Julian Serrano: Passionate Las Vegas Pioneer

If you count the number of celebrity chefs that have restaurants in Las Vegas these days, it seems infinite. Anybody who is anybody has a spot in Sin City, and if they don’t, they are probably planning to open one soon. Rewind to the Las Vegas of 15 years ago, however, and you’d be hard-pressed to come up with more than a handful of notable eateries, as Vegas was a culinary wasteland of sad buffets, mediocre steakhouses, and cheesy chains. What happened to turn it all around? The Bellagio, and a Spaniard named Julian Serrano, that’s what.

In 1998, the Bellagio opened with much fanfare, introducing the then finest-dining option Las Vegas had ever seen: Picasso, helmed by chef Julian Serrano. Serrano had just won the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef California for his work at Masa’s Restaurant in San Francisco. At Picasso, his menu dabbled in France and Spain. That menu earned him another Beard Award as Best Chef Southwest in 2002, and the restaurant remains one of Vegas’ finest.

But the Madrid native got into cooking for one reason and one reason only: “To travel around the world,” the chef recalls. “That was the most important thing for me. I became a chef because I was very young, and in those times I didn’t speak any foreign languages, and I thought it was a great way to learn. I thought that cooking is the international language. If I learned how to cook, maybe I could work in many different places.”

The epiphany that cooking could lead to world travels came to him when he was a teen. “A friend of mine delivered food to restaurants and bars in Spain. One day I had nothing to do and I said, ‘I can help you today,’” the chef explains. “And I went to the restaurant and I saw these guys slice potatoes–pa pa pa pa–very fast! I thought, man, I would like to do that!”

He was feeling tired of his hometown at the time when he also serendipitously came across a neighbor that he hadn’t seen in a while. “I said, ‘I haven’t seen you in a long time. Where have you been?’ and he told me he had been in culinary school in the south of Spain, in Marbella.” A light bulb went on in his head. Serrano had previously visited Marbella on a school trip and had fallen in love with the city. If he got into the culinary school there, he could learn to cook, get out of Madrid, and start the rest of his life. Inspired, he immediately applied. Three weeks later, he received his acceptance letter.

“I told my mother that I was leaving, and she said, ‘Are you crazy?’ I was 16 years old. It did seem crazy because at that time in Spain, nobody left their families until the time they got married. So I was the exception. And I think she suffered a little bit for the decision, but I did it.”

Next, Serrano sets off on his delicious adventure…

The chef moved to Marbella, got his culinary degree, and set off on a worldwide adventure that continues to this day. After cooking through kitchens in Europe, he landed a gig aboard an exclusive cruise line, an experience that he says was “incredible,” because of the numbers involved. “The amount of covers you were doing in a short time was impressive,” he says. “You had to be very good with speed. You had two seatings and every seating was 500 people. And you have to do it and do it quickly.”

As his time on the cruise line was wrapping up, he heard from a friend about a job in the United States, in Nashville. He was excited to land there and learn the language. “I had heard other people who were very critical about the States, saying ‘they don’t know how to eat, they even have very bad sandwiches.’ But I wasn’t critical. I was happy to be there with the people. I left the boat and I moved into Nashville to work in a Spanish restaurant.”

The lack of available ingredients made his job a challenge, however. “It was very difficult to produce food there at that time,” he remembers. “The simple things like fried calamari were even a big deal. I could not find anything there in Nashville, so everything was coming from Atlanta. And everything was coming frozen.”

Another challenge was introducing Spanish cuisine to the clientele, he said. “At that time, Nashville was a very meat-and-potatoes city and they weren’t open for much else.” Soon after, he left for the more bountiful pastures of San Francisco. “There it felt like home,” he said. “All of the nearby farms, the produce, the markets. I loved it.” Serrano trained under esteemed chef Masataka “Masa” Kobayashi, mastering the art of fine French cuisine at Masa’s Restaurant. When Masa was murdered in 1984, Serrano took charge, and continued in the chef’s good name for 14 years, before heading for Las Vegas in 1998.

Serrano, who admits he never thought he would stay in Las Vegas as long as he has, solidified the city’s status as his home in 2009, when he opened his eponymous restaurant in the Aria, Julian Serrano. Though it was during this time that he feels Spanish cuisine was finally becoming properly represented in the United States, Serrano credits tapas with US diners’ enlightenment. “People who didn’t know so much about Spanish restaurants, knew about tapas,” he says. “When we opened Julian Serrano, I didn’t want to put ‘tapas’ in the name because I thought it was a little tacky. But after the first 6 or so months, I started to realize tons of people didn’t know the name Julian Serrano, but once I would tell them it was a tapas restaurant, they would get excited and say, ‘Oh my god! I love tapas!’ So I put the word ‘tapas’ along with the name of the restaurant, and while business was good, after I added that to the name it became better. Because people know tapas.”

He shakes his head, however, at the abuse of the word. “Now if I go into a Japanese restaurant, they have ‘tapas.’ Korean, ‘tapas.’ Any kind of restaurant is ‘tapas’ now. It is sad in some ways to use the word tapas in these kinds of restaurants. But they use the name because people know it.”

That said, Serrano embraces the US because of the new energy he feels is constantly being brought to local cuisine. “I love that there are a lot of young people who have culinary interest in the US, and a lot of people who have cooking opportunities.” He pauses intently before turning this question on his interviewer: “In America, do you know who watches the Food Network the most?” Another dramatic pause before he answers. “Children. They watch the food channel more than anyone else. These kids that grow up with food on the mind, they want to be chefs because they have a passion. When I first came to the United States, people did not like to work in the food business. Now, American people own restaurants and hotels, and they are managers and they like it. They start to recognize that if you have a passion and you do it well, then you can make a very good living. If you don’t have the passion, you are dead.”