Few Las Vegas restaurants survive 18 years on the Strip, and fewer still do so while maintaining a sterling reputation for impeccable food and service.
Yet when acclaimed chef Charlie Palmer looked at Aureole, his modern American eatery at Mandalay Bay, he saw a restaurant in need of a refresh, a veteran venue ripe for reinvention.
"Over the last year, we've been really kind of reassessing the history of Aureole here and also thinking, 'What's our next step? How do we take Aureole into the next 10, 15 years?'" he said.
In late November, the restaurant closed for a monthlong renovation that would answer that question, and when it reopened just before the new year, it was nearly unrecognizable.
"It's really cozy," said Palmer over the phone from Las Vegas, "which is a challenge in a space like this. This is a 300-seat restaurant."
While the basic bones of the restaurant remain — along with the signature wine tower where spandex-clad "angels" in harnesses retrieve your bottle selections from the upper reaches — the rest of Aureole has been updated and reimagined, from the color scheme and the carpets to the menu and the wine list.
There's new furniture, brighter carpets and a 35-foot-tall olive tree that's become the centerpiece of the dining room.
"Everything about the room has been thought through again, even the music program, the entrance way, the frontage. How do we take things to the next level and also present it in a way that people respond?" said Palmer.
A cold-pressed coffee panna cotta served at the Aureole at Mandalay Bay.
The menu and wine list have also undergone a full transformation.
The menu is divided into three sections devoted to "root" (vegetables), "ranch" (meat) and "surf" (seafood), with dishes broken down into shareable small plates, bigger items and large-format dishes for the table, such as a 48-ounce Creekstone Farms porterhouse or a whole sea bass dressed with hot lemon and chimichurri.
Each dish is also listed alongside two numbers, which correspond to wines from the 50-bottle-strong, by-the-glass list.
"We've always been completely bottle-oriented," said Palmer. The format allows guests to mix and match, sampling a handful of wines over the course of a meal as either full or half glasses.
Of course, there's still a bottle list — now printed, after years of being presented on a tablet — with 3,000 wines. And the wine angels, decked out in new metallic uniforms, are still happy to fly up to your preferred cabernet or pinot noir. Because even at the new Aureole, some things will never change.