Bellagio’s Picasso paints perfect dining experience

Stacy J. Willis

Sunday, Feb. 6, 2000 | 9:09 a.m.

No fish.

A storm on the East Coast has Picasso Executive Chef Julian Serrano on his home phone at 6 a.m. dialing seafood suppliers, hoping some brave fisherman weathered the ice and reeled in a catch of halibut which will, by this evening, be on dinner plates in Las Vegas.

No luck.

"Tremendous problem. Big problem. Big, big problem," Serrano, 48, says in his thick Spanish accent. "Everything must be perfect. I will have to change the menu."

By the time the chef arrives at the restaurant at midday, the prep cooks are simmering stainless steel pots of fennel for vegetable stock and mixing vats of milk and chocolate for ice cream. Lobsters are writhing in a countertop tank and, down the hall at the receiving dock, wooden palettes are stacked high with crates of today's fresh tomatoes and cauliflower.

But Serrano is antsy. No halibut.

Never mind the $5,000 worth of other seafood, meat and fresh vegetables sent from around the world overnight -- salmon from Scotland, purple Peruvian potatoes from California.

"Every element is important," Serrano says, while striding back toward his kitchen through a labyrinthine stretch of employee hallways under the Bellagio.

"The goal is to make a great gastronomical experience. That's what we work for everyday. Consistently."

He stops in the hallway to greet "the flower ladies" who are pushing a delivery cart loaded with fresh azaleas and bromeliads. Picasso gets $9,000 worth of fresh flowers each month -- waiters are quizzed each day on the flower names in case a customer asks.

"All elements are important. Not just one element, but all elements. Every detail. The carpet guests walk on: perfect. The service: perfect. The silver: perfect. The food: impeccable."

2 p.m.

In a kitchen corner Matt Fleisher is juicing apples for strudel on the day he will get a hefty pay raise. He doesn't know yet that he's up for a promotion from baker to assistant pastry chef.

"I love this job," says Fleisher, 32, who once worked as a Dallas diamond courier -- ("I drove around a lot of money but I never got any of it") and later accumulated 10 years of kitchen experience in San Francisco.

Fleisher and his colleagues chuckle when asked if they take a break to eat their own dinner.

"Have you ever seen the hot-dog-eating contest on Coney Island?" Scott Varricchio, assistant pastry chef, asks while laughing. "That's what we do."

"This is not a set of employees that calls the union if they don't get their hour for dinner," adds Robert Gilbert, assistant pastry chef, who is rolling cookie dough. "If we get time, we eat quickly."

"This is a field we chose. It's tough, but it's fun," Fleisher says. "I've been doing it for a while now, and I don't know anything else. I have every intention of doing it until the day I die. "But some day it would be nice to be a pastry chef and maybe own my own restaurant," Fleisher says. Today, however, there are a more than a hundred Fuji apples to juice.

2:30 p.m.

Serrano and sous chef Yoshimaru Honda sit down in the dining room for a pre-game tete-a-tete. The menu has been adjusted due to the East Coast storm:

Warm lobster salad. Florida snapper in buerre rouge sauce with cauliflower mousseline. Sauteed foie gras with Madeira sauce. Roasted wild striped bass. Roasted lamb chop. Warm quail salad. Poached oysters. Sauteed medallions of fallow deer...

Honda, 37, has worked for Serrano eight years; he followed the chef here 18 months ago from their former post at Masa's restaurant in San Francisco.

Honda was raised in Japan and his entire family still lives there.

"Julian's family is like my family now...

"I started kitchen work when I was 17. I washed dishes in my uncle's restaurant," Honda says. "This is very hard work both mentally and physically. A simple state of mind is important. Simplicity and focus...

"I enjoy cooking because it makes people happy. It's like when you invite guests to your home and they are happy, then you are happy. It doesn't matter if I'm ever famous or make a lot of money. If I make people happy, then I get to share their happiness."

