Transcript of interview with Anthony A. Marnell II by Stefani Evans and Claytee White, September 29, 2016

i AN INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY A. MARNELL II An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea and the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv PREFACE "For my ninth birthday I got a Social Security card . . . I have filed a federal income tax return every year of my life ever since I was nine. I worked for my father. I worked delivering papers. I worked in a garage after school. I worked painting. I worked every summer, every Christmas vacation. I think it was absolutely the very best thing that could have happened to me." v Twentieth-century visitors to the Las Vegas Sands Hotel experienced the masonry work of Anthony A. Marnell, who removed his family from Riverside, California, to North Las Vegas in 1952 in order to build that structure. When he formed his own masonry company in 1958, he taught his namesake nine-year-old son the skills of a mason and the value of honest work. The younger Marnell learned all he could about construction from his father and completed his education by graduating USC School of Architecture in 1972, serving his apprenticeship, and becoming licensed in 1973. After designing McCarran Airport's A and B Gates, he teamed up with Lud Corrao in 1974 to form Marnell Corrao Associates, the first design-build firm in Southern Nevada. Marnell Corrao built many of Southern Nevada's most iconic hotel-casinos including the California Hotel, Maxim Hotel, and Sam's Town and Steve Wynn and Treasure Island, The Mirage, Bellagio, and New York New York as well as the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino and the M Resort Spa Casino. In this interview, the Riverside native speaks to the importance of teaching future generations about the value of work, of earning the sense of accomplishment, and of fueling one's inner spirit. His philosophy built a work environment that encouraged employee longevity from the beginning in 1974 (he is employee number one, and his assistant is employee number two). He talks of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), of entrepreneurial gamesmanship, and of casino greats Bill Boyd, Jay Sarno, Cliff Perlman, Kirk Kerkorian, and Steve Wynn. He describes the evolution of Las Vegas resorts from prioritizing casino games to fine dining to night clubs and entertainment. He credits his own Rio staff tradition of serving Chef's Table to the employees and the Rio's award-winning chef, Jean-Louis Palladin, for beginning the Las Vegas food renaissance in the late 1990s that rebranded Las Vegas as a Mecca for celebrity chefs. The nine-year-old who worked part time in his father's masonry business learned his lessons well, much to the benefit of Southern Nevada's growing skyline, its residents' growing waistlines, and its businesses' growing bottom lines. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Anthony A. Marnell II September 29, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Preface………………………………………….……………………………………..………..iv Birth in Riverside, California; father mason at Sands Hotel for Don Olson Masonry; with family to North Las Vegas 1952; working for father's masonry company at nine years, ca. 1958, and other part-time jobs; grandson; USC School of Architecture 1972, apprenticeship, license 1973; McCarran Airport A & B Gates; 1974 Lud Corrao, Corrao Construction, Marnell Corrao Associates, design build services, and the American Institute of Architects (AIA); employee longevity; Caesars additions and convention center, California Hotel, Maxim Hotel, and Sam's Town and Steve Wynn and Treasure Island, Mirage, Bellagio, and New York New York. Architects, builders, accomplishment, and the soul. Entrepreneurial gamesmanship, the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, and Bill Boyd, Jay Sarno, Cliff Perlman, Kirk Kerkorian, and Steve Wynn. Electronic security and surveillance……………………………………..……..……. 1–12 Cell telephones as mini-computers; hotels and decor as reflections of their times. Rio, Chef's Table, Jean-Louis Palladin, and the Las Vegas food renaissance. Creative imagining of sight, sound, and smell at The Mirage, Treasure Island, and Bellagio. Women and casino bathrooms, temperatures; casinos, restaurants, night clubs, and entertainment. Las Vegas and preservation…………………………………………………………………...…………….12–25 Appendix I, Photographs, Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino …………………...…………… 26–30 Appendix II, Photographs, M Resort Spa Casino…………………...