This week's LVW col: Woo Restaurant

Here's this week's installment of "The Strip Sense" in Las Vegas Weekly. Enjoy. -sf

A Rock and a Chinese Place

The Woo family’s move to the Palazzo might not have been the best thing for all

By STEVE FRIESS

Sometime back in the 1990s, an eccentric fellow wanted to eat at a restaurant. He sent his advance team to scope out the place and its various exits, baffling the owners of the fine establishment.

“Is the president coming?” Theresa Woo remembered thinking.

No, no. It was just Sheldon Adelson, then the owner of the Sands Expo Center and the construction site that would become the Venetian. Even then, he was a peculiar presence, running with his bodyguards and concerned about perceived enemies lying in wait to kill him.

To Woo, Adelson and wife Miriam became just another well-known pair of clients at the Mayflower Cuisinier, the go-to spot for upscale Chinese food tucked away in a strip mall at Sahara and Decatur.

Yet as the years went on, the Adelsons and other Las Vegas Sands executives started dreaming of bringing the family-run operation to the Strip. And Rob Goldstein, the president of the Venetian, finally made the Woos an offer they couldn’t refuse: Las Vegas Sands would build them a $6 million space on the second floor of the under-construction Palazzo’s shopping area.

There was a catch, though. A tragic, weird, totally unnecessary catch. According to Woo, Goldstein required the family to close the Mayflower. And so, in January 2008, they did.

Woo Restaurant opened shortly thereafter. It’s beautiful and spacious, all dramatic high ceilings and bamboo and worm-eaten butternut. Oh, and, for most of the year that it has been open, hardly the jammed house the always-busy Mayflower was.

We’ll get back to that in a moment, but first you ought to know that there are few classic Vegas stories more charming than that of the Woo family. Ming See, Theresa’s mom, was 6 when her family fled the Chinese mainland for Hong Kong amid the Communist takeover. She met Henry Woo, had two of their three children and then moved to Vegas to become American citizens. Henry dealt cards; Ming See worked as a dishwasher at the Dunes.

Read the rest HERE

Chat is back on this week!

UPDATE: I'll be in the LVRocks.Com chat room tonight as the site plays the classic episode when George Wallace was a douche! Woo hoo! Join us 6:45 p.m. PT! We're still going to record a shorter episode of "The Strip" from home and post it tomorrow with the Shecky Greene interview because we're both a bit sick. We'll be back live next week, 4/28, with the Carlos Santana interview. Really off to the doctor now!

Lame. Lame. Lame.

It's terrific that the Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote an editorial today congratulating the Las Vegas Sun and reporter Alexandra Berzon for winning a Pulitzer Prize yesterday. But I was a bit in disbelief that they couldn't be bothered to assign a reporter to cover perhaps the most significant journalistic triumph in the history of the state. Instead, they buried the news on page 3B of the local-news section and used an Associated Press piece by Ken Ritter.

Oh, you're saying, of course they wouldn't want to put much effort into exalting their competition!

Except that that's the standard. The Detroit Free Press also won a Pulitzer yesterday and its bitter rival, the Detroit News, had staffer Francis X. Donnelly do a piece on it. The St. Petersburg Times won two and their chief competitor, the Tampa Tribune, had staffer Walt Belcher write it up. And every newspaper in New York City wrote their own stories about The New York Times' feat of five Pulitzers.

I have a theory. If the R-J had to actually cover the Sun's Pulitzer, it probably would've meant calling on the Classiest Publisher in America to make a comment. And he was very, very busy yesterday using his uberclassy blog to foment the view that teabagging is a gay sex act. It's called the Urban Dictionary. Look it up.

Reaction Pours In For LV Sun's Pulitzer

Some of the R-J folks are showing a little class in the midst of the humiliation that was the Las Vegas Sun's triumph as a Pulitzer Prize winner proving that investing money and resources in quality journalism is not only good for the community but also -- gasp! -- prestigious.

R-J City Editor Mary Hynes sent a congratulatory note to lead reporter Alexandra Berzon and columnist John L. Smith heralded the news with a blog post in which he took a minor swipe at his own paper by beginning, "I always wanted to work for a newspaper that delivered a Pulitzer Prize-winning story to its readers, but I never imagined it would happen this way." And over at Poynter.Org, the industry's digital watercooler, some are conjecturing that the Pulitzer folks are making a direct statement in favor of the kind of exploratory reporting the Sun does over the work-a-day stuff the R-J does.

