Ready for a break? Take a trip to hell and back at Tahoe’s game-changing restaurant

In late December, before the coronavirus pandemic turned the world upside down, the center of gravity shifted in the $215 million-plus South Lake Tahoe dining scene. It was thrown off-kilter by the soft opening of celebrity chef-restaurateur Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen inside Harveys Hotel-Casino at Stateline.

Every day for its first three months, lines of excited customers filled the place for lunch and dinner, the mobs spilling out onto the casino floor. By early March, HK (as it’s known) had booked 20,000 reservations for the next few months. With millions of global visitors to the Tahoe Basin each year, it was expecting many more.

HK’s official grand opening was scheduled for March 20-21, when Ramsay himself would be on site to host a VIP dinner and perhaps a random meet-and-greet with local fans. But the pandemic quashed those plans, closing Harveys and its sister hotel-casino Harrah’s on March 18. To date, there are no plans for a replacement grand opening involving Ramsay.

Harrah’s reopened June 4, followed by Harvey’s on June 30, with HK picking up where it left off — sort of. Restaurant-bar capacity has shrunk from 150 to 87. Super-safety protocols are in place, to the point that tongs are used to hand out disposable menus to diners.

The dinner menu is shorter, too (lunch has been temporarily suspended), though it’s been joined by a to-go menu and a vegetarian menu. “The menu items are driven by making sure the cooks remain 6 feet apart while preparing the dishes, and some dishes have been removed that were specifically designed to be shared,” said Steve Turner, senior director of food and beverage for Caesars Entertainment, which owns Harveys and Harrah’s.

As much as HK has adapted, and as much unpredictability lies ahead, it’s not just one more entry in Caesars Entertainment’s strategically engineered dining concepts.

A sure bet on Gordon Ramsay

Caesars never bluffs, and so far HK has proven a sure bet for a corporation with 50 hotel-casinos housing restaurants around the world, including 11 in partnership with Ramsay, which range from fine-dining to casual. Many have reopened.

The meticulously engineered and furiously buzzed opening of HK was something extra-special, branded with the Ramsay magic and echoing elements of his most-watched reality-TV series, “Hell’s Kitchen” — minus a screaming chef, of course.

“We have some great restaurants in town and on property, but this is a different animal,” said Turner. “With the power of a celebrity chef of Gordon’s stature, Hell’s Kitchen will be a motivator for (other Tahoe restaurants) to raise their ante. We’ve even looked at our own restaurants internally and asked, ‘Can we get better?’”

Ramsay and Caesars Entertainment have history going back to 2012, when they debuted Gordon Ramsey Steak inside the Paris Las Vegas. But the HK concept is unique in the dining industry, a restaurant based on the set of a TV reality show with viewership in the millions, starring a famously unpredictable host.

The first HK opened inside Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 2018, followed by another in Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Now along comes HK in South Lake Tahoe, a small town at heart that’s quickly overwhelmed and overbooked during the winter and summer tourist seasons. How did this happen?

“Caesar’s Entertainment and the Gordon Ramsay Restaurant Group were looking for more opportunities, and the idea of Lake Tahoe came up,” said Harveys-Harrah’s public affairs chief John Packer. “Ramsay and his team made several trips here to look at locations, and he fell in love with the lake. One place they scouted was Harveys, and Ramsay decided the Sage Room location was the ideal spot for Hell’s Kitchen, being right off the heavily trafficked middle of the main casino floor.”

Crews began disassembling the venerable Sage Room last summer for its move to the 19th floor and into the former 19 Kitchen & Bar, and transforming the vacated space into the modernistic HK.

But they were treading on hallowed ground, and longtime Sage Room customers let management know it. After all, the seemingly perpetual Sage Room was a special-occasion, history-saturated destination for countless generations over decades.

It opened in 1947 inside the rustic Harveys Wagon Wheel, founded in 1943 by San Francisco meat wholesaler Harvey Gross and his wife Llewellyn. It was the first fine-dining restaurant at Lake Tahoe, and quickly became a dining tradition.

