Food & Drink: Raku Toridokoro, plus Casa Dragones

All about the bird

Chef Mitsuo Endo unveils a new spe c ial ty yakitori restaurant

By Brock Radke

This is not the best time to open a new restaurant. The typical challenges have become intense, to say the least, and those obstacles don’t include the threat of being ordered to close if dining out is deemed too dangerous by the state government.

But chefs and restaurateurs are like artists—they need to create. It’s ingrained. And in some ways, the pandemic has created a different kind of fuel for their fire.

Mitsuo Endo, the James Beard Award nominee whose inimitable influence on the off-Strip dining scene began with the spectacular Aburiya Raku in 2008, unveiled his latest concept on July 3 with Raku Toridokoro, a yakitori restaurant dedicated to chicken. It’s located near the Palms in the intimate space where Endo opened Tatsujin X, a unique take on teppanyaki, last year. He has replaced Tatsujin’s flat-top grill with a robata, upon which he’s skewering and charcoal-grilling every part of the bird you can imagine … and some you probably can’t.

Toridokoro is something new for Endo and for Las Vegas. Some of those new restaurant challenges don’t apply to the chef, who helped develop Las Vegas Chinatown as a must-visit dining destination for locals and tourists through the original Raku and the dessert wonderland Sweets Raku, which he opened with pastry chef Mio Ogasawara in 2013.

“I didn’t have a plan for this,” he says, speaking through an interpreter, about his success and expansion in Las Vegas. “I was surprised. Compared to when I first [arrived] and now, the overall restaurant quality is

FOOD & DRINK

Top: Beyond Onion (cooked for four hours), mushroom,

baby zucchini, peppers stuffed with cheese, pumpkin

and sweet potato with Irish butter; Middle: skewers of

chicken parts (from left) skin, breast, cartilage, neck,

gizzard, heart, liver and tail. Bottom: chicken wings (tebasaki age). (All photos by Wade Vandervort/Staff)

so high [now] and the customer’s gle farm in the LA area, where the expectations are also high.” fowl are raised for six months; most

Toridokoro hones in on others can take just a month one aspect of cooking that RAKU to 12 weeks. Toridokoro’s Endo popularized locally TORIDOKORO chicken is 100 percent with the original Raku. 4439 W. organic and delivered fresh “This one is more tradiFlamingo Road, 702-337-6233. almost daily, Endo says. tional, a real Japanese yaMondayYou can sample evkitori [place]. I just wanted Saturday, 6 p.m.- erything with the chef’s to make a chicken specialty midnight. omakase menu ($75, with restaurant in Las Vegas, optional $50 or $80 sake because I didn’t see any. pairings), or take your This is the first and only chicken pick from smoky skewers of wing, restaurant.” breast, thigh, neck, gizzard, heart,

All the chicken comes from a sinliver and more ($4-$5 each). There

Chef Mitsuo Endo

are vegetable skewers, too, along with other dishes like deep-fried tofu ($8); Yodare Dori ($11), which is boiled chicken breast in a spicy sauce; fried chicken cartilage ($6); and the somewhat controversial Tori Tataki ($8), seared sashimi-style chicken.

The restaurant caused a bit of buzz among local foodies when images and social media posts from preview dinners indicated raw chicken would be on the menu. Endo was actually serving small slices of lightly poached chicken liver, breast and gizzard, along with a hot stone for customers to sear the meat themselves.

As expected, Raku regulars who couldn’t wait to get back to their favorite restaurant on Spring Mountain Road have started to discover Toridokoro. Endo’s offerings are imagined as unique experiences and aren’t really built for takeout, but he says he’ll shift into a different operational mode if necessary. The original Raku has been serving a takeout menu in recent months.

“I don’t have any special problems” because of the pandemic, he says. “I’m just doing what I need to do.”

FOOD & DRINK

A NEW AGE OF TEQUILA CASA DRAGONES REDEFINES THE SPIRIT OF MEXICO

BY GENEVIE DURANO our approach.” That approach is rooted in the meF or many of us, tequila is probably one of the first spirits we tried when we came ticulous handcrafting of each bottle, which begins with hand-harvested agave, grown in the rich soil of the of drinking age. A staple of Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, that college campuses and the base of has been matured for seven to nine popular cocktails like margaritas years. The water, which comes from and palomas, tequila has a storied Tequila Volcano, is processed in Casa history that dates back centuries, to Dragones’ modern water treatment when the first large-scale distillery facility, which allows for the extracwas built in the town of Tequila, in tion of the right mineral pro le to Jalisco, Mexico, during the 1600s. harmonize with its tequilas.

Casa Dragones Tequila, a relaThe producer has brought to tively new Mexican small-batch market three styles of tequila: Casa producer specializing in sipping Dragones Blanco, a 100% pure blue tequilas, has quickly made a name agave silver tequila that can be enfor itself as it ushers the spirit joyed on the rocks or in signainto the modern age. Its ture craft cocktails; Casa focus is on the experiDragones Joven, a blend ence of taste, in which of 100% blue agave each sip brings forth silver and extra-aged a new understanding tequila rested in of the agave plant, American oak barrels the base ingredient for five years; and in tequila, and the soil the recently debuted from which it grows. Casa Dragones “blue

“We founded the label” Añejo Barrel company in 2008 with Blend, which is aged in a mission of being as curious as possible and Casa Dragones co-founder Bertha González Nieves two different custommade oak barrels—the as innovative as possiwood is sourced from ble with our own ways of working to the Bordeaux region of France, and expand the tequila repertoire, and from Pennsylvania and Missouri. to really bring and showcase tequila The Barrel Blend is an exceptionin a very different light,” says Berally smooth sipping tequila with tha González Nieves, co-founder of a stunning clarity, not unlike a Casa Dragones and the first woman Chardonnay. It has notes of nutmeg, to be named Maestra Tequilera by macadamia and blackberry up front the Academia Mexicana de Cataand a long, round finish, with notes dores de Tequila. “We believe that of cacao and black pepper lingering tequila adorers and spirit drinkers on the palate. today are more curious than ever “What we’re trying to do in this before. People are into exploring tequila is let the product invite you whiskies or single malts or tequilas to really sip and savor what we’re all or mezcals. We think that today, about,” Nieves says. “We want our the consumer really has a reperproducts to actually sing in your toire, and they pride themselves in palate and invite you to try and go showcasing their knowledge of a on this journey of taste. That’s the category. And we believe that we are complexity and balance that we’re very unique and very rebellious in trying to accomplish as producers.”

Casa Dragones tequilas can be found in several Las Vegas restaurants, including Elio at Encore, Zuma at the Cosmopolitan and Mas Por Favor Taqueria y Tequila in Chinatown. They are available to purchase at Total Wine, Lee’s Discount Liquor and Liquor World, and through casadragones.com.

The Watermelon Margarita

Available at Encore Beach Club throughout the summer

Ingredients:

■ 1 1/2 oz. Casa Dragones Blanco Tequila ■ 1 1/2 oz. fresh watermelon juice ■ 1/2 oz. fresh lime juice ■ 1/4 oz. Cointreau ■ 1/4 oz agave

Method: Rim a glass with salt. Shake ingredients with ice, then carefully pour ingredients with ice, then carefully pour into the glass. Garnish and serve over ice.into the glass. Garnish and serve over ice.