Wynn and the h.wood Group open Delilah at Wynn Las Vegas, a supper club whose full-throated glamour evokes the strip's past and embraces an opulent future.
If you were to enter Delilah’s art deco-inspired doors and wonder if you had stepped into one of the city’s most decadent midcentury institutions, you’d be forgiven. After all, the supper club, which opened July 14, was designed to channel years past.
Delilah’s brass palm trees and lively performers are sure to become a storied part of Las Vegas nightlife.
“When the Rat Packera acts were done for the night in Las Vegas, they convened in the city’s supper clubs,” says Todd-Avery Lenahan, president and chief creative officer of Wynn Design & Development. “It was an era with an affinity for tropicalism, such as in the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador in L.A., the original Tropicana Club in Havana and movies like South Pacific, which captured the popular imagination.”
The Stepford Wife cocktail
To create an experience that fully embodies the age, Lenahan and The h.wood Group partners John Terzian and Brian Toll created the character of Delilah: Vegas showgirl-turned-proprietress. In this way, the room spans several decades, as though Delilah herself collected the bronze cubist paintings reminiscent of Georges Braque, and malachite-inlaid tables. Look closely, though, and you’ll see that the caricatures that ring the top of the lounge area—think Sardi’s and the Palm—are thoroughly contemporary (yes, that is a Jenner). The cubist-patterned lounge upholstery and silk velvet textiles were designed by fashion houses Pierre Frey and Hermès.
The h.wood Group co-founder John Terzian.
True to the era, Delilah is all about making a grand entrance. You’ll step into an intimate lounge with effervescent “Champagne bubble” chandeliers and velvet waist-coated bartenders. Twin staircases descend into a main dining room with soaring ceilings whose center shimmers with solid cast-brass palms (a nod to New York City’s Copacabana). Zebrawood-inlaid floors double as a dance floor for the stage, designed to accommodate the venue’s nightly three-piece band (and surprise celebrity appearances). Sunday nights host a five-piece jazz band, and a DJ comes on late at night.
Executive chef Joshua Smith.
The h.wood’s Group’s star power already dominates L.A. in 14 dining and nightlife venues, from the original Delilah and Bootsy Bellows to Poppy and The Peppermint Club. “There is this nostalgia for the old Las Vegas supper clubs that our generation has really only seen in films,” Terzian says. Guests can summon it in a private dining room that adjoins the kitchen and in two candlelit courtyards. Executive chef Joshua Smith pays updated homage to the classics, such as a surf and turf of seared dayboat scallops and short ribs and a theatrical (and photogenic) strawberry shortcake baked Alaska. Mixologist Mariena Mercer Boarini has devised a showstopping menu of cocktails, like her Stepford Wife, a French 75 made with strawberry lemongrass vodka, citrus and rosé Champagne, and a Drake Spritzer, named for a certain Wynn frequent flier.
The gorgeous space designed by Wynn Design & Development’s Todd-Avery Lenahan.
Enthusiasm for Delilah rivals that of the 1950s, when a weekend flight was only available to the rich and famous. But this is no themed restaurant. In a city whose current mood is nothing if not effervescent, Delilah just gives her guests what they want. 702.770.7000
Photography by: ROBERT MILLER PHOTOGRAPHY, BRASS PALM TREES PHOTO BY MYRIAM SANTOS, BILL MILNE PHOTOGRAPHY
