Tyler Vorce opened the Lilli Las Vegas restaurant on Thursday, October 8, after live scallops from Maine’s Penobscot Bay reached his kitchen on Spring Mountain Road and waited for the knife. Lilli, at 3616 Spring Mountain Road, Suite 101, is the 37-year-old chef’s first permanent restaurant in Las Vegas’s Chinatown, a French restaurant guided by seasonal American ingredients and the kitchen discipline Vorce carried from The French Laundry, Troisgros, and Le Bristol Paris.
The opening gives Las Vegas a tasting-menu room built around one chef’s station work. Vorce drives to the airport two to three times a week to collect seafood shipments. The four-course tasting menu is $98 per person; the eight-course is $188. A separate lounge serves à la carte dishes, cocktails, and wines, and the project centers on the course-by-course meal and the ingredients Vorce chooses.
Why Lilli Las Vegas restaurant is drawing French Laundry followers
The Lilli Las Vegas restaurant arrives with a name taken from Vorce’s three-year-old daughter and a kitchen lineage that begins far from Nevada. Vorce is from southern Maine. At fourteen, he began washing dishes at Pier 77 in Cape Porpoise under Chef Pete Morency. He later trained at New York’s Dovetail, then joined Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry in Yountville, California, in 2012 (Lilli2).
At The French Laundry, Vorce spent five years moving from commis to sous chef, working under Thomas Keller and Chef David Breeden. Five years in that kitchen meant repetition under pressure, the long way through prep lists, service standards, and corrections that arrive before a plate reaches the pass. The French Laundry connection will draw the first wave of diners to Lilli. The Spring Mountain Road address asks a sharper question: what does a chef do with that training when the restaurant belongs to him?
Lilli follows nearly a year of pop-ups, collaborative dinners, and a residency at Durango Social Club, where Vorce introduced the project before opening a permanent room. The residency debuted at 3655 S. Durango Drive, with one seating at 7 p.m. and doors at 6:30 p.m. for cocktails, and it ran Saturdays and Sundays through December 28. The permanent Lilli keeps the tasting-menu structure and gives the chef a fixed pass, a fixed address, and a room built around his own name (Reviewjournal3).
Tyler Vorce’s path from Napa to Las Vegas
Vorce’s training after The French Laundry continued in France, at Troisgros in Roanne and Le Bristol in Paris. At Troisgros, he accompanied Chef César Troisgros to morning markets to select ingredients for that day’s service. That kind of education changes how a cook looks at delivery schedules. The ingredient enters the kitchen as a decision made before prep begins.
Vorce has described the French Laundry years as a threshold in his discipline. "I learned a lot about respecting ingredients, pushing beyond what I thought was possible, and what it means to truly commit oneself to this profession," said Tyler Vorce.1 Respecting ingredients, in Vorce’s kitchen, now means live scallops from Penobscot Bay, produce harvested the same morning in Pahrump, and duck aged for two weeks before it meets the plate.
In 2018, Vorce co-founded Truffle Shuffle, a company that brought restaurant cooking into home kitchens through live, interactive classes. Following the company’s sale in 2024, Vorce and his family relocated to Las Vegas to build something of their own. After years inside Keller’s in Napa, Troisgros in Roanne, and Le Bristol in Paris, Vorce has a dining room named for his daughter and a nightly service in Chinatown (Lilli2).
Seasonal tasting menus and the ingredient runs behind them
The opening menu starts with a detail from Vorce’s childhood coast: live scallops flown from Maine’s Penobscot Bay, about an hour from where he grew up. The kitchen shucks them to order and serves them with avocado mousse, white sturgeon caviar, and horseradish-sour apple granita.
Vorce is tracking seafood by flight, then carrying it back to a Chinatown kitchen for a menu that begins at $98 and stretches to $188. The kitchen stays close to purchasing during Lilli’s first season.
Lilli’s food is guided by French technique and seasonal American ingredients. Vorce calls the restaurant’s food his version of French cuisine, and the plate descriptions bear that out. His version of sole Véronique replaces the classic creamy white wine sauce with Concord grapes, tender lettuces, and a sesame-brown butter emulsion. The sole appears on both tasting menus, part of a progression that begins with amuse bouche, salad, and fish, then moves through white meat, red meat, and dessert.
