Chef opens second restaurant

Bistro Zinc to feature bakery, culinary theater

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Following almost four months of delays, Chef Joseph Keller today opened the long-awaited Bistro Zinc in MonteLago Village at Lake Las Vegas.

It is Keller's second eatery at MonteLago Village -- he also owns Como's Restaurant-- and according to the chef, Bistro Zinc is just a little closer to his roots.

"I'm a bistro guy at heart -- this is what I love," Keller said. "This is the food I grew up on. It's what I ate while studying in France. The food here is very flavorful. You can get your teeth into it and it melts in your mouth."

Before finding Bistro Zinc's location, Keller said he spent about a year and a half searching for the right place to open his newest restaurant.

"I stopped looking in about August," Keller said. "Then this came up. This is prime location. It's the one I wanted."

The new restaurant's bakery will supply breads and pastries for both Bistro Zinc and Como's.

Keller thinks the bakery will complement the village feel of MonteLago. Bistro Zinc will serve lunch, breakfast and dinner, and will feature a late-night menu and an oyster bar.

Keller describes his new restaurant's food as "American cuisine with French influences." The menu includes seafood creations like pan-roasted grouper and crispy skinned salmon, as well as signature dishes like beef bourguignone, chicken pot pie, café crepes, European-style pizzas, lobster étouffée and po' boys served with pickles and potato chips made fresh.

"The food is going to be very traditional, but I'm going to take some of it and do a little different version, do some new and different stuff," Keller said. "It's taking everything that you were exposed to in your life that you said 'wow' to and putting it together."

One of the more unique aspects of Keller's new restaurant comes in the form of the Keller Culinary Theater. When the theater debuts sometime this summer, it will offer cooking classes, with meals made before a live audience.

Keller said the classes will occasionally feature appearances by surprise guest signature chefs.

He will lead the culinary theater classes three times a week, and said the classes will be available to aspiring professionals and amateurs in the community.

"The classes will be hooked up with the theater stuff we have in the restaurant, and they'll be recorded to DVD," Keller said. "Eventually, those DVDs will be edited and become sets -- a set about roasting, a set about sauces, and so on."

Keller also hopes to see the Keller Culinary Theater make it onto the small screen. He plans to eventually put together a pilot for PBS based on the culinary theater classes.

"The restaurant comes first though," he said. "Then the cooking school, the television stuff."

Keller said his culinary theater was inspired by "The Galloping Gourmet," a show featuring Chef Graham Kerr.

"I grew up with 'The Galloping Gourmet,' " he said. "I absolutely loved the show as a child. We'll bring different cuisines in and learn how to do it, how to re-create a meal."

Keller said thoughts of opening his own restaurant complete with culinary theater have been on his mind for about 12 years, but "a lot of things had to happen before I got to this point."

In addition to his restaurants, Keller also serves as an occasional guest teacher at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Las Vegas.

"I want people to come in and have some fun in the kitchen here, and then they can go home and impress their friends," he said. "I'm going to bring cooking to them with language everyone can understand, and after the class you'll be able to whip up something amazing."

Keller said Bistro Zinc was designed by architect Barry Berkus to compliment the future theater.

"There's very dramatic lighting and color and textures," he said. "It's going to look like a theater, and we're going to have murals of people along the upper walls. And in keeping with the theater feel we'll have what I call the Keller Cam."

The Keller Cam will project footage of Keller leading his cooking classes onto large screens that will come down over the wall murals. The chef also had his restaurant equipped with satellite dishes in order to show silent movies and sports.

The restaurant will feature a carved mahogany raw bar in one corner, which was built by Keller's brother Michael. The raw bar will offer eight different cold water oysters from the East and West coasts along with shrimp, lobster and crab served individually or by the platter.

Bistro Zinc will offer patio seating overlooking the lake, a fire pit, a zinc bar created of zinc imported from France, a wine room and a chef's table in the kitchen.

Keller said he grew up in the restaurant business, and began cooking at the age of 12. At 16 years old, his mom secured for him the opportunity to work at Gustanzo Pucillo's Petite Marmite Restaurant in Palm Beach, Fla. Later, he studied the culinary arts in Paris and the south of France for two years.

Previous to Como's Restaurant and Bistro Zinc, Keller opened restaurants in Massachusetts, Florida and California, including Bouchon, the renowned authentic French bistro he and brother Thomas opened in Yountville, Calif., in 1998.

"The kitchen will be designed after the way traditional French kitchens are designed," Keller said. "The kitchens I grew up in, with a center island, so you have to look at each other and know what you're doing. It's the dance, the way you move in the kitchen. A restaurant is all about controlled chaos and creativity."

Michael Monguillot, general manager of Bistro Zinc, has a good feeling about the future of the restaurant.

"If we take with us what we learned here at Como's in regards to what people want -- which we will -- (Bistro Zinc) will be a success right out of the gates," he said. "We understand that it's a different world here than on the Strip, and we're ready for it."

For now, Keller is just content to get his new venture off the ground.

"It's fun," he said. "I'm doing what I want to do."

For more information, visit bistrozincrestaurant.com.