Along with developing restaurants, Elizabeth Blau is a cookbook writer, co-authoring “Honey Salt: A Culinary Scrapbook.” | Photos courtesy of Blau & Associates
To say Elizabeth Blau has changed the face of dining in Las Vegas may sound like a bit of puffery. After all, she’s not a celebrity chef or a hotelier or a real estate magnate.
But through a combination of luck, connections, ambition, and opportunity, she found herself moving to Las Vegas 30 years ago and has never looked back. Along the way, she not only was instrumental in changing the city from the buffet capital of the world to a world-class dining destination, she elevated hospitality, women, and philanthropy to new heights.
From her first restaurant job making chimichangas to her current role as founder and CEO of Blau & Associates, a restaurant planning and development firm, the power of connection has guided her journey.
“Las Vegas gave me the stage I could never have imagined,” Blau said. Here’s how she became one of the stars of that stage.
Falling in love with hospitality
“Making those chimichangas really launched my passion for the industry,” Blau recalls. She held that job in high school, then went on to college at Georgetown University, working in restaurants and starting a little catering business on the side called “The Butler Did It.” After graduation, she moved to Boston and learned the industry from the supply side working for a liquor distributor. Then she was ready to buckle down and study for the law boards, thinking she would enter that profession.
“I took an internship with a prosecuting attorney and was sitting in a trial taking notes, and a bubble went off in my head, and I thought, ‘This is not my career,’” Blau shared during her keynote at the national conference for Les Dames d’Escoffier in April, held in her adopted hometown of Las Vegas. “So I got a job as a candy maker in an old-fashioned candy shop, and I loved it. My heart was full, and my belly was full of chocolate.”
Blau pivoted from law school, applying instead to Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. “That experience truly is what changed my life,” she said. “That’s where I met Sirio Maccione [owner of NYC’s Le Cirque] and I went to work for his family in New York. There was a plan to open a Le Cirque in Las Vegas, and I was part of that plan.”
Blau helped open Le Cirque at Bellagio, the luxury Las Vegas hotel developed by Steve Wynn.
“The Wynns were close family friends and Steve Wynn gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” she said.
Transforming Las Vegas dining
When Blau arrived in Las Vegas in the 1990s, the conventional wisdom was that the city’s dining culture had a ceiling. It was all about giving guests volume and value; 99-cent shrimp and all-you can-eat buffets featuring prime rib.
“Fine dining was asking too much … it cost too much and it worked against keeping people on the casino floor,” she said. “But luckily for me, and luckily for Las Vegas, Steve Wynn looked at that ceiling and said ‘this doesn’t exist.’ What he understood, and what I came to understand working alongside him, is that markets don’t define standards — leaders do. It was a failure of imagination. Las Vegas simply had not offered fine dining at the level we were prepared to deliver it at The Bellagio.”
In addition to Le Cirque, The Bellagio became home to Michael Mina, that chef’s namesake restaurant, Olives by Todd English, and Picasso by Julian Serrano.
Blau went on to develop restaurants with Steve Wynn at The Mirage, Treasure Island, and his namesake hotel, The Wynn, bringing in celebrity chefs and restoring glamour to dining in Las Vegas.
“We didn’t just open restaurants, we established a new language for what hospitality could mean in the city,” said Blau. “Excellence requires that no detail is unplanned and nothing is left to chance … whether it’s the first sip of a cocktail or the way the light hits the table — the art of making a stranger feel like they belong.”
Buddy V’s at the Venetian, a post-Steve Wynn project, reflects some of his thinking.
During the keynote, Blau related how Wynn taught her what she calls “organizational entrepreneurship; the rare and extraordinary gift of space to think boldly, to take risks and to build something that had never been built before … and do it within the structure of a world-class organization. He didn’t just give me a seat at the table; he handed me the keys to reimagine what hospitality could be. And what happened here in Las Vegas became a revolution,” she said. “The city became the world’s most significant culinary destination.”
But she’s quick to point out that every transformation is built through collaboration, mentorship, and the persistent work of people whose names don’t always make the headlines. And in Las Vegas, many of those people are women.
Although Steve Wynn gave Blau the runway to reimagine what a Las Vegas restaurant could be, her relationship with Elaine Wynn, Steve’s wife at the time, was just as impactful to her career.
“On the complete other side of the spectrum, Elaine Wynn showed me that women can hold tremendous power with absolute grace, and the way you walk into a room matters just as much as what you accomplish in it,” said Blau. “Elaine was a trailblazer in this industry, a visionary who helped transform Las Vegas. She understood something that very few leaders ever truly grasp — excellence is not a moment. It’s a culture. It’s a set of values that must be built, tended, and then passed on.”