The kitchen uses Liberty Ducks from Sonoma County Poultry, wild-caught hake from Maine, produce from Kerry Clasby of Intuitive Forager, and morning-harvested fruits, vegetables, and herbs from Green Life Produce in Pahrump. Flannery Beef supplies dry-aged flat iron steaks. China Ranch Date Farm supplies dates for chestnut and kale tortellini, a drive of less than two hours from Las Vegas. Vorce pins his menu to trucks, flights, farms, and airport runs.
Some dishes follow the project from the Durango Social Club residency into the opening restaurant. Hawaiian kanpachi and black cod appear on the opening menu, carrying earlier guests into the first permanent service.
The Spring Mountain Road room and the Chinatown choice
Lilli occupies the former Le Café Central French bakery space on Spring Mountain Road, in Las Vegas’s Chinatown. The address places Vorce’s first permanent restaurant in a corridor already shaped by diners who travel for a specific bowl, skewer, roast, or noodle pull. Lilli adds a French tasting-menu room to that route, with the Taco Stand next door and a dining room that uses an exhibition kitchen, white curtains, and arched floral-patterned panels.
An exhibition kitchen changes the contract between chef and diner; hands, towels, pans, and timing become part of the experience. Vorce has spent years in kitchens where a plate leaves the pass only after a sequence of small checks. At Lilli, that discipline sits in sight of the dining room. The former bakery shell now holds a restaurant where the work is watched as it happens.
Chinatown also changes the expectation around access. A Strip tasting menu often arrives wrapped in hotel machinery: valet flow, casino sound, a lobby designed to move thousands of bodies. Vorce is at the pass.
Las Vegas has long been able to import famous names. Lilli’s opening adds another pattern: a chef with Keller, Breeden, Troisgros, and Le Bristol in his lineage choosing a Chinatown address for his first permanent restaurant after testing the city through pop-ups and a residency.
The wine list, the pairings, and the cellar signals
Lilli’s compact wine list includes French and California producers, with bottles chosen for the food. The list includes Peay Vineyards from Sonoma, Domaine Pierre Morey, and Littorai from Anderson Valley. One bottle is a $500 white burgundy from Domaine Pierre Morey. Another is Littorai’s 2024 Savoy Vineyard pinot noir from Anderson Valley at $175.
The pairing language is precise where the kitchen needs it to be. Vorce has pointed to a 2023 “Cep” Pinot Noir from Sonoma’s Peay Vineyards with Liberty duck breast aged for two weeks, jujube purée, roasted radicchio, and foie gras-Port sauce. The duck’s two-week aging gives the pairing a measurable anchor. The wine choice places California fruit against a dish built through French technique, the same conversation Lilli has with its food: American ingredients, French method, Las Vegas address.
The Lilli Las Vegas restaurant’s wine list runs from accessible bottles to a $500 white burgundy. Peay, Domaine Pierre Morey, and Littorai name the lane clearly enough. The question for future visits will be how the wine program tracks the menu’s seasonal changes and whether the compact format keeps the pairings close to the plate.
How to book Lilli and what to expect at service
Lilli serves dinner Tuesday through Saturday from 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Reservations are available through Resy. The core choice is between the four-course tasting menu at $98 per person and the eight-course tasting menu at $188 per person. Diners who want less structure can use the lounge for à la carte dishes, cocktails, and wines (Lilli2).
The sequence begins with an amuse bouche, salad, and fish, then continues to white meat, red meat, and dessert. Sole with Concord grapes and sesame-brown butter emulsion sits inside that structure. So do dishes carried over from the residency, including Hawaiian kanpachi and black cod. The opening menu gives returning Durango Social Club guests a point of recognition and first-time diners a view of how Vorce edits his own repertoire.
The chef drives to the airport two to three times weekly for seafood shipments. Morning-harvested produce from Pahrump, dry-aged beef from Flannery, dates from China Ranch Date Farm, and Maine seafood all place pressure on the kitchen to adjust as ingredients arrive. The team is still defining Lilli’s first season. The method is visible now, while the team is still defining the restaurant’s first season on the bench.
Vorce’s next work will happen in repetitions: Tuesday through Saturday, 5:30 to 9:30 p.m., at the pass in Chinatown, with the airport runs and supplier calls shaping what reaches the table.