Even U.S. Sen. Harry Reid gets in the act with a call to Berzon and this on the front of his website:



So, any good wishes publicly for Berzon from the Classiest Publisher in America? Uh, no. It's not that he didn't have the time; he managed a blog post today about the impact of week-old anti-tax demonstrations. Sure, he could have done what Smith and Hynes did, appreciate the significance of the moment for our community. But, no. He's too busy dwelling in the pettiness that explains why his own paper's never come close to such an accomplishment.

Las Vegas Sun Wins Pulitzer Prize!

Wow. For years I've been saying that there were Pulitzers waiting to be won in this town. And now, finally, someone's won one. Here's what the Pulitzer folks wrote in giving the Las Vegas Sun its most coveted prize, for public service:

Awarded to the Las Vegas Sun, and notably the courageous reporting by Alexandra Berzon, for the exposure of the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip amid lax enforcement of regulations, leading to changes in policy and improved safety conditions.

Head to the Las Vegas Sun to see the award-winning work and some terrific online presentations, too. While Berzon deserves most of the glory here, the category honors the overall effort of the news organization and content that includes "editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics and online material."

And since the Sun folks probably won't do this, allow me the honor of rubbing it in the face of the Classiest Publisher in America. Having to do this...


...must just KILL him. I just can't wait to see how they cover it in tomorrow's Las Vegas Sun wrap-around. I'd love to think that this might motivate the R-J chiefs to kick it up a notch and give some of their terrific reporters the time, money and opportunity to do the sort of work, but that's just crazy talk!

Of Presidential Pooches and Petcasters

That's Lolita. She's a Portuguese Water Dog owned by a Vegas dentist. And she, along with Dr. Jim Brannan, were our guests on the most recently posted episode of "The Petcast." I don't usually post about new Petcast episodes here, but this was a particularly interesting and timely discussion, what with the Obamas now the proud owners of Bo.

Here's a shot of co-host Emily and Dr. Brennan with Lolita in the new LVRocks.Com studio.


Pick up that episode by subscribing to The Petcast via iTunes or by right-clicking here to play or save the file.

Norm to Cirque: Fire Criss Angel

This morning's column by Norm Clarke was very, very unusual. The king of Vegas gossip -- who rarely offers a negative opinion unless it's about Pete Rose -- predicted that volatile "Mindfreak" magician Criss Angel will be and should be canned by Cirque du Soleil. "He's a goner, sooner than later," Clarke wrote.

The tipping point was Friday night's show, when celeb blogger Perez Hilton live-Tweeted about how bad "Criss Angel Believe" was during the performance. Angel's people evidently noticed and told Angel, which means they enabled what came next. At the end, according to Norm's Sunday column, Angel asked Perez to stand. "I have to recognize someone special here in the house," Norm quoted Angel as saying. "Perez Hilton, please stand up. We have the world's biggest douchebag asshole in the house!"

This is really a toughie. Angel's words about Perez were true. He's a terrible, unethical, vainglorious human being. But this was a G-rated show with children in the audience and a really outrageous and unprofessional thing for Angel to say in public. (Similarly, by the by, I'm baffled that the Review-Journal, also read by people of all ages, would print the word "asshole.")

But the incident is notable because Angel has now lost the support of Hilton's enormous web following as well as of Clarke. Also, there's no love lost between Perez and Clarke either, so it's not like Norm was sticking up for a buddy. How Angel ever expects to get anything approaching good PR anymore is a mystery; he's shut himself down to all media and even killed a profile of him that I was set to do for The New York Times. A strange strategy.

It's worth recalling what I wrote almost exactly a year ago in my 4/23/08 Las Vegas Weekly column about the Cirque-Angel alliance:

Yet if the MGM Mirage folks think they're in the clear, they're not paying enough attention to the burgeoning disaster that is Criss Angel Believe at the Luxor. Cirque du Soleil, usually synonymous with the safest bet in Las Vegas, is certainly going in a new direction this time.

Indeed, with Angel, Cirque is now laying in a bed of nails with one of the most controversial and egotistical figures on the American pop landscape. Last week, he physically threatened Review-Journal gossip columnist Norm Clarke, virtually ensuring his show will never be one that "Norm Recommends" on the outside flap of the R-J. It also promises to sour much of the Vegas press on him, creating a tabloid PR challenge the likes of which the Cirque folks have never had to confront.

The Cirque suits in Montreal must be sweating, but they also failed to either make a public statement condemning Angel's threats or force him to apologize. They're powerless, it seems, and thus it's only a matter of time before they helplessly watch their enormous investment be hijacked by a man not given to respecting much of anyone.

Prescient words, no?