With superstars like Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Louis Palladin in the kitchen, eating in Vegas is no longer a crapshot.

THE SINGLE BEST thing I have eaten this year so far--a year that has included a dozen or so four-star restaurants on both coasts, a pound or three of barbecue at the Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Texas, and a salad Alice Waters herself put together from ripe avocados, grapefruit and giant spiny lobsters--was probably a salsify soup I tasted last month, an inky goo that practically throbbed with the musky essence of fresh black truffles. Some connoisseurs, mostly Italian men, claim that the white truffle is more sensual than the black, alluding to ardor, unmuted desire, sweaty passion on a summer afternoon. These truffles, this soup, ladled over fried rounds of sweet, smoky andouille sausage and lightened with a truffle-laced quenelle, breathed sensuality of quite a different nature--subtler, more intimate, hinting at the kind of woozier pleasures that turn your knees to water and your afternoons into weeks.

With the soup, the sommelier suggested (from his 1,400-item wine list) a glass of Zind-Humbrecht's Herrenweg pinot noir, a rare red from the great Alsatian white wine producer with a fragrance that suggested mushrooms and decaying leaves and leaned into the truffles; elegant funkiness like a long-lost lover.

This exquisite dish, mind you, was in Las Vegas, a town better noted for Naugahyde prime rib platters and 99-cent breakfast buffets than for truffles; more specifically, it was at Jean-Louis Palladin's restaurant Napa, a floor above the slot machines and crap tables of a hotel--the Rio--most famous for all-you-can-eat seafood and the floral string-bikini bottoms worn by its preening cocktail waitresses.

After the soup, there was a risotto, perfumed with the pure essence of white Italian truffles and studded with sweet bits of fresh Maryland crabmeat (Phelps "Ovation" Chardonnay 1996 with this course), then a plate of roast suckling pig, stretched like crisp pastry around a gently herbed forcemeat and drizzled with a rosemary-infused broth (pinot noir again, Gregory Graham 1996). With the pig came a tiny copper saucepan filled with a buttery sweet potato puree that seemed light enough to hover of its own accord and was glazed with a thin puddle of homemade marshmallow. I hate sweet potatoes, but I couldn't get enough of this stuff. Dessert was the world's best rhubarb tart. If there has ever existed a meal further away from Vegas's once ubiquitous 50-cent shrimp cocktail sluiced down with 25-cent tankards of warm Miller Lite, I would like to know what it is.

In the old days, nobody in his right mind came to Vegas for the food, although the city's hotel restaurants have always featured a kind of attentive, neo-Continental service that otherwise died out in this country about the time the Stork Club shut its doors. The first time I visited Las Vegas, I was so glad to stumble finally upon a California Pizza Kitchen that I practically wept with joy.

But when a Las Vegas branch of Spago opened in the Forum at Caesars Palace five years ago and posted numbers that the hotel must previously have associated with its sports book, hotel owners started to diversify their bets on the gaming tables of American cuisine. The MGM Grand installed a branch of Mark Miller's popular Santa Fe southwestern restaurant Coyote Cafe and hired New Orleans chef Emeril "Bam!" Lagasse to develop a vaguely Creole-themed fish restaurant next to its facsimile of the Hollywood Brown Derby. New York, New York opened branches of mid-range restaurants familiar to the bicoastal community: Chin Chin, Il Fornaio, Gallagher's Steakhouse, Stage Deli.

Then, for about what it would have cost to feature Barbara Mandrell for a couple of weeks, the Rio hired Palladin, widely considered the best chef in the United States at the time, to build its wine arm food program, and when the free-spending Town & Country crowd poured into the restaurant, the food world took notice. So when the Bellagio opened last year, the floodgates opened with it. To complement his de Koonings and Picassos, owner Steve Wynn plundered chefs and concepts from some of the finest restaurants in America--Le Cirque, Jean-Georges, Aqua, Masa's, Olives--and the rush to cuisine had begun. Mandalay Bay is in the process of opening restaurants from superstars Charlie Palmer and Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger; the Venetian will feature versions of Lutece, Valentino, Star Canyon and Pinot. Matsuhisa is coming to the Hard Rock Hotel; Wolfgang Puck is seemingly opening a restaurant in every new hotel in town.