……………………… 31–37 vii 1 S: Good morning. It is September 29, 2016, and Claytee White and Stefani Evans are here with Mr. Marnell in his beautiful conference room. Mr. Marnell, would you pronounce and spell your first and last names for the tape, please. Anthony Marnell the second. A-N-T-H-O-N-Y. M-A-R-N-E-L-L. Roman numeral two. S: Thank you. Why don't we begin by you telling us about your early life, where you were born. Tell us about your childhood, your siblings, parents, that kind of thing. I was born in Riverside, California, on March 30, 1949. My father was a bricklayer and my mother, at that time, was a food checker in A&P Markets. I am the oldest of three brothers. When I was two my father went to Las Vegas to work for a masonry contractor to work on the masonry on the original Sands Hotel. S: Who was the contractor? Don Olson Masonry. My father was sent as the lead foreman, lead superintendent for the masonry crew and the company. For about nine to ten months he commuted from Riverside to Las Vegas. He came home on the weekends. When the Sands Hotel was finished I was three going on four and the masonry company decided to open up an office in Las Vegas because Las Vegas was going to boom. The family all moved from Riverside, California. The first place I lived here, for about a year, was in Henderson, right by the titanium plant. By the time I was going to attend kindergarten the family moved to 2609 Reynolds Avenue in North Las Vegas, off of Eastern [Avenue]. That is where I grew up all through high school. I went to Rancho High School, J. D. Smith Junior High School, all of us did, all 3 brothers. S: What elementary school did you all go to? I went to [Tom] Williams Elementary School. The family was a member of Saint Christopher Catholic Church parish in North Las Vegas. By the time I was seven or eight the company my 2 dad was working for decided to leave Las Vegas and my father opened up his own masonry company here with the office in the house, which you can't hardly do any more these days with the zoning regulations. I had a great childhood. I had a lot of great teachers. We were relatively involved with the church, had a church life. I played on the schools' baseball and basketball teams. I had a real, normal, American childhood. At that time North Las Vegas was the poor part of town. I think it still is in a lot of ways, but I grew up in a very integrated surrounding with all ethnicities in my schools, right from the very beginning. Nobody got bussed in or out of our schools because we were all in the same neighborhood. C: Did you work part-time for your father? I worked part-time for my father. At sixty-six I had to apply for Medicare. Long story short, the nice lady who helped me fill out all the paperwork had never in her career seen a background like mine, because for my ninth birthday I got a Social Security card; that was my birthday present at nine. I have filed a federal income tax return every year of my life ever since I was nine. I worked for my father. I worked delivering papers. I worked in a garage after school. I worked painting. I worked every summer, every Christmas vacation. I think it was absolutely the very best thing that could have happened to me. I learned a lot about a lot. I have a grandson, Anthony the fourth, who was ten years old last summer and he wanted to come here and work in the office, starting with menial chores and learning about what his grandfather does. To my dismay, I had to go to a judge to get a work permit, because if you are under sixteen years of age you couldn't go to work. I think there is something wrong about that, because I learned a lot. I was around adults of all different makes and kinds. I think it was a great experience for me and our generation that we got to be around older people and learn to 3 work and learn to feel good about it at the end of the day. In those days I was making 25 cents an hour, but it was 25 cents. C: How much did you pay your grandson? I paid my grandson $2.00 an hour. Danitra, who is our director of accounting, said that I had to fill out another whole bunch of special forms so that I wouldn’t be abusing the child labor laws. By the end of the summer, the last month, he got a raise to $2.25 an hour because he showed up to work every day and on time, hair combed, clean, and ready to go to work. In 1967 I applied to architectural school and was admitted to USC School of Architecture in a five-year curriculum. I was noted as the poorest student at USC, which was great, because I didn't have any money to get into trouble with and the Vietnam War was ongoing. I ended up in the draft lottery but was not chosen, fortunately. I was 1-A through the last two years of my schooling and graduated in 1972 with an architectural degree. [Ed. Note: From 1948–1976 the Selective Service draft category 1-A meant “Available for unrestricted military service.”] C: Did you finish school early? No. From '49 to '72 is eighteen; I was eighteen years old when I graduated high school. S: Who were your classmates in architectural school? Anyone here in Las Vegas? No one here in Las Vegas. I shouldn't say that. Not in my class. There are several architects here in town. My cousin, George Rogers is a USC graduate as well. I came back to Las Vegas after school and went to work for Moffitt and McDaniels Architects as an apprentice architect. Because I had such an extensive history doing field work in construction I was allowed to take my architecture license exam after one year instead of after two years of apprenticeship. I became a licensed architect in 1968. [Colloquy not transcribed.] 