The artichoke and black truffle soup at Las Vegas’ Restaurant Guy Savoy looks deceptively simple. The pale, velvety dish arrives with toasted mushroom brioche and black truffle butter, its richness suggesting a generous amount of cream. Yet there is no cream or butter in the soup itself.
Artichoke hearts cook for five or six hours before being blended and passed through a chinois (a cone-shaped sieve). Water, truffle juice and an abundance of truffles produce its silken texture, while the brioche delivers the butter.
“To begin with an artichoke, create that soup and have it remain a signature for more than 30 years is amazing,” says executive chef Nicolas “Nico” Costagliola.
The beloved selection predates the Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star restaurant, which opened at Caesars Palace on May 17, 2006, as celebrated chef Guy Savoy’s only location outside France. Twenty years later, it remains the most requested dish.
When chef Savoy visits Las Vegas and approaches the pot with a tasting spoon, “I stare at him and think, ‘What is he going to say?’” Costagliola says. “The soup is his baby.”
Costagliola’s own history with the restaurant began on the entremets station, where he started as chef de partie. “Walking into the kitchen of a restaurant like this is always intimidating when you start,” he says.
During his first two years, Costagliola worked every station and learned Savoy’s approach to taste, technique and presentation. He then left and returned to the kitchen twice more, in between, working at Caesars Palace’s Bacchanal Buffet, helping open Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen, and spending two months on the debut of a Caesars hotel in Dubai.
In 2019, he returned once more, this time to lead Restaurant Guy Savoy’s kitchen. “I have worked for Monsieur Savoy for a long time, so I know what he likes and what he does not,” Costagliola says. “Even when we create something they do not have in Paris, it must remain within his style of cuisine.”
Savoy typically visits Las Vegas two or three times a year, often staying for two weeks at a time. He and Costagliola speak every week and chefs from Paris travel to Caesars Palace throughout the year to introduce recipes and check the kitchen’s execution.
Some dishes do not change. The artichoke and black truffle soup, Colors of Caviar and Mosaic of Poularde, Artichoke, Foie Gras and Black Truffle Vinaigrette are prepared as they are in Paris. Others are adapted to the ingredients available in the desert and the preferences of Las Vegas diners.
A French dish focused entirely on sweetbreads, for example, may become a composition of sweetbreads, veal loin, chop or cheek in Vegas. Costagliola recently applied that balance to blanquette de veau, a rustic French family dish Savoy had been asking him to add. The kitchen deconstructed the preparation, rearranging its veal, sweetbreads, onions, carrots, mushrooms and cream sauce into a presentation suited to the restaurant.
“It is a classic French dish revisited,” Costagliola says. “We make it our way, but within his vision.”
For the restaurant’s 20th anniversary, a small à la carte menu brings Savoy’s signatures into sharper focus. The establishment also expanded its longest tasting experience to include even more courses, giving returning guests a chance to discover more of its recent work.
Across both formats, the cooking moves between seasonality, tableside theater and the compositions that have defined the restaurant. Tomato All Around plays with the fruit in multiple forms: peeled and sculpted into a plump red centerpiece; sliced into colorful petals; churned into sorbet; and sharpened with balsamic, basil and crisp elements.
Lamb tartare in cold steam turns tableside presentation into aromatherapy. The tartare is crowned with a generous disc of caviar and presented amid rosemary and parsley as cool vapor rolls across the plate, releasing the herbs’ scent before the first bite.
Savoy’s signature Colors of Caviar stacks caviar vinaigrette, caviar cream, green bean purée, Osetra caviar and a delicate sabayon in a transparent glass. A mother-of-pearl spoon plunges through every layer, combining salinity, acidity, richness and vegetal freshness in each bite.
Chocolate and Coffee appears as a glossy dark-chocolate dome topped with coffee-colored cream and a gilded coffee bean.
Yet the dishes are only part of what turns a meal here into a ritual. That continuity also comes from a dining-room team that has presented Savoy’s cooking — and learned guests’ preferences — over decades.
Costagliola estimates that about 70% of the front-of-house team has been at the restaurant for most or all of its 20 years. They know the regulars who return weekly or monthly, as well as the traditions those guests expect to find unchanged.
One of them is the bread cart, a selection of nine varieties accompanied by a mountain of French butter that’s scooped individually tableside. Savoy worries that diners eat too much of the bread baked throughout service and cannot finish the tasting menu. Costagliola counters that Las Vegas does not have a boulangerie every 200 feet, so carbohydrates aren’t a big worry at the restaurant. Besides, he says, Savoy is always the first to reach for the bread when they dine together.
“Monsieur Savoy does not like the bread cart, but it is one of the things people come for,” Costagliola says. “There is no way we can take it out.”
Baguettes and brioche may be one argument Costagliola can win. In the kitchen, however, Savoy’s standards are nonnegotiable. He wants every preparation tasted each time it is made, and every plate served hot — never warm.
“It does not matter how many times you have made the same sauce, jus or soup,” Costagliola says. “If you make it 1,000 times, you taste it 1,000 times.”
That repetition is what allows Restaurant Guy Savoy to evolve without losing the flavors guests remember. It is also why, whenever Savoy raises a spoonful of artichoke soup to his lips, Costagliola still holds his breath.
