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airplane at two miles over the desert with the Flying Elvi skydiving team.
    "Pull yourself together, Ruhlman," I howled over the blaring radio. "Pouring beer on yourself is good. Helps avoid sunstroke. And having an open receptacle in the car is, I'm pretty sure, illegal—even in this state. Now snap out of it. And drive us to Bouchon!"
    *       *       *
    Las Vegas: a bright, hopeful land of opportunity for chefs—or the elephant graveyard for cynical cooks-turned-restaurateur/ entrepeneurs? A well-deserved final score for celebrity chefs, after a lifetime of toil; a last cash-out before knees fail entirely and brains cook—or just a soulless extension of The Brand? Was it possible to serve truly good food; maintain one's standards, one's integrity; do good works in Vegas's mammoth, air-conditioned Xanadus, this neon-lit theme park, these Terrordomes of twenty-four-hour beeping, bleeping, and jangling slots? Were these names of recognizable and respected chefs, these distant outposts of empire, simply far-flung knockoffs, expensive reproductions of what were once the soulful, heartfelt expressions of their strengths and dreams—now only farmed out cookie-cutter versions? Or were they just as good as their flagships, the same, only subsidized by the shattered hopes and dreams of the hapless souls two floors down, feeding their disability checks in increments into the endless banks of blinking, uncaring machines?
    These were the serious moral issues I was grappling with as Ruhlman crushed his size-thirteen foot onto the gas pedal and powered the eight-cylinder red beast off gravel and onto asphalt, toward Thomas Keller's Bouchon, the place I hoped would provide an answer.

    A few days earlier, we'd visited some usual suspects. Inevitable, really, that we'd hit Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill first. I figured that a purer example of branding could scarcely be found. I was looking for an easy hatchet job. A clear case of reptilian regeneration, a restaurant group expanding unthinkingly, like a chameleon grows back a lost tail. The story arc appeared classic: New York chef becomes fantastically well known on the Food Network, widens operation, opens in Vegas. It's easy, so easy, to dismiss Flay's whole Vegas enterprise with a New York sneer. It certainly does no serious restaurant much help in the gravitas department to locate in the Mega-Coliseum of Uber-Kitsch, Caesars Palace, among the Italianate statuary, the staff in togas, the gurgling fountains and Celine Dion gift shop. Flay's mug looks down on diners and punters alike from a giant JumboTron over the slots—in a continuous loop of clips from his television shows. The restaurant itself looks, from the exterior, like an over-designed coffee shop; only a layer of slightly tinted glass separates the light, modern, vaguely Southwestern dining room from the killing floor.
    As we took our seats in the dining room, Ruhlman pointed out an old woman in a wheelchair being pulled reluctantly away from a slot machine on the other side of the glass.
"That's not putting me in the mood."
    Over an open kitchen, a satellite-size rotisserie twirled chickens in slow rotation.
    "First night they opened, that thing was roaring red at like . . . nine hundred degrees," said Ruhlman. "Would have looked cool if it was red. Or if you could see flames now. But the thing was so hot it would have cooked the customers if they'd kept it cranked. They had to turn it way down, or they would have had customers bursting into flames, running across the casino floor with their hair on fire."
"That wouldn't be good for business," I said.
"You think that would stop these people from gambling?"
    Perhaps sensing the general mood of skepticism at our table, a wary-looking flack from the casino's food and beverage department quickly—and sensibly—plied us with novelty margaritas.
    "Just let the kitchen cook for us," suggested Ruhlman. "Do what you're good at. Nothing that's not on the menu."
    Our very