4 S: You graduated in '72 and then worked for Moffitt and McDaniels for a year after graduation or while you were in school? After graduation. I actually worked for them my last summer between my fourth and fifth year. I made a mistake on that, I graduated in '72 and got my license in '73. C: What was your first job at that company after USC? I worked on the McCarran airport doing all the door and window schedules to the McCarran airport addition. The round buildings you see out there are that old. That was the first job that I worked on. S: At A & B gates? Yes. In 1974 I met a gentleman named Lud Corrao who was with Corrao Construction Company. Their main office was in Reno. They were contractors. Lud Corrao had gone to industrial design school. He was always very interested, still is, in design. I was also very interested in building. I went to work for him in 1974 in charge of the Las Vegas office. The project we had down here was Caesars Palace convention center. That was my first project. Within a year we formed Marnell Corrao Associates, which was a design build company, where we provided complete architectural and building services. S: Was this the first such company in Las Vegas? Were there other companies that did design build? We were about one of three companies in the United States that did that. The largest company was Austin Corp[oration] out of Texas. They were doing mostly government work. At that time in America I was not allowed to join the American Institute of Architects (AIA) because the American Institute of Architects thought it was unethical for an architect to build his own buildings; [theoretically] because I would not have the moral judgement to make a decision as 5 an architect vs. for monetary reasons, as a contractor. In 2007 the American Institute of Architects made me an honorary member because the American Institute of Architects fully sanctioned and embraced the idea of design build. It took me 30 years of sitting at the back of the class, but I got there and so did the profession. It was just the path. S: What other design build firms opened up in Las Vegas after you did? None, still to this day. No other architect who has an architectural license and a general contracting license. I am still the only one. C: I am surprised more people haven't followed that model. Why do you think they haven't? It is much easier to get a contractor's license than to get an architectural license. Most architects who have a license A) really do not understand construction from the shovel up, like I did; and B) most architects were not willing to take the risk. As an architect there is a minimal amount of risk to your business. As a contractor when you bid on a billion-dollar project like Bellagio, Mirage, or Wynn, there are huge risks. It is just not in their DNA. We obviously started incredibly small and worked our way up over the years. It has been a forty-year journey to get where we are from where we had been. Most architects now want to design. They don't want to get into the details. They are designers. I am not a designer. I am an architect and was trained as an architect with a pencil. C: Give me an example of one of your projects that is your favorite one, where you have done both the architectural work and the contracting/construction. We have done about eight-plus billion dollars of that kind of work around the world. Mirage, Bellagio—you go up and down the [Las Vegas] Strip, many of those buildings you see. Probably the funniest one, the one I liked the most, was the M Resort Spa Casino, because I got 6 to do that with my son. It was the thrill of a lifetime to have your son as your client. That was a pretty enjoyable journey. S: How did that work [with you] as the architect and the contractor? You and your son are working together and he is your client. How did it start? He has this piece of land? It works the same with him as it does with other clients. We have clients come in here and the first thing they need is an architect before they need a builder. Like I said, we started small. What was appealing to our customers, or most of the customers, was a couple of things. One is what we call the "golden triangle": the architect, the owner, and the contractor. The way that usually works is when there is a problem, the architect says I didn't make a mistake; the contractor did. And the contractor says I didn't make a mistake; the architect did. In the end—and having been an owner by the way, many times—in the end the owner usually winds up paying for the problem. What we did is say to our customers, "If there is a problem, it doesn't matter to you, Mr. Owner. It is our problem, and we will take care of it." That was one very appealing thing to the owners. Number two, we developed a system here that is [now] used extensively in America. It is called Fast Track, whereby once the building is architecturally thirty percent done, we could tell you what the building was going to cost. Then we went to the building department here and laid out a procedure, whereby we could get permits to build the building in segments. We would get a foundation permit; then came the structural permits; then came the life safety permits, and then came the mechanical and electrical permits. We always had completed plans, and we always had checked plans. We were able to—from the time the client walked into our office and until the time we produced the project for them—produce the projects in 25–30 percent less