Jaleo

Paella held to its Valencian name

The paella pan meets olive and orange wood at the pass where Ramón Martínez, Chef at Jaleo in Las Vegas, keeps the rice accountable to its origin. His work at Jaleo has long measured Spanish cooking against memory, technique, and repetition, not as nostalgia but as a working standard. Martínez serves as Executive Chef and Culinary Director of Jaleo, after holding Head Chef posts at Jaleo in Washington, DC and Crystal City; his earlier career includes Escuela Joviat de Manresa, Hostal SPORT in Falset, Restaurante Las Vegas in Manresa, Hacienda Benasuza, El Celler de Can Roca, and Martin Berasategui’s restaurant in the Basque Country. The line matters because the Las Vegas room is not a stage set for tapas. It is a station inside a broader Jaleo discipline, where dishes have to remain legible even as they move through a restaurant built for volume, speed, and spectacle. Martínez speaks of paella as a humble Valencian dish, and at Jaleo the name carries a boundary: Paella Valenciana is the form that should earn the title. That distinction gives the kitchen its spine.

The grill, the bravas, the standard

At Jaleo, paellas cook over wood-burning fires in an open cooking area, with olive and orange wood giving the station its heat and scent. The Paella Grill is the centerpiece, and the restaurant describes it as one of only three in the world. Around that fire, the program moves between tapas and rice: Paella Valenciana with rabbit and chicken, seafood paella, gambas al ajillo, pan de cristal con tomate, chicken croquettes, Catalan sausage stew with braised onion and mushrooms. Martínez’s own signature language runs through Patatas Bravas, Paella Valenciana, Gazpacho, and Pescado Marinado. The bravas carry the broadest pull in the room, built on contrast, crisp potato, sauce, heat, and the familiar discipline of a dish that can be spoiled by casual handling. The paella asks for another kind of restraint. It is not simply rice in a pan; it is a method with a name, a region, and a memory attached. Martínez has said José Andrés brought chefs from Spain to teach the kitchen how to cook paella, because authenticity mattered across the whole table, not only in the marquee dish. That instruction still sets the tone.

A counter with fire in view

The room sits on Level 3 of the Boulevard Tower at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, mid-Strip, but the craft gathers around the open cooking area. The pass has the particular rhythm of a tapas restaurant: small plates leaving in waves, garlic hitting a hot pan, tomato rubbed into pan de cristal, croquettes moving from fryer to plate before they lose their center. The counter and the room carry the energy expected of this address, yet the useful details stay bench-side. A cook tending rice has less room for theater than the room suggests; heat, liquid, grain, and timing make their own demands. Contemporary Spanish art and a loud dining room can frame the work, but the fire gives it measure. The orange wood does not care where the table is seated.

The first jamón, the same argument

Jaleo is the first restaurant in the United States to offer Jamón Ibérico de bellota, and Martínez makes the same argument with Paella Valenciana: origin changes the method, and the method protects the dish from becoming only a name. Inside the Las Vegas restaurant, that argument continues at the grill, at the tapas station, and at the table where Patatas Bravas keep returning as the dish guests ask for most. The kitchen does the rice, with rabbit, chicken, and fire holding the line for Paella Valenciana.