Some of the new stuff is straight from the L.A. Zagat Survey. Victor Drai's eponymous La Cienega restaurant has been reincarnated in the Barbary Coast basement, right down to the jungle plants, the foie gras terrine, the delicious sole meuniere--and the crush of fringe Hollywood guys taking their "nieces" out for a night on the town, Cristal and chocolate souffles included.

If Vegas was built to appeal to your great-uncle Manny, yesterday's family-style Vegas may have been for your folks--unless, of course, you were personally interested in listening to Chicago in concert, walking through an exhibition of Faberge eggs or paying $75 to see a guy segue from a Boz Scaggs impression to a portrayal of Sammy Davis Jr. But this newly sleek, postmodern Vegas is money, baby: Cash is cool again, Frank is the king again (albeit posthumously), and chefs are the new showgirls that lubricate the fun. Bring on the appetizers!

The Bellagio, of course, is the sort of place God might build for Herself if She had the money, a ballooning vision of an kahan villa wedged between the freeway and a glistening artificial lake. The casinos are draped with what passes for lush Venetian silk, and the vast entry hall is lined with boutiques featuring what seems like every designer who has ever bought the back cover of this magazine. The lobby doubles as a Victorian-style conservatory stuffed with more spring flowers than ever bloomed at Versailles. A tour of the hotel's art gallery, famously stocked with Van Goghs and Monets, is a surprisingly moving experience; owner Wynn, who obviously loves his paintings, narrates the recorded tour with a sincerity that has been uncool since Vasari left the scene.

But I was here for an entirely different kind of aesthetic experience, and as I stalked the casino floor, glancing sometimes at the luminous jellyfish that floated in the giant tank at the Japanese restaurant Shintaro, or at the $80 price tag for poached duck liver at Aqua, all I could think of was that my 9:30 reservation for dinner at Prime was still two hours away.

I contemplated sticking the magazine with the check for a beluga splurge at the caviar bar Petrossian, but I slipped instead into Noodles, the hotel's Chinese noodle house, and gawked at the apothecary jars of exotic fungi that lined the paneled walls. This was obviously a serious kitchen, but the chefs and the waitstaff had an odd idea of what non-Chinese people like to eat. An appetizer of seaweed and dried tofu, which is almost always a cold dish, was served steaming hot, and the "chow mein" was distinctly different than the proper chow mein we all know--more, in fact, like a linguine-ish plate of braised e-fu noodles. The Chinese roast duck was ratty and soft. I paid the check and escaped to a roulette table. Red came up. I had bet on black.

Prime, a restaurant conceived by New York chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten (Jo Jo, Vong, Jean-Georges, Mercer Kitchen), is a romantic's version of a great Las Vegas steak house, with martini glasses the size of Louisville Sluggers, jewel-like steak knives from the artisans of Laguiole, France, and a superb view of the Bellagio's shimmering lagoon. The menu reads like a classic steak-house bill of fare, but squeezed between the lines is something like a roster of Vongerichten's greatest hits: potato-wrapped goat cheese terrine perfumed with thyme and served with a beautiful salad of baby herbs; grilled spot prawns with homemade ketchup and saffron mayonnaise (the "shrimp cocktail"); a sweet, soft melange of no less than 27 vegetables that tastes like the essence of spring; white-pepper ice cream. You can get his famous chickpea fries or cumin-scented potato cake with your rack of lamb or five-pepper New York steak; sauces served on the side include his spectacular reduction of red wine with pureed carrots as well as a classic bearnaise. I really liked the pineapple-banana salad with ice cream, but as at any of Vongerichten's restaurants, there is only one dessert you will actually order: the molten, warm Valrhona chocolate cake, which may be the richest possible foodstuff on earth.