time. He was paying 25–35 percent less construction interest on the loan, plus he was getting his 7 product to market and getting the revenue coming back 25–30 percent quicker. That adds up to a lot of money when you start building billion-dollar projects like the Bellagio, Mirage, and Wynn. It helped accelerate a lot of the public companies because Wall Street really liked that. We have a reputation. We have in 41 years never, ever missed our budget on a project and we have never, ever missed an opening date. Ever. Our contracts are all open, audited, transparent contracts. We were transparent from the very beginning. The first project we ever did was for Irwin Molasky at the Las Vegas Country Club, which was the little masonry tennis building at the Las Vegas Country Club. We did several projects for Irwin. I am married and have two wonderful children in their forties and grandchildren, and I grew with the town. People say, "Tony Marnell, you built most of those buildings." No. We did. We are a community. My secretary, Meredith Ellis, is employee 002. I am employee 001 and she is 002. We have had literally hundreds of thousands of employees over the years. She is still with me and many, many people have been here 30 years, 25 years, a long, long time. S: Your first Strip project was the convention center at Caesars? Yes. S: Do you remember what the second project was? I think the next large project was the California Hotel for the Boyd’s, downtown. We did what is now the Westin on Flamingo that was [then] the Maxim Hotel. Probably one of the biggest ventures in Las Vegas was a local hotel, Sam's Town, the original Sam's Town. We did 20 years of additions at Caesars Palace. We built Treasure Island, Mirage, Bellagio, and New York New York. C: The Bellagio, were you the architect and the contractor? 8 Yes. C: Tell me about working with Steve Wynn to design that. It was a seriously big step for us because it was truly our first billion-dollar project. Steve had his whole company riding on it and failure was not an option. I've worked for Steve Wynn for about 20 years. In those times, which is pretty much how Mr. Wynn goes about everything, going back 20 some years, we probably did 50 different renditions of that project, which is how Steve and I worked. I think in the end we built either the seventeenth or nineteenth rendition. His projects are exceptional. He truly has a vision. He has an idea about it and he has a market he wants to say something to and talk to. He is involved in every damn detail. C: Is it easy to work with an internal design team as you are the person from the outside? How does that work? On the eight billion dollars of projects we have done, we were probably the interior designers for about three to four billion dollars of those projects. On the Wynn projects Roger Thomas (we have known each other since we were kids) heads up the interior design part for Steve, and has for a long time. You can't ask for anyone better to work with. We got to know each other. Steve did an excellent job at pitting us against each other a lot. I personally enjoy that because it brings out the best of us. Roger is as good as they come and we have worked with that inside triangle for 20 some years starting with two projects downtown at the Golden Nugget and then onto the Mirage, onto Treasure Island, onto Bellagio, and onto the first Macau project. That is how that works. S: The odds of having two people who grew up together rise to the tops of their professions and produce these buildings and interiors that captivate the world, seem pretty slim. Yet here are two home-grown boys, [you and Steve Wynn,] who did that. 9 C: In a town that says everybody is transient, nobody grew up here. Those of us who have [grown up here] balk at that pretty hard. The odds of that are pretty difficult, but I think you have to give a tremendous amount of credit to Steve Wynn. Roger [Thomas] and I were given the opportunity, where needed and sometimes required by Steve, to find the best expertise. He sent us around the world when we were looking to do something that nobody had done before or to do it better than anybody had ever thought about doing it. I think Roger would say the same thing. Nobody had built a volcano before; nobody had ever built a thirteen-acre lake with dancing waters; nobody had built pirate ships that came out of buildings. We worked with some of the great professionals around the world. We built all the Cirque [du Soleil] showrooms in all the properties. Those are incredibly complicated machines. When we built the pool at the Bellagio and the showroom for the O show, those were challenges. If you were an architect and you were a designer and you liked to build things, where else in the world would you want to be but up and down that six-mile Strip. Holy Sheets! Look at the opportunities! We worked really hard. I couldn't wait—I still can't wait—to get up in the morning and go to work. Great community. Great group of people. C: What surprised me when we started doing these interviews is the stamina of the architects. In school, you stay up all night to finish projects and you get such little sleep. Tell me about the conditioning necessary for working the