Owners of 2 of Vegas’ top restaurants opening a new place

The EDO restaurants have become some of the most acclaimed in Las Vegas, celebrated for using Spanish cooking (especially the food of Barcelona) as a starting point to embrace international grace notes, unexpected plating, and the pairing potential of cocktails and Spanish wines.

EDO Tapas & Wines, which opened in Chinatown in fall 2018, showcases the possibilities of small plates, either from its regular selections or as tasting menus. Anima by EDO, the sibling that debuted in southwest Vegas in January 2022, takes the spirit of tapas and lifts it into more traditional fine dining.

Now, the owners of the EDO restaurants — chef Oscar Amador, Roberto Liendo and Joe Mikulich — are creating restaurant No. 3.

It’s called Braseria. It’s a Spanish-French brasserie forecast to open in the first quarter of 2025 in The Collective, the center at 3900 Paradise Road filled with restaurants, including Middle Child, a breakfast and lunch place from the Herbs & Rye folks, and Bramàre, a modern Italian spot from the owners of Table 34.

“We’ve had this concept in mind for quite some time, but we just couldn’t land on the location to make sense for it,” Mikulich said. “With The Collective turning itself into this cool restaurant hub really close to the Strip, we felt this was a big opportunity to go for it.”

Awards mean business

It’s been a big two years for EDO Tapas and Anima.

In 2023, Tapas made Yelp’s list of the top 100 restaurants in the Southwest. That same year, chef Amador received his first James Beard Award nomination and Yelp named Anima the best new restaurant in the U.S. for 2023. This year, the chef received another Beard nomination, this time for best chef in the country, the most prestigious of the chef categories.

“To have received those awards, it’s definitely leapfrogged us into wanting to grow. It brought a lot of business for us, not only EDO but Anima as well,” Mikulich said. “I think it assisted us in making those decisions to grow.”

Other factors also played into that decision. Anima required a trip across town for visitors staying on the Strip. EDO Tapas had evolved, Liendo said, “from a place where people can come after work for tapas to more of a tasting menu place for people to stay for two to three hours.”

And the new business that resulted from national attention also resulted in more requests to host large parties, something EDO Tapas is too small to accommodate easily. “We’ve had to turn away a lot of supporters that want to bring larger groups,” Liendo said.

The solution to these (nice to have) challenges was Braseria, which will occupy Suite Z at The Collective. The space, on the second floor, features high ceilings across almost 5,000 square feet. The premises once housed Yolie’s Brazilian Steakhouse.

Cross-border flavors

The owners have ambitious goals for Braseria, hoping to combine volume and group dining with a lively bar scene — hospitality workers, people stopping by after work, visitors — that recalls EDO Tapas in its early years.

The menu is still being developed, but Liendo said it would draw on the cooking of Barcelona and on the city’s location near the French border.

“You’ll find a huge French influence in Barcelona. They share the waters of the Mediterranean. A lot of the dishes, they are part of both cultures. It’s going to be more Barcelona but with a French accent.”

Braseria would also take inspiration, Liendo said, from another aspect of Spanish dining culture.

“In Spain, you see really old stone houses, and what people have done over time, they took these houses and transformed them into the kind of restaurant we want to be: larger tables, a larger format, seafood, whole fish, larger cuts of meat, things to share.”

Braseria, Mikulich added, would be less adventurous than EDO Tapas or Anima. “The focus will be on not as many ingredients, not as many gastronomic techniques. It’s more straightforward.”

Braseria is likely to be one of the most anticipated restaurant openings in Vegas in 2025, if for no other reason than restaurant watchers want to know what “straightforward” looks and tastes like.

Contact Johnathan L. Wright at jwright@reviewjournal.com. Follow @JLWTaste on Instagram.