Chef Charlie Palmer opened a restaurant called Aureole in Manhattan in 1988 with a mission to bring "new American" cuisine to upscale New Yorkers. One of the previous residents of the restaurant's Upper East Side brownstone was none other than Orson Welles, who surely would have approved of the new use of his old home.
Palmer's devotion to culinary excellence and an obsession with wines (it can take 20 minutes just to read the wine list) have earned him countless accolades, making Aureole a natural choice for the Circus Circus corporation to take into their high-end Mandalay Bay casino, which opened in Las Vegas in 1999.
Other than the food and the wine, the Las Vegas outpost bears little resemblance to the more humble Manhattan franchise. Most striking among these differences is the four story tall wine cellar at Aureole Las Vegas, and the rotating cast of wine angels who scale its clear glass walls to retrieve bottles ordered by the establishment's well-heeled clientele.