hours you work. I can tell you for myself it is really simple. I grew up understanding the rewards of work. Yes, I was getting a paycheck, and I needed a paycheck, but there was also this feeling of accomplishment. I can just look at you two ladies and I can tell you have this feeling of accomplishment. Yes, you get paid. There are certain things that fuel the human spirit. I always tell my children and my grandchildren that you have a brain and a heart, but there is this thing 10 in the middle. Every culture, every religion calls it something different. It is called your soul. There are those of us who learn to attend to our soul. I hear people say, "I have to go to work today." I tell people, "I can't wait to go to work today." I like to play, don't get me wrong, but I can't wait to go to work because there I have to feed this thing between my heart and my brain. I call it my soul. Some people call it their inner spirit. I don't want to be politically incorrect. I think you have to be a little bit off to be an architect, to be honest. It is just a different ticker. I think writers are the same way. You talk to people who write and they will write all night until they can't write or type anymore. Then they get re-energized by a butterfly. I look at something and go, "Oh." When I go into the buildings that I have been a part of, they are not me. This has been an incredible place in time here where we really could get things done. We were so fortunate. When you look at Bellagio, think about the builders and the hands. It all happened with these two hands, thousands of these two hands, right? Then you begin to operate this place and it never closes, right? Think about all the hands that come to work every day. It doesn't matter if they are dealing the cards or they are signing contracts or they are making the beds or parking the cars. There are reasons Las Vegas became Las Vegas. There was this great group of people. I think that one thing that was incredibly good for the town was that there was this great entrepreneurial gamesmanship that was happening at that time. I built the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino and ran it for ten years and played in that game for ten years as well. When you look at the people you are meeting and talking to and you think about the Boyds; the Sarnos; Cliff Perlman, who just passed away last week at Caesars Palace; the Kerkorians and the Steve Wynns. I remember I was working for Steve and running the hotel and competing with him on a very minor scale. There was this gamesmanship: wait until you see this new restaurant. You 11 would get this call from Steve and he would say, "Well, you haven't see the spa yet and you are going to be building it for me. Wait until you see this spa." Then the corporations came in. God love them all! They put a bit of a lid on things, the rules, and the laws, a lot of which were good. There is always some bad with the good and there is always some good with the bad. Here we are now and we are moving into another generation, different market, different wants, and different needs as the world moves on. The challenges for us now in buildings are a little bit different because they need to be a lot more flexible, adapting and meeting the different wants and needs of the customers. It is always about the customer. We are not building these buildings as monuments to ourselves. I've torn down half of a billion dollars of stuff I built 30 years ago and remodeled it. It is kind of like Disneyland. What is the next ride, what is the next attraction, better technology? C: Talk about technology, how it has changed over the years and how you use it in your business. One thing that was very exciting for us in Las Vegas as architects and builders is that you have a building that is open seven days a week and 24 hours a day and you want to be efficient with your labor. It is not like General Motors having a car plant where you can do 50% of the work now with robots. There are no robots in our town, on our properties. You have to do it with people. You are always looking for two things. You are looking for your customer to say, "What is this card you are giving me at the front desk? Oh, you don't have a key anymore." You get a card and it was called Marlok in those days and you got a card to your hotel room. Who gives you [an actual] key to a hotel room these days? Maybe in Europe or someplace, but now you get a card. That really exploded, that type of thing. A lot of the air conditioning systems, 12 mechanical systems, they have to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There has to be a backup system for all these things. Cameras. I can tell you that Las Vegas was a huge development site. Now we have cameras in our telephones that are that big. Remember when you would walk into a casino and you would see all the [glass] bubbles that were on the ceiling as big as beach balls? [Ed. Note: These were the "Eye in the Sky" surveillance cameras.] The slot machines. There is no place to put a coin in a slot machine anymore. They are computers now rather than mechanical devices. Being architects and builders we were always looking for two things. [First,] we were looking for reliability