L.A. has battled with Washington over federal funding, with Canada over filming movies, with Sacramento over fixing our roads and schools, with China over appropriating our factory jobs, with the NFL over bringing back pro football, and with East Coasters over our purported vacuity.
Add one more to the list: Vegas.
America’s Sin City is swiping our finest collections of vintage wines, our highest-quality produce and our most celebrated chefs, all in the pursuit of becoming a gastronomic capital.
Actually, it’s already happened. Most every celebrity chef this side of the Food Network has established an outpost in the Nevada desert. There’s Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck, of course, but also Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud, Charlie Palmer, Thomas Keller and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Prices are predictably outlandish, but this is Vegas, after all, where there’s no shortage of high-rollers happy to pull out a grand for dinner. All in a night’s work.
For those of you who have yet to take the place seriously, it’s time to wake up. As the Los Angeles Times noted the other week, the “Vegas effect” threatens to leave L.A. in the dust.
Or perhaps you didn’t catch September’s Bon Appetit magazine that named as its top 5 restaurant cities New York, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans (pre-Katrina) and, yes, Las Vegas. “Not that long ago, with some of these star chefs rarely crossing Nevada state lines to tend to business, big checks at the end of the meal often came with big disappointments,” the magazine noted. “But nowadays, the Las Vegas dining room experience dazzles.”
And what about L.A.? “It is a little weird that our home base doesn’t have as high a profile as it did in the late ’70s and ’80s,” writes Editor-in-Chief Barbara Fairchild, who noted diplomatically that “L.A. is in a mellow zone right now.”
That hurts. But it’s probably true. A bunch of high-end eateries have fallen by the wayside in recent months, among them the Four Oaks in Bel-Air, Citrine in West Hollywood, Granita in Malibu and Aubergine in Newport Beach.
Beyond those closings are the dearth of openings certainly the kind of openings that get written up in magazines like Bon Appetit as being fresh and creative and exciting. L.A.’s dining malaise must have local foodies gnashing their teeth at how the restaurant scene has devolved into over-priced steak houses and indistinguishable trattorias.
Should the rest of us care about any of this? Well, sort of. Los Angeles prides itself on being a tastemaker for the rest of the country and when the action starts happening somewhere else, there is a loss that’s more tangible than it might appear.
Consider what happened to the local advertising industry, which 20 or 25 years ago was considered among the most creative in the world much of it the work of several local independent shops. It was where some of Apple Computer’s most memorable ads were created.
And then, stuff happened the industry went through a massive consolidation in which those local agencies were gobbled up, a few high-profile campaigns fell flat, and several big-name players left town. By the 1990s, Los Angeles was no longer a very big deal at all.
It’s not that good advertising isn’t practiced here it’s just that much of it is process-driven and anonymous, a little like the restaurant scene.
I am not a big fan of Las Vegas, but there can be no denying that it has a vibrancy Los Angeles sorely lacks. Sooner or later, that shortfall has to have an effect, whether it’s Asian tourists skipping L.A. for the desert, or talented techies spurning job offers because they don’t want to relocate here or up-and-coming restaurateurs shuttering their establishments because not enough diners are willing to brave the traffic.
The stories might all seem disparate and yet they’re all strangely interconnected. In a world loaded with competitors, L.A. is having a tough time keeping its customer base. And once they’re gone, it’s tough to bring them back.
*Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal. He can be heard every Tuesday morning at 6:55 and 9:55 on KPCC-FM (89.3).
