Bonjour, Las Vegas!

Savoy has four restaurants besides the Michelin three-star Restaurant Guy Savoy Paris, but they're all in Paris as well. He's really a chef's chef, enormously well-regarded in the food world internationally for his focused, inventive, often playful cooking. Clearly it would have been better for Savoy to open in the fall, as originally planned, at the same time as Robuchon and capitalizing on the excitement, instead of seven months later.

Two waiters came to present a dish called "colors of caviar": a layered appetizer served in a rounded shot glass -- a gelee made with pressed caviar on the bottom, caviar cream atop that, then a brilliant green stripe of puree of \o7haricots verts\f7, a layer of sevruga and osetra caviar, and sabayon on top.

I sent a mother-of-pearl spoon to the bottom of the shot glass, pulling up a bit of each layer, and tasted. Waves of flavor and texture followed -- briny gelee, the creamy flavor of the sea, smooth green bean, and then the roe, with that marvelous pop. But most striking was the temperature: The dish wasn't cold, as one would expect, but what the French call \o7tiede\f7 -- just barely warm, or almost warm. And as a result, the flavors melded and merged and came alive.

"The basis of taste is texture, above all," said Savoy in French. (The chef hasn't spent much time yet in the U.S., and he's more comfortable speaking his native language.) But temperature is quite important to him too. "The magic is intellectual," he said, "the sensation of hot chocolate. Or the pleasure that ice cream brings you when it's hot outside."

Vvvvrrrrroooom, went something on the table -- it was Savoy's cellphone, a bright red one shaped like a race car, with a Ferrari logo. He pushed a button to silence it. Why a Ferrari phone? Jean Todt, manager of Ferrari's Formula 1 team, chief executive of Ferrari and Savoy's close friend, gave it to him.

But unlike Todt, who's famous for a nervous habit of biting his nails, Savoy was cool as can be.

Instant dream team

AMAZINGLY, the staff had only been at Caesars training for two weeks, yet everything seemed to be in place. Or almost everything -- the 950-bottle showcase wine rack in the entry wasn't quite right: The holes to hold the bottles' necks were too small to fit the bottles. The paintings and sculptures hadn't arrived yet -- they were expected the day before opening. But at Restaurant Guy Savoy Las Vegas, which was designed to be the twin of Restaurant Guy Savoy Paris, the foundations had been laid, and apparently laid well.