Serrano also lured from Masa's Maitre d' Ryland Worrell, who arrives in Picasso's brightly colored dining room wearing a maroon bowtie.

"(Dallas Cowboys quarterback) Troy Aikman will be here tonight," says Worrell as the two study the 200-person guest list -- which they will do four more times before service starts. The list includes details about every diner -- where they are staying, whether they asked about dress code, whether they have special requests. The information is transferred onto a card for the waiter.

"No surprises," Serrano says.

As he walks out of the dining room, he stops to refold a napkin.

3:30 p.m.

While Richard Koker cracks lobster shells and Varricchio stretches dough the length of a 3-foot stainless table and Alfonso Gordon arranges sliced purple Peruvian potatoes in perfect circles on dozens of white plates, baker Barbara Dellich slams hunks of semi-sweet chocolate against the counter, breaking it into meltable pieces for a cake.

"I remember watching my mom bake when I was little," Dellich says. "I always loved to bake with her. But I figured out later that I don't like the other part of cooking, just the baking.

"I went to (culinary) school, I went to work on a cruise ship, and I was excited to work here. I had heard Julian's name and (Pastry Chef) Lincoln Carson's name in school," she says.

"The thing you have to do after you learn the basics is find your own style. There is so much out there that you really have to learn to make your own mark."

Serrano zips past Dellich and leads an unsuspecting Fleisher into the dining room.

"The people in the restaurant are very important to me," Serrano tells his employee.

"Matt, you've been doing a great job for me. Every day you work hard, and you ask for nothing. I want to do something nice for you. I want to move you up to assistant pastry chef and increase your salary from $30,000 to $35,000. It's good for you, it's good for me."

Fleisher reddens. He shakes Serrano's hand vigorously and pats him on the shoulder.

"Thank you very, very much, chef. You rock," Fleisher says. "Right on."

Serrano's wireless phone rings. As he listens, he covers the mouthpiece and whispers, "Another VIP. The violinist. Itzhak Perlman. 6 p.m."

5 p.m.

The chef is slicing cold, engorged duck livers with a knife that has been warmed on the burner. The meat hisses at each touch of the blade and immediately fills the kitchen with a rich aroma.

Foie gras is one of Serrano's signature dishes.

"I worked very hard to get here," he says. "But years ago I did not expect to be a chef. I thought I would be a soccer player or maybe an actor, not a chef."

Serrano grew up in a small town near Madrid, where his father raised farm animals for slaughter and his mother "cooked only because the family had to eat."

"When I was 15, I wanted to travel and make money, so I thought cooking would be good for a while because you don't have to speak the language in a country to cook there," he says.

"Also, I was in a restaurant kitchen once, and I saw a guy slicing potatoes so fast -- chop-chop-chop -- and I thought, 'I wish I could do something like that.' "

He finishes cleaving a tray full of duck livers and spreads them in two side-by-side pans over a flaming gas burner, where they immediately crackle and smoke.

"When I was about 25 years old, the other dreams started fading away, and I started focusing on cooking as a realistic career. I started working hard -- so hard that I lost some friends who didn't want to talk about food all the time.

"But I wanted to be good."

5:30 p.m.

About 20 waiters and food runners are standing shoulder to shoulder in the dining room on orange and purple carpet designed by Pablo Picasso's son. They are dressed in crisp white shirts and black pants and vests.

Worrell holds up a red flower and says, "Azalea." The team repeats, "Azalea."

Worrell continues. "The purple ones are bromeliads."

The first guests amble in at 6 p.m., and Serrano heads back into the kitchen. When the first orders arrive, a day of steady food preparation gives way to the organized chaos of food service.

Serrano begins shouting out the orders; chefs shout out a reply. Runners line up at the door.

Flames are rising and freezer doors slamming and hands and knives and spatulas twirling and bodies negotiating around tight kitchen corners and -- every few minutes -- from this havoc comes a simple, elegant plate of food: two large scallops side-by-side with a small corn flan; four oyster shells accented with a tiny dollop of caviar.

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