The Portable Chef

Chefs come, and chefs go. Most of the time, I'm sorry when chefs I admire pack up their knives and move to another city. I actually went into a brief state of mourning several years ago at the departure of charismatic Mike Saluzzi, who was last seen in the kitchen of the now-defunct Altizio's Italian Restaurant in Overland Park. Saluzzi was the best thing about that joint, and when he took a hike in 2003, Altizio's lost a lot of vitality. In fact, the restaurant didn't stay open much longer. Saluzzi, a New York native, kept moving west — according to his most recent e-mails to me, he has now opened his own place, named after himself, in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

More recently: I never got a chance to see chef Tim Doolittle in his last Kansas City gig, heading up the kitchen at The Café at Briarcliff Village. Doolittle — a veteran of some of Kansas City's best dining spots, including EBT, Joe D's Wine Bar, Café Allegro and the Stolen Grill— decided to leave The Café in February. But he was conflicted about his next move.

"I was sitting at the bar at Le Fou Frog, telling people that I had had my fill of Kansas City and, half-seriously, that I just might pack up and move to Vegas," Doolittle tells me. "And one of the waiters there turned to me and said that he had a friend who was an executive with Wolfgang Puck's company, overseeing the Vegas restaurants."

Before he could say Viva Las Vegas, Doolittle was on a plane to Sin City for a job interview, and when I spoke to him last week, he had accepted a position with Puck's successful Postrio Restaurant in The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino on the Strip. He'll begin work in the Postrio kitchen on May 1.

"It's a strange place, Vegas," Doolittle says, "but I'm looking forward to living there. I hadn't been in 16 years, and it's changed a lot."

He says he'll miss many of the people in Kansas City. "I had a lot of customers follow me from restaurant to restaurant, and they were very supportive. I hope they'll come and dine with me in Las Vegas."

After all, heading to The Venetian Resort is a lot more convenient than going to the real Venice.