Serving Up Sinatra

From Norm’s Vegas Confidential column November 23, 2008:

One of the new restaurants at Steve Wynn’s Encore hotel will pay homage to Frank Sinatra and another will feature walls that lift up and down, transforming the room throughout the evening.

In a recent interview, Wynn revealed the Sinatra family has loaned him their father’s lone Academy Award, for best actor in a supporting role in 1953’s From Here to Eternity, and his Grammy awards.

The priceless memorabilia will be prominently featured in the Italian restaurant which will be named Sinatra. The family has so fiercely guarded the name that Wynn, a family friend, is the only person who was granted permission to use it. Among Wynn’s biggest coups was wooing Sinatra to the revitalized Golden Nugget as an exclusive headliner in the 1980s.

Wynn added that Paul Anka has promised the gold record he won for writing the English lyrics for My Way.  Anka wrote the hit song soon after Sinatra told him he was leaving show business.

“It won’t be a museum. It will be the most stunning restaurant in the country,” promised Wynn.

When Wynn recently unveiled his restaurant lineup for Encore, his $2.2 billion all-suites sister hotel to Wynn Las Vegas, the restaurant name was listed as Theo’s, after Theo Schoenegger, executive chef of Patina, a Los Angeles legend founded by Joachim Splichal.

Things change fast in Wynn’s world.

Switch, the other restaurant Wynn brought up in the interview, is so named because of the transformation diners will experience, from the changing walls and ceiling to the staff switching clothes.

Wynn’s national ad campaign, which has him standing atop Encore, is being launched today.