Empire Building

Export Report: Checking In on Old Homestead, Balthazar, and Momofuku

Will the Vegas location have a Schnabel-designed room?
Will the Vegas location have a Schnabel-designed room? Photo: Courtesy Old Homestead Steakhouse

Lots of New York restaurants are headed elsewhere. Rosa Mexicano is gearing up to open its second L.A. location, and yesterday Zagat reported that by the end of the year, the Old Homestead Steakhouse will open its third location at Caesars Palace in Vegas, already home to Mesa Grill and Rao’s outposts. The 250-seat restaurant will occupy 16,000 square feet. They’re going to have the same colossal crab cake as New York, reports Zagat; however, there’s no word on whether the new steakhouse will have a “blue room” designed by Julian Schnabel. The end-of-year arrival of the Old Homestead Vegas expansion seems to gleefully join a bunch of other notable New York restaurant exports around the globe.

The Paris-inspired, New York–based Balthazar is going to England, as reported earlier. Balthazar London will open early 2012, according to reports, at the Theatre Museum at Convent Garden. The millionaire Richard Caring, who’s working on Balthazar London with restaurateur Keith McNally (who himself famously once told Vanity Fair he has “an intense dislike of chains and sister restaurants”), last month described the new location as “an act of love” in the Evening Standard, adding: “This will not be some Far Eastern copy, everything will be made in the US, the real McCoy. It won’t be a copy of the New York Balthazar, but it will be in its image.”

Meanwhile, David Chang, last seen taking new Momofuku concepts to both Canada and Australia, has officially started looking for cooks to staff the forthcoming Momofuku located in Sydney’s Star City Casino, according to a job posting listed earlier this week. (He also recently made an appearance on Australia’s crazy-popular version of Masterchef.)

And while man of the hour Danny Meyer may be busy exporting Shake Shack (and its associated “Hospitality Quotient”) to Dubai and Kuwait, at least we know he’s never going to open in Las Vegas, at least while those anti-smoke “synthetic deodorizers” are still in use out there.

Old Homestead Steakhouse Headed To Vegas [Zagat Buzz]
Earlier: Danny Meyer Is Exactly As Charming As You Think He Is

Export Report: Checking In on Old Homestead, Balthazar, and Momofuku