WYNN LAS VEGAS: Lobsteriffic

Nearly 2,000 crustaceans a day make resort warehouse their brief home in the desert

Clockwise from top, Yasmin Tajik, the self-dubbed "lobster lady," holds one of her charges in the live lobster area in the Wynn Las Vegas warehouse. Tajik makes sure the lobsters stay healthy during their brief stay in the desert. A lobster peers from a tank. Lobsters sit inside a holding tank in the kitchen of the Ming Li restaurant inside the Wynn Las Vegas. Photos by Dale Dombrowski/VIew Top, David Snyder, executive chef of casual dining and production kitchens, said the Wynn Las Vegas prepares around 3,500 Maine lobsters a month, as well as an additional 200 to 300 spiny lobsters. Left, Yasmin Tajik sits on the edge of one of the lobster holding tanks in the Wynn Las Vegas warehouse. Tajik has a background in marine animals and said she considers herself a lobster and seafood specialist, although lobster wrangler also is an appropriate title.Photos by dale dombrowski/View Top, David Snyder, executive chef of casual dining and production kitchens, said the Wynn Las Vegas prepares around 3,500 Maine lobsters a month, as well as an additional 200 to 300 spiny lobsters. Left, Yasmin Tajik sits on the edge of one of the lobster holding tanks in the Wynn Las Vegas warehouse. Tajik has a background in marine animals and said she considers herself a lobster and seafood specialist, although lobster wrangler also is an appropriate title.Photos by dale dombrowski/View Clockwise from top, Yasmin Tajik, the self-dubbed "lobster lady," holds one of her charges in the live lobster area in the Wynn Las Vegas warehouse. Tajik makes sure the lobsters stay healthy during their brief stay in the desert. A lobster peers from a tank. Lobsters sit inside a holding tank in the kitchen of the Ming Li restaurant inside the Wynn Las Vegas. Photos by Dale Dombrowski/VIew Advertisement

Like many hotel casinos in town, the Wynn Las Vegas has a warehouse. It's a fairly ordinary place full of cases of envelopes, palettes of tiny bars of soap and enough liquor to keep the customers very happy for a long time. It also has a particularly unusual feature -- a lobster room.

The room is cold, smells vaguely of salt water and has around 2,000 live lobsters in it, located 300 miles from the nearest ocean.

David Snyder, who was executive sous chef when the hotel casino opened, but was promoted to executive chef of casual dining and production kitchens in late January, said the hotel prepares around 3,500 Maine lobsters a month, as well as an additional 200 to 300 spiny lobsters. Actually, a lot of the Maine lobsters are from Canada. Lobsters are flown in four times a week and packed in wet hay or paper in Styrofoam containers. As long as they're kept moist, lobsters can go a day or two out of the water.

"We like to use a local vendor for a couple different reasons," Snyder said. "One of them is that they have the logistics worked out, and another reason is that we're really dedicated to take care of our local market, so if there's product available from a local vendor, we like to do so, because it's helping to cultivate Las Vegas rather than buying it from L.A. or New York. We like to keep the money within Las Vegas."

It's Yasmin Tajik's responsibility to keep the lobsters healthy during their stay in the desert.

"I take care of all the chemistry and pumps and filtration; it's like running a giant aquarium," she said. The water in the tanks is kept at 40 degrees, the temperature the lobsters are used to, and there's an elaborate filtration system that takes up a room of its own.

"We don't feed them," Tajik said, "because they're here such a short time. They're opportunistic feeders, so they'll graze when they come across something. They can go quite a while without feeding."

Tajik refers to her self as the "lobster lady," although she also uses a number of other appellations, including lobster girl, lobster cop and lobster wrangler. When she meets people, she tells them she's a lobster and seafood specialist.

"Most of my background is in marine animals in some capacity," Tajik said. "I used to train dolphins in Hawaii and do research with them. I did research with the humpback whales in Hawaii, as well. Most of the people that know me, friends, family, they all know, I'm always going to be involved in animals in some way. I never thought I'd end up working with lobsters, but it's fun. Definitely very unique."

Aside from her fieldwork, she has an undergraduate degree in biology from Minnesota and a master's degree in business administration that she earned online from the University of Phoenix. She started working at the Wynn Las Vegas before it opened and has been working with lobsters for about 51/2 years now.

With practiced ease, Tajik reached into the tanks and extracted two lobsters, a male and a female, and explained how to tell the difference. "You can tell the sex by looking at the underside. You look at these two fore legs," she said, pointing to a pair of legs near the base of the tail. "If they're wispy, they're female. If they're harder, they're male. The other thing you look at is tail width, the females are a little wider because that's where they keep their eggs."

The job is not without its dangers, although Tajik is more than capable of dealing with them.

"Lobsters have a dominant claw, a pincher and a crusher," she explained. "If they get their claw loose, they can hurt you. They won't take your finger off, but they can break it."

The lobsters all are banded, of course, but even on the very rare occasion when one slips the rubber band loose, Tajik can deftly pick it up from behind in a manner that doesn't allow the claws to reach her.

"It's really easy to catch the claw and close it," she said.

The Maine lobsters, which make up the vast majority of the room's population, only spend four or five days there. When new lobsters arrive, they're put in an empty tank and the date is noted to ensure that they're rotated out quickly.

There also are tanks of lobsters reserved for particular restaurants, and these hold some of the more unusual and exotic crustaceans. The tank for Bertolotta Ristorante, for instance, holds Australian spiny lobsters and slipper lobsters, which resemble, to some extent, a ballet slipper. These particular slipper lobsters come from off the coast of Senegal.

"One of our lobster vendors has a system of bar codes they attach to the bands," Tajik said. "You can input the code on their Web site and find out exactly where they came from."

Most of the lobsters are caught in the wild by lobstermen, a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Some lobsters, like the large, bluish ones from Australia, are farmed.

"A 11/2-pound lobster is around 5 to 7 years old," Tajik said. "We've had 5- or 6-pound ones here, and those are estimated to be 30 years old."

All of this explains the relatively high price of lobster over, say, tuna.

"We serve lobster from around $48 to $120 (each), depending on the size," Snyder said.

About half the lobsters prepared at the Wynn Las Vegas are special requests. The chefs cater to a high-end clientele that know what they want. "That's what makes it fun and interesting for us," Snyder said.

"We can do pretty much anything from a Szechuan-style stir fry to a lobster risotto, butter-poached lobster ... It's really what the chef likes to use it for," he said. "And what the guests ask us to do with it -- I think lobster is like breakfast-type items, where people think about their eggs in the morning and they know exactly how they like them -- I think lobster falls into that same idea."

Snyder now oversees 850 people working in casual dining and production kitchens at the Wynn Las Vegas. When the new addition to the hotel casino opens, Snyder will have another 450 people working under him. Despite the workload, he still hopes to keep cooking lobsters.

"I always like to keep touch with what's going on," he said. "Being a chef, you want to keep close to your roots."