Las Vegas Weekly

Where ceviche is king

At Caña, South American staples get top billing

Scallop ceviche with mango, mint and pomegranate seeds

Latore Niskey Photography

The newest addition to Town Square’s stable of restaurants and bars is Caña, a sleek South American eatery named for the Spanish word for sugar cane and inspired by the spirits the plant provides. Rums, cachacas and aguardientes all are based on caña and all will be poured inside the restaurant, where Chef Kevin Lew will be cooking up a menu to match explicitly focused on the Latin American staple ceviche.

Wait, not cooking...

“Cooking is the application of heat,” Lew explains. “Ceviche is generally raw seafood denatured by acid. It does not cook the fish, it just changes the proteins.”

Photo: Latore Niskey Photography

Kevin Lew's snapper ceviche with Leblon gastrique

Technicalities aside, the Las Vegas local who last worked as a master cook at Bradley Ogden will be devoting a full third of his menu to the refreshing snack when Caña opens January 19. Lew will serve 10 varieties of ceviche that will range from $9 to $14, including a classic hamachi ceviche marinated with orange juice, yuzu and sour orange marmalade and rarities like beech mushrooms marinated in lemon and lime juices and beef tenderloin rubbed with mushroom powder and ancho chile.

“You have to try it to understand it,” Lew says of the flavorful carpaccio-like beef rendition.

The 26-year-old chef grew up in Las Vegas and attended Green Valley High School, working his first restaurant industry job at Cold Stone Creamery where he had to sing every time a customer dropped a few cents in the tip jar. “I felt bad for the people giving us tips, because I can’t carry a tune whatsoever,” Lew laughs.

After graduation, Lew enrolled at the Scottsdale Culinary Institute, moving on to hospitality jobs on and off the Strip before Caña owner Cory Harwell mentioned a Town Square project and invited him on board.

Together with Harwell, Lew tried out hundreds of ceviches while waiting for construction to start on the upstairs Town Square location that formerly housed Louis’s Fish Camp. (You may recognize Caña’s host-stand and 16-foot communal table; both were milled down from the 20-foot log of driftwood that marked the Fish Camp’s front door.)

Photo: Latore Niskey Photography

Chef Kevin Lew worked both front and back of house positions in Las Vegas before taking the job as chef at Caña.

“You can make them sweet, you can make them spicy; you can make them savory,” Lew says of the versatile dish. Today, even his fiancé makes a laudable ceviche, Lew notes, though hers has yet to gain a spot on the menu.

While ceviches have been made in the U.S. for years, they’ve recently stepped into the culinary spotlight as notable Latin American restaurants spring up in cities across the country. South of the border, acid-marinated fish and seafood long has been a popular dish served in coastal communities where fresh fish is a fact of daily life.

“In Peru, in Ecuador, that’s what you pack in your lunch box,” Lew explains. “Ceviche is a staple of Latin American culture. They even drink the juice run off as a hangover cure. It sounds disgusting, but it probably works and it probably tastes pretty darn good.”

Far from the sea at Caña, the ceviche and hot menu items will all be served “bocadillo-style,” in small bites placed at the center of the table and meant to be shared. Don’t call it a tapas bar; this is different, though how I’m not entirely sure.

“Eat slow,” cautions Lew. “Order one to two dishes at a time, wait for that food to come to the table and then see what else you want to order. I live by that philosophy.”

Raw seafood isn’t the only thing on offer at the new restaurant. A section of the menu will be devoted to flatbreads, with Caña’s three-cheese take tapping goat cheese, white cheddar and jack cheese with a sugar-cane-and-honey glaze. Open until 2 a.m., I can already see myself scarfing down Caña’s chorizo corndogs served with tangerine-habañero mustard as I wait for my hangover to set in. Maybe I’ll even drink down the run-off from one of Lew’s ceviches. Here’s hoping the ceviche sings, so the chef won’t have to.