A tale of two local cookbooks

An intrepid wannabe chef puts Personal Favorites and Reservations Required

By Lynnette Curtis

As someone renowned among family and friends for her many culinary catastrophes, I approached Heidi Knapp Rinella's Personal Favorites: The Chefs of Las Vegas and Sarah Lee Marks' Reservations Required: Culinary Secrets of Las Vegas' Celebrity Chefs with considerable trepidation. After all, my personal kitchen specialties run the gamut from a bland tuna casserole to a blander tuna salad sandwich; you could say I don't know my osso buco from my foie gras.

In this case, however, I needn't have worried. Turns out the only qualification for enjoying either of these two cookbooks is that you like to eat and read about good food. Both books contain instructions on how to prepare the specialties of well-known Las Vegas chefs, their personal histories and plenty of pretty photographs of their finished products. And both are fun to read and visually interesting, even if you don't plan on preparing a single recipe.

Las Vegas Review-Journal food critic Rinella's take on local cuisine creators focuses on fewer chefs--13 compared with Marks' 28--but readers get to learn more interesting tidbits about their lives. (Andre's French Restaurant owner Andre Rochat, for example, began as--snicker--a "sausage stuffer," while Hamada's Jay Hamada was a professional dancer who performed on "The Ed Sullivan Show.") There also are more photographs in Rinella's book, including shots of the chefs in action, and photographer Jeff Scheid's elegant work makes their food look more colorful and appetizing than that in Marks' book, taken by photographer Audrey Dempsey. (I did appreciate Dempsey's restaurant-interior shots, which weren't as prominent in Rinella's book.)

The 36 recipes Rinella includes are more down-to-earth and easier to prepare than are Marks' 52. One of the complex recipes in Reservations Required, for example, is for Charred Octopus Salad, which looks like something a cringing "Fear Factor" contestant might be asked to consume.

After a quick Sunday grocery run, I tried a couple of the simpler recipes: Rochat's Jumbo Sea Scallops in a Macadamia Nut Crust from Personal Favorites, and Aquaknox chef Tom Moloney's Sweet Shrimp Salad from Reservations Required. My scallops came out crunchy and buttery, but my beurre blanc sauce tasted a little off (which I'm sure had everything to do with the preparer, not the recipe). And the salad was a cool, citrusy delight even I couldn't mess up. Naturally, neither dish turned out looking anything like its lovely book photograph.

Other recipes in both books are too labor-intensive for someone with my limited interest and culinary skills. I'll leave them instead to the real chefs, who wouldn't be caught dead serving up a bland tuna casserole.