As Harvey’s grew into its current incarnation, the Sage Room stood still in time. The meat-dominant menu continues to star vintage appetizers and entrees seldom seen anymore — frogs’ legs Provencal, oysters Rockefeller, steak Diane and veal Oscar. Caesar salad and flaming cherries jubilee are still prepared at tableside, and you can even get a side of 1950s-vibe creamed spinach.

A show-stopping Lake Tahoe dining option

I drove up to Lake Tahoe in mid-February to check out HK and tour the new Sage Room, which reopened July 1. Frankly, it’s a drastic improvement over the dark, nearly claustrophobic old Sage Room, nostalgia notwithstanding. For starters, there’s the unobstructed view of Lake Tahoe and the Sierra, a show-stopping backdrop.

“You could say this has given the Sage Room a new lease on life, even though there has been some apprehension among longtime guests,” Turner said. “But once they come up here, they’re enchanted with how it looks and feels, and the menu remains the same. We had to add a second char-broiler to meet the demand.”

Caesar’s Entertainment preserved much of the old Sage Room in the new site, installing the original doors, antique wood walls and wagon wheels, a mural, mounted cow skulls, and an art museum’s worth of limited-edition reproductions of Old West-themed paintings by Charles Russell and sculptures by Frederic Remington.

Those unusual hanging lamps? They’re made from hand-painted deerskin, originally a gift from the Washoe Indians to Harvey Gross. “We’re communicating with the tribe to see if they want them back,” Turner said.

The servers moved upstairs, too, a crew of impeccably dressed and mannered gentlemen as old-school as the menu. At dinner that night, our server told us he was now the senior man on the floor, with 32 years on the job. That’s because his colleague had retired the week before, after 42 years.

Big crowds of Ramsay fans

A devil-may-care lunch at HK was planned the next day during our February visit. The crowd was jazzed, the horseshoe-shaped bar was jammed, servers squeezed between tables, and cooks in the open display kitchen pulled bubbling-hot pizzas from the wood-burning oven. It was a more raucous experience than HK’s current dining model under Nevada safety guidelines.

But most everything else remains the same, especially the quality of the food. Still greeting guests at the entrance is a huge “duratrans” (a backlit photo transparency) of Ramsay surrounded by gas ovens shooting out jets of fire. Flame is a recurring motif in the restaurant, along with three-prong devil’s pitchforks. This is a kitchen-restaurant in hell, after all.

Inside, the dramatic blue-and-red color scheme echoes the one on Fox’s TV series, and photos of the show’s winners from the past 18 seasons line one wall. Though “Hell’s Kitchen” seasons 19 and 20 have been filmed, Fox won’t say when they’ll air.

On our tasting menu were some of the “greatest hits” featured on the “HK” TV series — scallops with braised lardons; butter-poached lobster with truffle risotto; non-traditional beef Wellington (involving prosciutto and mushroom duxelles); crispy-skin salmon with Beluga lentils; and sticky toffee pudding dessert. All are on the current menus.

One essential key to any restaurant’s success is consistency, and the Gordon Ramsay Restaurant Group holds an ace-high straight flush.

For instance, one visitor to our table was Christina Wilson, winner of “Hell’s Kitchen: Season 10” and now the executive chef of the Gordon Ramsay Restaurant Group. She was running to catch a plane after spending weeks at the new restaurant, training the culinary team and triple-checking preparation, textures, plating, temperatures, taste profiles – in other words, making sure that corporate standards were met.

The second person to have a seat was HK executive chef Jayson Behrendt. How fluid is the menu, he was asked. “We do not run daily specials, but I do have some discretion,” he said. “I’ll propose something new, but it has to be passed by the group before we can put it on the menu.”

Given the price point and all the branding and boosting, the final question is: Does HK truly deliver something extraordinary that cannot be missed? Answer: Oh, hell yeah.

One last thing: A cocktail lounge opened next door to HK. In a marketing flourish with a sense of humor, it’s called the Heavenly Bar.

This story was originally published July 9, 2020 at 4:00 AM.