By Karen Bryant

“The feeling, the atmosphere, is somewhere between the heart of the Mediterranean and New York City and the menu is based on the food that is found where olives grow: Europe, Africa, Asia,” says celebrity chef Todd English, who has been featured on The Food Channel and won multiple James Beard awards.

Chef English has an Olives restaurant at Bellagio and four others in metropolitan cities: Boston, Aspen, New York, and D.C. He had just opened the restaurant, and I was lucky enough to be invited to join friends at the farm table in a private room next to the open kitchen.

The new Olives is rustic, with wide, oak ceiling beams, weathered wood tabletops, crackled wall covering, warm tones, and bronze chandeliers that look like olive branches. At the center of the main dining room is an eight-foot-tall bottle of olive oil from which customers can fill their own olive oil bottles.

There were 10 in our group and we tried just about everything on the menu, which offers Olives’ signature house-made pastas and flatbreads as well as traditional Mediterranean dishes. We also had a couple of cocktails (I highly recommend the pomegranate martini!).

Chef English himself paid us a quick visit and told us what he’s particularly proud of at his newest Olives: a huge, wood-burning oven that he helped design. The oven was made in Australia and shipped to Beau Rivage. This location is the only one of English’s restaurants to have this type of oven, and there are no others like it anywhere in the world.

After dinner, we headed next door to BR Prime, another of Beau Rivage’s new restaurants, for a few cocktails. Here, the scene is sophisticated. Vice President of Food and Beverage George Goldhoff cites the timeless look and feel, calling it “a sacrosanct steakhouse.” George Corchis explained the idea behind the design. “You can build a steakhouse thousands of different ways. We chose to use deep, dark colors, rich reds and a tremendous wood flooring. The design is very high-end and masculine. There are gigantic glass cellars with thousands of bottles of wine displayed in the restaurant,” said Corchis. The idea behind the floor-to-ceiling wine towers, which hold 3,500 bottles, was to create not so much a look of a wine rack but a mosaic of the epitome of high-end wine.

Executive Chef Joe Friel, who lived in New York for 24 years, says that BR Prime’s warm colors and Rat Pack-era music in the background have a calming effect on him and that the whole feel is very metropolitan. It transports him back to his years working at the famed 21 Club in New York.

This place is undeniably beautiful. The big attraction here is what comes from the kitchen, which Chef Friel designed: Only two% of all beef produced in the United States is certified prime grade by the USDA and BR Prime serves nothing but this premium grade beef.

BR Prime has been getting rave reviews for its seafood selections too, namely the Louisiana crabcakes and Hawaiian swordfish. Chef Friel’s favorites are the scallop appetizer, lobster tempura and cold seafood platter with three kinds of oysters, king crab, Maine lobster, and jumbo lump crabmeat served French bistro style on an elevated platter. He also recommends the steak tartar, prepared just as it was when Friel worked at the 21 Club.

Corchis couldn’t be more pleased with the reception BR Prime is enjoying. “BR Prime has surpassed all expectations,” he said. “The service is unbeatable, no matter where you go in this country, and the food is extraordinary.”

The third of the resort’s new gourmet dining establishments is Jia (Japanese for “beautiful”). Corchis jokingly says Jia has multiple personalities because of its many facets: it offers three distinct dining experiences, serving sushi, teppanyaki and cuisine from Thailand, Japan, China, and Vietnam.