Lotus of Siam in Red Rock looks like no other Thai restaurant in the city. In 1999, when the Chutima family opened the original Lotus of Siam on East Sahara Avenue, “the clichés were seen as authentically Thai,” daughter Penny Chutima said. What are not design elements at the new Lotus of Siam - as the Review-Journal learned during an exclusive tour in advance of this Friday’s opening - are Thai restaurant clichés like faux orchids and a profusion of golden Thai figures and posters of floating markets on the Chao Phraya River. There are corrugated aluminum panels (in the back dining room), the same material used to construct dwellings for the poor in present-day Thailand.Īnd off the street entrance to the restaurant, there is a pool strewn with 15 brass lotus flowers, an invitation to a moment of timeless reflection (before hitting the khao soi). There are red bricks (hand placed) and stylized stone arches, like those found in the ruins of Thai temples and other buildings from the past. There is the bamboo scaffolding rising at the monumental front door and elsewhere in the restaurant, as if completion lay in the future (or has been deferred in a continual process of becoming).
(Amaya Edwards/Las Vegas Review-Journal) the new Lotus of Siam in Red Rock Resort, time itself is a design element, subtly installed. One of the dining rooms of the new Lotus of Siam restaurant in Red Rock Resort on Saturday, Nov.
