Chefs, rockers ... and madams too

NEW YORK-based Mario Batali, winner of the 2005 James Beard Award for “Outstanding Chef of the Year,” was one of the last celebrity chefs to enter the boiling Vegas market. But he did so with a vengeance this year, opening two restaurants, B&B; ristorante and Enoteca San Marco, at the Venetian.

Reached by phone, he notes his choice of Vegas turns out to be no accident. “On close inspection of the rest of America the only scene that is close to like New York is Las Vegas. All the rest are either to bed too early or they don’t start early enough or there just aren’t enough people around to create the buzz we want.” Still, Batali was surprised by how hard it was to create buzz in Vegas: “They weren’t waiting for us there as much as I thought they were. But in the end, there are just so many people, wave after wave after wave of people.”

Despite his respect for Las Vegas as a food destination (he ranks it among the nation’s top 5), Batali was not prepared to trust his reputation to the local talent. “The way we maintain our quality out there is that we got 45 people to come with us from New York.” As for his own presence in Las Vegas, “I was there once a week for the first eight weeks, and now that they are up to full speed, I’ll be out there every second or third week.”

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“I’LL Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon” by Crystal Zevon is a new warts-and-all authorized biography of her ex-husband, the late, great songwriter. Before he died in 2003, near the end of his life, Zevon was a regular performer at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay. But Zevon also had wilder years during which he regularly visited Vegas, starting in the early ‘70s as a bandleader for the Everly Brothers at the Landmark.

Crystal Zevon recalls that her favorite Vegas memory of the Excitable Boy took place a few years later: “We got married in Las Vegas (May 25, 1974). Things career-wise were very up and down. Warren came in one day to our kitchen in Hollywood, and he literally got down on one knee and proposed to me. We were afraid we might change our minds if we slept on it. So we took acid and drove across the desert with a couple of our friends. We checked into the Stardust because his dad used to stay there. We got married at the Chapel of the Bells.

“We had to go find something borrowed and something blue and all of that. We felt wonderful. We were on acid. Then all of the sudden he got very serious and said that this wasn’t good enough for my wedding. There wasn’t even a ring. But I thought everything was perfect, even not having any sleep. Until then it had been very romantic. But there wasn’t a ring, so Warren went into the bathroom. I don’t know exactly what he did, but he was wet when he came back. He had a washer in his hand that he put on my finger. We thought the marriage would last forever.”

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THESE days former “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss lives in Pahrump, Nev., where she plans to open a laundromat on June 10 -- Dirty Laundry, across from the town Wal-Mart.

Though out of the limelight these days, watching Paris Hilton is bringing back fond memories: “Let me tell you, I think Paris is awesome. What I love is that if you take the really richest families in America, all those Fortune 500 parents who send their kids to Ivy League schools and give them the most opportunities to experience culture, their kids still all want to be Paris. I love that.”

As for Hilton’s upcoming prison stint, Fleiss, who knows a thing about doing time, thinks Hilton should have no worries: “She’s spent nights in plenty of places that are worse than jail.”

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For more of what’s happening on and off the Strip, see

latimes.com/movablebuffet.