A hot party calls for a great guest list, good food and a little gossip. Friday night’s opening of Gymkhana in Las Vegas had all three.
One Battle After Another’s Teyana Taylor was in Vegas to welcome Gymkhana, the first U.S. outpost of the celebrated Indian restaurant, which has two Michelin stars in London and one unlikely claim to fame. “Kendrick Lamar ate Indian food for the first time at Gymkhana,” reports co-founder Karam Sethi on the eve of another milestone. His family’s restaurant? It just became the first Indian spot to open inside a Vegas casino. Tikka what?
It’s an interesting time to launch a fine dining restaurant anywhere, let alone an untested category on The Strip, ten feet from a Wheel of Fortune slot machine on Aria’s floor. With tariffs and inflation running high, tourism to the gaming capital is down nearly eight percent from 2024. In a dark sign of the times, local strip club owners are now reporting an influx of auditions from hospitality workers who’d been laid off.
Gymkhana — whose fans include Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus — isn’t the only big name betting large in Vegas right now despite the headwinds. One of Mexico City’s hottest chefs, Contramar’s Gabriela Cámara, is opening at the Fontainebleau this spring. Mario Carbone just birthed his seafood spin-off, Carbone Riviera, at The Bellagio. And the Corner Store announced it’s coming to The Cosmopolitan, presumably bringing fans like Sabrina Carpenter and Blake Lively along with it.
Corner Store’s opening makes perfect sense; the restaurant’s menu already includes Wagyu French Dip and a Sour Cream & Onion Martini (both very Vegas). For what it’s worth, the guys from Semma — the only Indian restaurant in New York with a Michelin star — once told me they could have done a “big ticket blockbuster” in Vegas but chose to open a fried chicken shop instead. For Gymkhana’s owners, the bright-lights ambition is certainly there. But can a restaurant specializing in Northern Indian regional cuisine succeed in a town where a popular steakhouse serves a $1,000-dollar, 55-ounce Tomahawk inside a briefcase?
Gymkhana mercifully doesn’t need stunts. The restaurant was a game-changer when it opened in Mayfair in 2013. And all of the London favorites are on the menu here, including the Chicken Butter Masala, the Tandoori Lamb Chops, and the Goat Methi Keema — each executed perfectly. The dimly-lit dining room, meanwhile, invokes the clubby feel of the Polo Bar.
But the key to any expansion is meeting your audience where they live, and management certainly gets that. A Maharaja Margarita punchbowl — theatrically wheeled out on a trolley cart — plays like a nod to the bachelorette party crowd ($240; serves up to eight people). While Gymkhana’s original location doesn’t sell beef, per Hindu custom, the Vegas kitchen is cooking up Wagyu naan. When asked about the introduction, Gymkhana’s Global CEO, Pavan Pardasani, says the idea was theirs. Of red meat’s appeal in America, he says: “We didn’t need the hotel to tell us that.”
Pardasani spent years as the CMO of Tao, and his celebrity credentials run deep. At the opening night party, Teyana Taylor (in a crimson Tom Ford trench) held court with Winnie Harlow while Tristan Thompson, Momofuku’s David Chang, The Diplomat’s Rufus Sewell, B.J. Novak, Million Dollar Listing’s James Harris and Chef’s Table founder David Gelb all milled about. Aaron Paul, the actor and Mezcal entrepreneur, was en route to toast Gymkhana when a mechanical issue forced his flight to divert to Iceland.
The Breaking Bad star didn’t just miss the Tiger prawns, he missed a pretty juicy rumor making the rounds. There’d been a lot of online chatter recently about a Spice Girls reunion allegedly coming to The Sphere, in honor of the girl group’s 30th anniversary. The Spice Girls last performed together at Victoria Beckham’s 50th birthday party in 2024, but rumors of an official reunion have long remained just that: rumors.
Over the din of the party — as the rapper Gunna walked by — one London source (who possibly had too much to drink, and was maybe full of more than naan) hinted: “If you’re a fan, you might be back in Vegas.” (A source close to the Sphere denies this.)
Fittingly or not, Brooklyn Beckham was on hand for Gymkhana’s opening night (wearing a backwards baseball hat), and we’d almost asked him to weigh in on the reunion but thought better of it in light of his rumored family feud, which he would detail days later in a lengthy Instagram post. Karam Sethi — who co-owns Gymkhana with his siblings, Jyotin and Sunaina — acknowledged he’d seen the same tabloid headlines we’d all read, explaining the Beckhams have been frequent guests at the original London restaurant in happier times. “The family celebrated all of their special occasions there,” he said.
Perhaps the only constant in life is change. That’s certainly true for Gymkhana superfan Ed Sheeran, who’d ordered the butter chicken and a house Lager in his early visits but later graduated to the testing menu, Sethi said, adding: “He likes very fine wine.” And with that, it was time for a nightcap.
Read the full article here
