Vegas for Vegans - Pura Vida

Black bean burrito

If you've been reading posts about my recent travels (thank you!), you'll know that my main travel companion, T, is vegetarian on the 1st and 15th of each lunar month. We happened to be in Vegas on one of these days - you'll know that we had dinner at Bartolotta, and that the Wynn is vegan and vegetarian friendly. But when I decided to set our GPS to Pura Vida, I had no idea it was a vegan "bystro". It was just sort of on the way to the outlets (I don't gamble, but I use/lose my money in other ways). In fact, T didn't even have to be vegetarian that day. The reason we came was because I saw pictures of pancakes on Yelp. Pancakes and shopping! How delightfully frivolous!

é by Jose Andres - Avant Garde-ism in Brash Las Vegas

Stairway to... Jose?

Jose Andres, a name not quite as well known outside of the US as Mario Batali or Thomas Keller, but within, he's been on the scene a long time, getting people to stop and look (and taste) avant garde Spanish. He's an elBulli alum (almost everyone doing avant garde is nowadays, no?) but that's about all I knew. When I told people I was going to Vegas, gourmet traveller kindly sent me a very detailed email of everywhere they went and heard about on a similar trip (SF > Big Sur > Vegas). One that caught my eye was é by José Andrés. Many people in the US know him by his other restaurant, the super-experimental Minibar in D.C.

Bartolotta - There's an ocean in Las Vegas (for vegetarians too)

Mushroom ragout tagliatelle

Being vegetarian in the land of steakhouses and poker seems counter-intuitive, but is entirely possible. Funny that I should even be thinking about it, as (clearly) I'm not virtuous enough to be vegetarian, but best-friend-T is doing the vegetarian-on-the-1st-and-15th-of-the-lunar-month thang, so there we were, in Vegas, on the 15th of the 10th month of the lunar calendar.