Introducing the 2024 Eater Las Vegas Award Winners

The best new restaurant, best late-night hang, and best bar of the year

It’s time again for the Eater Awards, the annual occasion when Eater Vegas recognizes excellence in Las Vegas restaurants over the past 12 months. It’s been an action-packed year for Las Vegas: The city hosted the Super Bowl, the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards centered its event on the Strip, and two casinos earned spectacular send-offs. But beneath the spectacle, Las Vegas locals and even sharp-eyed travelers know it was another banner year for Las Vegas’s culinary scene. Chefs, visionaries, and industry powerhouses hit the city with big ideas, and these awardees represent the best of the best.

On the Strip, a genre-bending diner proved that the themed restaurant can deliver both whimsy and expertly rendered, irreverent food. A celebrity got involved with a new bar and — surprisingly — delivered. And among a dozen new steakhouses that opened in a city that already masters the steakhouse as a superlative, one managed to stand out from the rest. Finally, an Italian restaurant with a sleeper side dish is redefining late-night dining, while an understated new bar is offering a reimagined drinking experience for whiskey connoisseurs. Please join us in celebrating Eater Vegas’s 2024 Eater Award winners.

Diner Ross: Best New Restaurant

Presented by SevenRooms

Stepping off Las Vegas Boulevard and into the silver-tiled breezeway of the Linq Hotel is to bore through the center of a disco ball — its mirrored squares glinting on every surface. Just beyond lies Diner Ross, a restaurant plucked from the romanticized New York City of 1970-something and dropped into the Linq, adjacent to the theater for Spiegelworld’s new Discoshow production. Diner Ross is hardly the circus company’s first foray into food and beverage — it has previously merged pasta with performance at Superfrico and churned out a stellar smash burger at the Absinthe concession stand. Diner Ross would be worth a visit just for its grounded approach to the themed restaurant genre — marked by patent orange booth seating, dusky green walls adorned with era-specific album covers and ephemera, and a front-of-house staff clad in paisley and jumpsuits. But it’s so much more than just its design.

Chef Anna Altieri skips dinner rolls in favor of popovers like her grandmother used to make, available with butter and jam or plussed-up accouterments like foie gras and caviar. A plate of ham and cheese is as surprising as the show next door: Emulating the dish she and Spiegelworld creator Ross Mollison had at Vin Papillon in Montreal, Altieri dresses thin slices of Parisien ham and cuts of Avonlea cheddar in melted brown butter and a generous crack of black pepper — making for an ideal drinking snack with the sort of oddball presentation one could hope for from a circus company. A dirty martini salad pours all the salty and fatty pungency of a briney olive juice over a stack of Bibb lettuce. And Altieri takes the au poivre route with the burger, coating a bistro-style short rib blend in black pepper, searing it in clarified butter, and layering it with peppery watercress, roasted tart cherries, and Muenster cheese — all poised for dunking in a savory gravy. It’s all the imagination and escapism one could want from the circus company’s diner — but with a measured approach to food that stands up to what one expects from a Las Vegas Strip restaurant.

From our sponsor: SevenRooms is the leading CRM, marketing, and operations platform helping hospitality operators increase sales, delight guests, and keep them coming back — automatically.

Louiie Victa

The Pinky Ring: Best Vibes

When Bruno Mars set out to recreate the vibes of his personal living room within the Bellagio, no one — least of all the vice president of food and beverage for the resort — thought he would be quite so hands-on. But Mars had a hand in the Pinky Ring’s layout, lighting, music, signature drinks, and even the bartender’s uniforms. “No one expected him to be there after opening,” says Josef Wagner. “But he’s still bringing in talent directly, even jumping on stage.”

The result is a style of venue that was much-needed at the resort, and arguably even the Strip at large — a place that threads the needle between lounge, nightclub, and live music venue. Bands take the stage, playing groovy jazz music with driving percussion beats that demand visitors rise from the lush loveseats in the Pinky Ring’s sunken living room and dance — a fact that required the lounge to remove seating from the middle of floor to make space. Drinks like the Hooligan — a banging spicy margarita — and a delightfully rich mocha espresso martini keep spirits high until the band takes its second set and bottle service becomes de rigueur. The bar, conversation pit, Champagne room, and private booths at the rear drip easy opulence and Rat Pack-era style with mood lighting and mirrored walls. And with an enforced No Phones policy, it’s easy to throw a couple back and dance the night away — whether Mars makes a surprise appearance or not.