because they just can't break and, [second,] if it does, there better be some backup to it. So with the showrooms and the special features we got to look and see the best technologies. Now we are entering a new age that we are all trying to understand. I am really not sure about it yet. S: What is that phase? We all have a cell phone now that is well on its way to being a mini-computer. We are asking you to come to Las Vegas for 48 hours and leave your troubles behind. Let us entertain you. We entertained you beyond the casino forever. We had the shows, we had the pools, we had golf tournaments, and we had beauty salons. Now, of our 40 million customers that come here every year, probably 39,999,998 of them are carrying a computer with a television screen on it while taking their 36-hour break. It is real. We have to acknowledge that. So now we have to use that as part of our communication tools with our customers in the hotel. Your dinner reservation. A long time someone would write your dinner reservation for seven o'clock for two people at John's Restaurant is confirmed and there would be a note under your door. Then we had telephone with a message center. They would call your phone and say, "Your reservation is 13 confirmed." Now it shows up, beep-beep and you get a little thing on your phone that says your dinner reservation is confirmed. It is all encompassing and we are all trying to figure it out, whether it is here in Las Vegas or not. This machine is consuming our lives and it is consuming our children's lives in some, I am not so sure good ways. S: This is kind of a takeoff on that same question. How do your buildings, the M Resort for example, how does that differ from the clientele it is trying to attract versus the old Caesars Palace and the earlier generations it tried to attract. How do the buildings actually work to engage those new clientele? That is a good question. The best way I can liken the way generations look and see and use these buildings is a lot like how we would think of our houses. If you look at the neighborhood where I grew up in North Las Vegas, it was a very modest home, 900 square feet for five of us and my grandmother, the six of us. We had one bathroom. Now think how that is changing at the same economic levels. For instance, it is pretty hard to find a house anymore with a living room it in. Right? Nobody goes to the living room anymore. It is either the kitchen or the family area extension. Who has a formal living room anymore? Who has a breakfast nook and a dining room? How younger people have come through their childhoods matters. The schools look different. The schools now look like palaces. If you go back to J.D. Smith Junior High School. They tore Rancho High School down and built another one. Your environment trains you as to how you should live and how you grow up. When you come to the hotels, for instance, no one would ever let light into the casino. You would go straight to hell for that. [Colloquy not transcribed.] When we did the original first Rio Hotel in '89, maybe 25 percent of the hotel had a natural light area. Now you see that in a lot of casinos. In those days all ceilings were black and had to be low. As people got older and older it 14 got harder and harder for them to see, so we started raising the ceilings a bit and started adding a few more lights. The people are not afraid of bigger spaces anymore. They are comfortable in big spaces. I grew up in a 10' x 10' bedroom with my two brothers. You grew up in real small spaces. Our buildings are bigger, our schools, our classrooms. We just got bigger and more fluid and we got more and more comfortable with big spaces. I remember my mother would say, "This is big, this is cold to me. It is not warm and inviting." That is how we are adjusting in a lot of way to the culture. What is interesting now is when we have people come to Las Vegas from smaller spaces, they just gasp. The only spaces they have seen that big were cathedrals or huge public building spaces. Their normal lives just don't include big spaces. When they come here they say, "Oh, my gosh. This is unbelievable how big these spaces, these rooms, are." C: Tell me about the food. One of the things that stands out for me at the Rio and the M is the delicious food. It is a pretty short story. In 1990 the Iraq War started, gas prices skyrocketed and we were at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino and we were less than one mile from the most famous corner in the world, Flamingo and the Las Vegas Strip, but getting a customer over there was very difficult. We were sitting down one day and I said, "Everybody has what we have, they have rooms, bathrooms, casino, but one of the things they don't have is I don't think the food in Las Vegas is as good as the food could be. I am thinking we have sixteen chefs in the building and they are from all backgrounds and walks of life. We are going to have a meeting in one week and tell all the chefs to bring in their ten most favorite mother's recipes." S: You hired creative people and gave them free rein. We started this thing that has been around in Europe that is called the Chef's Table. Every Tuesday and Thursday we had two or three chefs