And that’s exactly what Blau has done. She co-founded the Women’s Hospitality Initiative (WHI) in February, 2020, to accelerate the development and advancement of women as leaders in the Las Vegas hospitality industry. Even when the pandemic shut down the industry a month later, WHI was able to launch a bachelor’s level leadership course, “From the Classroom to the Boardroom: Leadership for Women in Hospitality,” partnering with the Culinary Institute of America and UNLV. It has since expanded to San Diego State University and Florida International University.
“It’s an infrastructure play, and it’s built with the same discipline and the same insistence on structural impact that I have applied to every project I have ever worked on,” said Blau. “The goal is not to celebrate the women who made it through. The goal is to change that number permanently. Elaine Wynn taught me that the most powerful investment a woman of influence can make is with other women.”
Blau admits she was a little late in supporting women’s empowerment, but she took a few pages from Elaine Wynn’s philanthropy playbook earlier in her career. “We would go into soup kitchens and help prepare Thanksgiving meals and help families in need with gifts around the holidays, but for Elaine it was about more than just volunteering; it was about leading,” said Blau.
Elaine Wynn introduced her to Communities in Schools of Nevada, and Blau has been involved over the last 20 years, serving on the state board level. The organization works to address students’ basic and academic needs, empowering them to stay on track and succeed in the future.
“When you get involved at a leadership level, you’re helping children and families at a more macro level to help the organization continue to grow. Instead of touching 10 families, you’re touching tens of thousands of families,” Blau said.
During the pandemic, Blau also started an organization called “Delivering with Dignity.” She banded together with five other restaurant owners and partnered with a company that developed a tech platform to deliver meals directly to the doorsteps of the most vulnerable in the community.
“Elaine was one of the first people to endow it before we received public funding,” said Blau. “She also helped fund Women in Hospitality. She was a zealous advocate and incredible mentor; really a second mom to me.”
A place of her own
Backtracking a bit, Blau embarked on her first solo endeavor in 2001, partnering with Chef Kerry Simon and Peter Morton to open a restaurant at the Hard Rock Casino. Simon Kitchen & Bar opened in 2002.
“Kerry was known as the ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ chef and we took his high-quality food and put it into this fun, casual rock ‘n’ roll environment, offering professional service and hospitality. It was a great melding of minds,” Blau recalls.
She co-founded Blau & Associates in 2002 with her husband, Kim Canteenwalla, as partner. The firm was formed to develop more Las Vegas restaurants and take the model into other markets, working with luxury hotels, resort portfolios, sporting arenas, and mixed-use projects. Nearly 65% of the company’s leadership is female, and mentorship is key to the company’s mission.
“The first question I ask every client is not what the market supports; it’s what the market does not yet know it wants. Those are very different questions, and the answer to the second one is always more interesting, more ambitious, and ultimately more valuable,” Blau said.
She and Chef Canteenwalla developed many projects, including Honey Salt, their most personal restaurant yet. It opened in 2012 off the Strip, in the neighborhood of Summerlin, close to where the couple lives with their son.
Honey Salt is a very personal restaurant for Blau and Canteenwalla.
“This is 100% my baby,” said Blau. “It’s very much my style and vision, with the mismatched chairs, different tables, mix of mirrors, the antique chandeliers. I wanted it to feel very residential; my husband and I say, ‘You know, this is how we entertain at home.’ So every dish on the menu is either a favorite of mine, his, or our son’s, and everything is cooked from scratch.”
Canteenwalla is the executive chef but Blau says “I always stick my two cents in, since our palates are quite different.” In addition to craving healthier fare, she admits to having a terrible sweet tooth, and Honey Salt’s desserts range from the indulgent Society Chocolate & Banana Cake with caramelized bananas, milk chocolate mousse, and dark chocolate ganache, to the comforting Brown Bag Baked Apple Pie and Apple Cider Donut Bundt Cake. Many of the desserts and starters are designed to be shareable.
Honey Salt now has an outpost in Vancouver, Canada, and the couple also operate Buddy V’s Ristorante at the Venetian in Las Vegas and Crown Block atop the Reunion Tower in Dallas.
The bar at Crown Block in Dallas.
In their joint restaurant projects, Blau and Canteenwalla divide responsibilities to match their talents.
“I get very involved with the design and with the marketing,” she said. “We do collaborate on the food, but the rest of the operations I definitely leave to him.”
While hotels are still a big draw for chef-driven restaurants, the Las Vegas culinary scene continues to change with the times. Global influences are bringing in different cuisines.
“It used to be steakhouse upon steakhouse, but we have José Andrés bringing in Spanish food and wood-fired paella, and Kwame Onwuachi with an Afro-Caribbean restaurant, Sarah Thompson [a 2026 James Beard Award winner] doing coastal Mexican, and others serving Mediterranean cuisine and the foods of the Levant,” said Blau. “And we have our first Indian fine-dining restaurant on the Strip called Gymkhana.”
Whatever is next, it’s clear that Elizabeth Blau’s passion for restaurants, hospitality, Las Vegas, and women’s role in all three will remain unwavering.