Yabu Pushelberg

Don’s Prime: Best New Steakhouse

If there’s one thing Las Vegas knows how to do right, it’s the steakhouse. Vegas has perfected the art of the old-school steakhouse over decades — creating intimate, wood-swaddled restaurants where high-quality cuts of steak garner a calculated sear and find their way onto tables strewn with rich macaroni and cheese and lobster tails. This year, more than a dozen new steakhouses opened, flooding an already saturated market, but Don’s Prime manages to stand out for its arresting design, deftly grilled steaks, and a chef (Las Vegas steakhouse vet Patrick Munster) who, from the restaurant’s conception, has made tableside service the focal point of experience.

A visit here starts with a display of the kitchen’s offerings: A server presents a cutting board arranged with four cuts of steak — poised to answer any questions about each portion’s sourcing, marbling, or preparation. For example, a 16-ounce cut of New York strip steak from the East Coast’s Par LeFrieda butchery is first dry-aged in display cases at the front of the restaurant and then crusted in salt and pepper to emphasize the meat’s buttery texture. One roving cart is dedicated to Old Fashioned cocktails; smoke rising from the cart’s surface infuses the cocktails and delicately permeates the room. Another cart carries all the components for a decadent chocolate mousse — rich quenelles topped with diplomat cream and bright pops of brandy cherries. The steakhouse’s success stems from its commitment to creating an evening that is as lush and memorable as its Japanese wagyu and the crimson velvet that upholsters both the banquettes and the walls of the restaurant’s dining room.

Bill Milne

Bramàre: Best New Late-Night Hang

Leave it to the duo behind the classic Las Vegas restaurants Piero’s Italian Cuisine and Table 34 to reinvent late-night dining again. This time, they’ve done it with savory tagliatelle pasta, fizzy affogato cocktails, and a can’t-miss bowl of broccolini available as late as 3 a.m. It works together to make a strong argument for pairing post-drinks drinks with a post-dinner dinner. Fresh off reinventing Table 34 with industry veterans Evan Glusman and Constantin Alexander, executive chef Joe Valdez III shaped the Bramare menu of Italian pizzas, pasta, and steaks — all set against the backdrop of a dusky restaurant with black accents, exposed brick, and an eye-catching bar display under dreamy mood lighting. An ideal dinner starts with the modestly named toast — crisped bars of fluffy breadsticks laden with spicy ‘nduja sausage, caciocavallo cheese, caramelized onions, and a generous snowfall of pecorino. Ribbons of chewy tagliatelle get swathed in an earthy wild boar ragu brightened by slivers of sage. And then there’s that broccolini. The unassuming side is a must-order, finely chopped to solve broccolini’s problem of being too long and unwieldy to comfortably eat. Bits of stalk and florets are tossed in a piquant black garlic cream and pecorino cheese, then finished with a generous topping of seasoned breadcrumbs for texture.

Set in the Collective shopping center near the Las Vegas Convention Center, Bramare is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in transforming the strip mall into a Las Vegas culinary hot spot, neighboring fellow night owl Cleaver, local classic Marrakesh, and new brunch spot Middle Child. With its late-night hours and retina-soothing dim interior, mass exoduses of crowds departing from the Sphere or the convention halls in the post-midnight hours receive a welcome new category for posting up at the bar to enjoy never-boring drinks and dishes.

Louiie Victa

Bar Ginza: Best New Bar

On most evenings at Bar Ginza, one can find co-owner Joshua Monsivais behind the bar, hewing a 47-pound brick of ice into cubes and spheres for chilling pours of Japanese whisky and Tokyo slings with Japanese gin. Monsivais and partner Catherine Hebron approach service at their Japanese bar in downtown Las Vegas like they would an omakase dinner, customizing flights of half-pours uniquely to the taste, interest, and price point of each customer. Monsivais’s obsession with Japanese whisky took hold in 2007, when the two owners worked at Nobu. As a bar manager, Monsivais was an early adopter of imported liquor — which would hit Las Vegas more widely as a trend about a decade later.

A visit to Japan spurred the two owners to recreate its muted cool style of bar in Las Vegas. More than 90 bottles of Japanese whiskeys and another 70 or so American bourbons and scotches line the walls at Bar Ginza. Its collection spans a first edition of Kiuchi Hinomaru that runs from $5 for a half-pour to coveted whiskeys like Nikka Taketsuru, aged for 21 years, that retails for around $1,000. In addition to the liquor, ice, and glass-encased samurai armor, Bar Ginza imprints its ambiance from Japan — the televisions play anime and previously aired Pride fights, Hebron ferries bottles with illustrated labels to each table, and the classic rock that lulls from the speakers is punctuated by the steady scraping of metal on ice.

Louiie Victa