plasma screen TV sets, and serves seafood from across America –- po’boys, clam chowder, cioppino, and Moonen’s famous crab cakes straight from old his menu at Oceana. All this comes with cream biscuits one of James Beard’s cookbooks, says Moonen -- or cornbread or flatbread, all hot out of the oven. (Click here to see more food photos). Upstairs is restaurant rm where Moonen creates masterpieces with seafood. The house specialties are in shellfish: Maine lobster, spiny lobster, dungeness crab, and live Santa Barbara sea urchin. There is a special tasting menu, from a first course with flash-searched hamachi, lobster consomme, honshimiji mushrooms, and green onions, to a sixth with braised beef short ribs and sauteed skate wing, escargot and garlic herb emulsion. The restaurant's designer is Cass Smith of CCS Architecure, based in San Francisco. This is Cass' first restaurant in Las Vegas, though his clients range even farther afield -- like Japan. The restaurant is a two-storey facade. The upper storey features 20-foot waterfall along its glass front which drops into the floor/ceiling of the storey below and establishes the main entry. The motif upstairs is a fine wooden yacht in mahogany, while downstairs is more casual imagery of water and seafood. Interior decorations include imagery by San Francisco-based artist Melissa Wagner (click here to see more of her work). "I feel rejuvenated. This is the first time I have had a new kitchen, a new restaurant, and it’s all Vegas-sized. I am seeing a new demographic, different layers of guests. I am feeding Middle America here!" Moonen is taking on another challenge as well. He is writing a new cookbook called Seafood Without a Doubt (Houghton Mifflin), which he describes as setting out to help demystify cooking seafood at home. Many of the recipes are from r bar cafe. When I asked him, "What is tough about opening up in Vegas?" Rick admitted that it takes a while to get a stable kitchen crew. There is plenty of competition luring kitchen staff to other celebrity chef restaurants especially the new Wynn Las Vegas. Even though Las Vegas is luring culinary school grads, Moonen believes what Vegas really needs is a high quality cooking school. "My dream is to eventually open a culinary boot camp, so that people who graduate from my school are really ready for the industry," says Moonen, who himself trained at the CIA. As for those New Yorkers who miss Rick, don’t worry! Rick promises to come back -- when he gets the right offer. (Calling Jeffrey Chodorow! Mr. Chodorow...?) Sidebar: Rick Moonen on Work and Passion Fun links: photos of rm seafood's food et al. photos of rm seafood under construction architectural drawings of rm seafood Previous articles: Personal Favorites: The Chefs of Las Vegas Jeffrey Chodorow: Talent Agent Rick Moonen Sets Seafood Straight Buzz-Buzz-Splash, Super Chef --> back to superchefblog