Great gumbo plentiful in LV restaurants

Max Jacobson

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2000 | 10:02 a.m.

The term gumbo comes from an African language, and the original meaning of the word was okra. Okra was originally used as a thickening agent in gumbo. Many traditional Creole cooks in the South use it still.

In Las Vegas, you'd be hard pressed to find a gumbo thickened with okra. Most restaurants use a flour and oil roux, and one or two places make file gumbo, thickened with powdered sassafras root. Chef Seles Bowser of La Louisiane at the Orleans, likes the okra and oyster gumbo he grew up with. But he admits that it is an acquired taste and probably wouldn't sell here.

Gumbo, however, has become a culinary force in Las Vegas. There may be no city outside New Orleans with more restaurants serving delicious gumbo, and the gumbos keep getting better and better. No two taste quite the same. They are as personal a culinary expression as there is.

Let's take a gumbo odyssey across town and compare results. Here are five of our top gumbos, what is in them and how they taste. Each one is worth taking a wide detour to find:

La Louisiane, the Orleans

Chef Seles Bowser is a New Orleans native, but even more impressive is his resume: culinary school, a three-year stint with Jean-Louis Palladin at Napa, sous-chef under Kevin Graham, chef at the Windsor Court in New Orleans, and chef at the short-lived Nevada Nick's at the Regent Las Vegas.

Nevada Nick's served a wonderful gumbo, and Seles explains, "that was mine." Now he's improved it, using a stock made from chicken and shrimp plus a finely minced mixture of ham, chicken and real andouille sausage he obtains from his native state. The gumbo comes in a standard-sized soup bowl with a heap of rice in the center. It is a dark, musky gumbo at once both rich and spicy.

"Personally, I like to eat gumbo the next day," he says, "when the flavors deepen." He makes a more touristy version at the adjacent Big Al's Oyster Bar, but it won't be the same as the one in the dining room. At the bar, you get a mammoth bowl of ingredients prepared before your very eyes in a roasting pan, a soup base mixed with huge amounts of chicken, sausage and shrimp. It's tasty, but as Seles notes, those deep flavors take time.

Price: $6.95.

Delmonico Steakhouse, Venetian

Most people come here for steak, and rightly so. This Emeril Lagasse-owned steakhouse is easily one of the best and most elegant steak joints in the city.

But once you've tasted chef Christian Czerwonka's stupefyingly delicious gumbos, you'll be thinking N'awlins. According to the chef, gumbo can be a lot of different things, and not necessarily what your grandmother made.

So the gumbo here might be seafood-based one day, and even a white bean gumbo on days when the chef is feeling whimsical. Whichever one you eat, though, it will be brought to your table in an elegant little silver pot, then poured into a china dish.

Call ahead for the restaurant's epochal beef and chorizo sausage gumbo, one of the most unusual gumbos anywhere. It's loaded with big chunks of tender beef and a mild sausage, perfect for a drizzle of Crystal hot sauce. The chef slow-cooks it until it runs like a rich gravy. The roux is dark and smoky, and the holy trinity of Cajun cooking -- celery, onions and green peppers -- infuses it with complex flavors.

Cost: $6.50.

Big Mama's Rib Shack, 2230 W. Bonanza

We travel from silver to Styrofoam here, at this funky uptown soul-food restaurant. This is a file gumbo served in a plastic cup. In addition to being one of the best gumbos in town, the addition of chitterlings -- though only a few -- make it the funkiest.

Some may say that $7.95 for 16 ounces in a Styrofoam cup is pricey, but not so, according to personable owner Dargin McWhorter, who happens to be Big Mama's son. "This stuff is expensive to make," he says. "It's got crab, shrimp, chicken, ham beef and sausage, and what most people don't realize is that file gumbo doesn't keep long."

This gumbo is lighter on the palate and less oily than most gumbos in town, and the wide variety of components go down real easy. The large, also in a Styrofoam plastic cup, is 32 ounces, enough for almost anyone.

Cost: $7.95, $10.95.

Kathy's Southern Cooking, 6407 Mountain Vista St., Henderson

The aptly named Kathy Cook is a charmer from Vidalia, La. "Even though I keep file around," she says, "I make a roux gumbo, because file gumbo spoils too fast on top of a stove."

This is one more gumbo made with everything but the kitchen sink. "I add my own spices to the roux, which is made of flour and vegetable shortening. Butter burns fast, and the roux has to be stirred slowly. It sounds easy, but believe me, it isn't."

Kathy's gumbo is more of a watery one, but it is satisfying and hard to stop eating. She uses sausage, crab legs, shrimp and chicken and serves it with a larger heap of rice than any of her competitors. The one complaint she has about her own gumbo is that she'd like to improve the hot link. But if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Cost: $3.95, $10.50, $15.50.

Simply Southern, 4760 W. Sahara Ave.

Here is one more cafe run by a native Louisianan. In this case it is Raymond Stevens, a culinary school grad who owns and operates this charming, clean cafe. A black-and-white room with plantation shutters and walls serves as an informal gallery of jazz greats such as Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane.

Stevens only serves gumbo on Fridays at present, although he plans to make Saturday a gumbo day here in the next few weeks. And he is passionate and opinionated on the subject. "Some chefs make their gumbos too watery, and others make them too slimy," he says. "I make it just right."

No argument here. His gumbo is excellent, and he is the only chef in town who stocks the soup with easy-to-handle crab claws and Mexican shrimp.

The menu calls it seafood gumbo, but a purist can disagree, because there is chicken and andouille sausage in the mix. Stevens first makes a dark roux from a shrimp stock and simmers it for well over an hour. The white rice in the center sits in sharp contrast, and the result is one more argument for calling this city New Orleans West.

Cost: $9.95.