At Pisces Bar & Seafare, the new seafood restaurant that will open at Wynn Las Vegas on Saturday, May 10, executive chef Martin Heierling has done a deep dive into making lobster pasta.
Lobster pasta is a crowd-pleasing dish at seafood restaurants around the world, whether you’re summering in Sheepshead Bay or sailing across the Adriatic Sea. At Pisces, Heierling has a clear vision for his version.
“Most of the time, people make lobster pasta and they use a lobster stock and basically a tomato sauce,” Heierling tells Observer. “I looked at it like, ‘OK, how do I like to eat lobster?’”
The lobster spaghettini at Pisces does have a little hit of San Marzano DOP tomatoes, but Heierling wants this dish to be lobster-forward and not tomato-forward.
“I’m doing a fennel acqua pazza and I’m still using lobster stock, but I don’t roast it,” he says. “It’s a white stock, and I just reduced it until it’s extremely fortified.”
Heierling, who’s sourcing fish daily from the Mediterranean, is amplifying the flavors of the ocean in all kinds of ways at Pisces. He’s curing fish, including branzino that’s salt-baked before being flambéed tableside, with plankton. He’s getting dry-aged tuna (akami, chutoro and otoro) from Liwei Liao’s Joint Seafood and also dry-aging fish like orata in-house at Wynn. He’s honing in on the wonders of seafood, saffron and socarrat as he makes paella with a spiny lobster tail, shrimp, scallops, calamari, mussels and clams.
“Somebody just asked me about the menu, and we were discussing if this is modern seafood,” Heierling said. “I said, ‘No, it’s really not. It’s just seafood.’ What I really like to do is look for ingredients that are really interesting to me. For example, I use a lot of plankton that I buy from Ángel León in Spain.”
Pisces, located across from SW Steakhouse on Wynn’s Lake of Dreams just below the main level of the resort, feels like a glamorous throwback experience. The room is dark and moody with a vintage ’70s vibe and music that matches the atmosphere. This is Wynn Las Vegas, which knows a few things about making things over-the-top, so it’s no surprise that the space, designed by Todd-Avery Lenahan, boasts eye-catching elements like reflective mosaic floors, 400 rum-colored orbs made of Murano glass and an entry rotunda with both embroidered velvet walls and ebony wood.
Heierling, whose extensive experience includes running Sensi at Bellagio and working as Noble 33’s corporate executive chef, has done a lot in his career. But he knows that Wynn is on a different level. So he’s loading his menu with luxury.
“I didn’t want to just do caviar service,” he says.
So Pisces, which uses Thomas Keller’s Regiis Ova caviar, is also serving caviar with jamón ibérico croquetas. There are caviar bumps on crisp airbread in the shape of a fish. And the elaborate seafood platters at Pisces include the Siren’s Offering with oysters, clams, mussels, Oishii shrimp, lobster Catalana, king crab, spicy tuna tartare, langoustines, scallops, balik salmon and aged kaluga royal caviar.
Like everything else at Wynn, Pisces is designed to be a total-package experience. The bi-level restaurant will feature everything from tableside seafood presentations with dry ice to a section of Mariena Mercer Boarini’s cocktail menu that’s devoted to Spanish gin and tonics (like the Valencia with Sevilla orange gin, limoncello and Sicilian citrus tonic water). Jennifer Yee’s dessert menu has playful presentations like a beautiful chocolate fish.
Heierling is paying close attention to many difference-making details, like the Greek olive oils he’s chosen and the way he pre-scores the salt crust for his tableside branzino and how he leaves the skin only on the branzino’s top filet. It’s about sophistication and a more elegant experience.
“We want each person to have that communal dining aspect but still in an elevated luxurious way,” he says. “I think that was one of the most important things we focused on.”
Pisces Bar & Seafare at Wynn Las Vegas will open its dining room from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m on weekdays and 5 p.m to 10:30 p.m. on weekends. The bar opens at 4:30 p.m. daily.