celebrity chefs

The celebrity chef lineups for the Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore has been revealed and they are taking no chances at the $5 billion resort, bringing out some of the world's culinary big guns. The resort will feature restaurants by famous chefs from around the world. The six chefs announced include Mario Batali (New York), Daniel Boulud (New York), Wolfgang Puck (Los Angeles), Santi Santamaria (Barcelona), Guy Savoy (Paris) and Tetsuya Wakuda (Sydney). Chefs Santi Santamaria, Guy Savoy and Tetsuya Wakuda will have their restaurants on the mezzanine layer of the casino while Mario Batali, Daniel Boulud and Wolfgang Puck will have signature restaurants situated near Marina Bay Sands Theatres. Each of the six chefs is personally involved in the concepts, menus, and interior design of the six different restaurants.

When completed, Marina Bay Sands will feature have approximately 2,500 luxury hotel rooms, the rooftop Sands SkyPark, a museum, Las Vegas- style gaming, the Paiza Club for premium players, theatres, entertainment, an outdoor event plaza, and shopping and dining venues. In a press release, Batali calls the resort "the most exciting project I have ever been involved with" but the most philosophical quotes come from the European chefs. Santi Santamaria ponders the possibilities of "culinary poetry" saying he wants his cuisine to "delight the senses and awaken emotional memories with a cuisine of wisdom." Guy Savoy expresses a similar view saying that" cuisine is the art of instantaneously turning produce suffused with history into happiness." They sound like perfect fits for a city that prides itself on the quality and infinite variety of its food.

[via NY Daily News]

Chef Charlie Palmer already owns a hotel in Healdsburg, a city in the northern California wine country, but he is planning to take his celebrity chef status to a new level in Las Vegas by opening a hotel/condo complex that will bear his name. This venture is a step apart from other chefs, who have contented themselves with lending their names (and occasionally their actual cooking) to restaurants in hotel-casinos up to this point. Palmer's project will be built on the site of the casino known as the "Golden Palm." Instead of the 6-story building that now sits there, Palmer's complex will be 33-stories high, have 400 hotel/condo units and three restaurants on site, including a sushi bar. In total, construction should cost $400 million and Palmers expects it to be completed by 2008.

Palmer's new digs will not have a casino on the premises, but with one celebrity chef carving a new and glamorous niche in Vegas, how long can it be before other chefs follow suit and expand upon the idea? Ducasse Towers? Emeril's Kicked Up Casino?

This summer the Robert Mondavi Winery is holding a new conference, Taste3, which will bring together wine, food and the arts. The conference will take place in Napa, California from July 13-16 at Copia: The American Center of Wine Food & the Arts. The list of people tapped for the conference are widely eclectic, ranging from Austrian crystal designer Georg Riedel to archaeological chemist Patrick McGovern and Leo McCloskey, founder and president of Enologix, a wine consultancy that uses chemistry to predict taste score. There will be winemakers, scientists, writers and sommeliers and even Robby Barnett, the artistic director of the dance troupe Pilobolus. The conference will feature a variety of chefs such as Alice Waters and Thomas Keller. The event will include epic dinners at famous Napa Valley wineries such as Harlan Estate, Quintessa and  Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, and the most anticipated meal, the Great Chefs of Robert Mondavi Winery Alumni Dinner on Saturday, July 15, in which some of the world's most famous chefs will create dishes paired with special anniversary selections from Robert Mondavi Winery's wine library. The conference will end on July 16, the 40th anniversary of the Oakville winery. Taste3 costs $2,350 per person.