There’s a brand new restaurant on the Las Vegas Strip, and it’s transporting guests from the Nevada heat to Bedford, New York, where Martha Stewart owns a more than 150-acre farm estate.
The Bedford by Martha Stewart opened this month inside the Paris Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, and gets its design inspiration from the 81-year-old mogul’s New York farmhouse. In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Life, Stewart shares that her first-ever restaurant is an “iconic place,” where she hopes “people will sit and enjoy” a taste of what her actual home is like.
The Bedford offers multiple replicated rooms from Stewart’s home, from a bright open kitchen adorned with copper pots and pans to “the brown room,” a dining room with backlit panels that mimic views of Stewart’s actual gardens and identical faux-bois paneling along the walls.
“You can sit in a high-top table, like a white marble kitchen table,” she says of the decor. “You can sit at a mahogany lower table like in my dining room. In the brown room, you can sit at a table that’s a replica of my mother’s dining room table that she gave to me, which I still have.”
Other touches from Stewart’s mother, Martha Kostyra, who died in 2007 at the age of 93, include roasted chicken and pierogi recipes Stewart learned as a child. “The pierogies … are served with a sage brown butter or crème fraîche and caviar,” says Stewart. “You can splurge and get very expensive dishes (the whole roasted chicken, for example, is carved table-side and costs $90) but you can also eat very nicely and a little bit more moderately.”
Among those moderately-priced dishes are a $30 crab cake and the Martha’s Square Burger, a $30 sandwich served on brioche and topped with tomato jam, caramelized onion and house-made mustard. “I don’t ever eat hamburgers, but I eat this hamburger,” Stewart says of the dish.
There’s also a smashed potato side dish on the menu, served with a tray of crème fraîche, bacon lardon and chives. Caviar can be added to the mix for between approximately $100 and $300, depending on how much buttery golden osetra caviar — one of the rarest-colored caviars on the spectrum, harvested from sturgeon — guests require.
Stewart joins a long line of celebrity chefs who have restaurants at Caesars Entertainment-owned properties, from Gordon Ramsay to Giada De Laurentiis. On the weekend of the Bedford’s opening, several famed chefs took to the Paris Las Vegas Instagram to wish Stewart well.
“I love having something in common with Martha,” said chef Bobby Flay.”It’s not easy to do because she’s the best.”
Sean McBurney, the regional president of Caesars Entertainment, says Stewart was hands-on throughout the creation of the restaurant. “We couldn’t be more proud to have a partnership with Martha,” he tells Yahoo Life. “Martha has overseen every aspect of this restaurant and it really is extraordinary. How many people in the world have the opportunity to visit Martha’s home to experience her food and enjoy her hospitality? Not many, but thanks to the Bedford there’s going to be a lot more.”
Opening weekend of the Bedford also saw visits to the restaurant from Stewart’s close friends, Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo and rapper Snoop Dogg.
View this post on Instagram
But all celebrity endorsements and opulent decor aside, Stewart says the cocktail menu at the Bedford is one of the things she’s most excited for, adding that “even more important than the food, are the drinks.”
From “Martha-ritas” and “Martha-tinis” to flavorful Passion Fruit Caipirinhas and an impressive wine list (that features her 19 Crimes Martha’s Chard Chardonnay), there’s a beverage for all tastes to be acquired from the Bedford’s elaborate bar.
“It’s been a real pleasure developing this restaurant,” says Stewart. “It’s a rather strange time for me, when most people my age are retiring, to embark on a restaurant of all things. But I’ve always wanted a restaurant and this opportunity, I just couldn’t pass it up.”
Now that she’s been bitten by the restaurant bug, Stewart tells Yahoo Life she has another concept restaurant in her sights. “Now that we’ve actually gotten through the process of opening, we have the idea to maybe open a Skylands restaurant — that’s my home in Maine and that is so beautiful and so different from this place, so we’ll see.”
“Presentation is extremely important,” Stewart adds. “Ingredients are extremely important. Finding all the local ingredients that were fresh enough and superb enough to serve in my kind of restaurant was a challenge. But I think we’ve done it.”
