By Elaine & Scott Harris

Some restaurants you review. This one, we simply live in. This November, Honey Salt — Elizabeth Blau and Kim Canteenwalla’s farm-to-table landmark in Summerlin — celebrates fourteen years since it opened its doors in 2012, and we have been at its tables for every one of them. We were there in the first weeks, when a serious restaurant in a neighborhood shopping commons still felt like a gamble. We have celebrated birthdays there, brought out-of-town guests there to prove that Las Vegas dining does not end at the Strip’s edge, and claimed our corner often enough that the staff starts our order before we sit down. Elizabeth and Kim are not just two of the most accomplished people in American restaurants. They are our friends, and this is their month.

“We started with the principle of how we like to entertain at home and how we like to eat at home,” Elizabeth told us. “We did something very authentic to us.” That is the whole secret, and it has never changed. The room feels like their home because it is an extension of it — a menu that holds the healthy and the indulgent in the same breath, desserts made in-house, and even the kids’ menu made personal: Cole’s Corner, named for their son — “Cole tested; Mom approved.” His mac and cheese is still a favorite, and we can confirm from long experience that plenty of adults order it too.

It is easy to forget now how radical the address was. When Honey Salt opened at Rampart Commons in 2012, the valley’s culinary gravity sat on Las Vegas Boulevard. Elizabeth and Kim brought Strip-caliber artistry — hers in the dining room, his in the kitchen — off the Strip and into a neighborhood, and helped begin a shift in Las Vegas dining that continues to this day. “I like to think we were a part, a pretty sizable part, of making restaurants off the Strip more acceptable,” Kim has said, “where they are going to get reliable service and food on par with the Strip.” Fourteen years on, with a generation of neighborhood dining rooms thriving in their wake, that is not a boast. It is a record.

Our standing order has been refined over fourteen years of research, and we offer it as a public service. Start with the savory monkey bread — warm, pull-apart, glistening with parmesan and olive oil — and Grandma Rosie’s turkey meatballs, from Kim’s family, in pomodoro with ricotta and sourdough. Elizabeth’s Caesar is the one every kitchen should study: Tuscan kale and romaine, torn croutons, parmesan, and a black garlic dressing that makes the classic new again. The Biloxi buttermilk fried chicken is the plate the room runs on — at lunch it arrives as a sandwich with creamy slaw and house Durkee’s dressing; at dinner it is the chicken itself, boneless breast and thigh with mac ‘n cheese, coleslaw, hot sauce and honey. When we are behaving, there is the Grain Power salad — quinoa, beluga lentils, avocado and a zingy lemon vinaigrette; Elizabeth built an entirely plant-based side of the menu early on, and it has only grown. And nobody at our table leaves without the Brookie: chocolate chip cookie meets fudge brownie, under salted caramel chunk ice cream. It is the dessert this neighborhood dreams about.

As sommeliers, we notice the cellar, and Honey Salt’s list is salted with boutique treasures from around the world, poured by people who actually know them. The wine dinners sell out nearly every time. Theme nights, holiday meals and special events keep the calendar full — there is always something on at Rampart Commons, and half of Summerlin seems to be in the room for it.

The years have been full ones. In 2017, Elizabeth and Kim published “Honey Salt: A Culinary Scrapbook,” a book that reads the way the restaurant feels — part cookbook, part family album — and Food & Beverage Magazine named it Best Cookbook of 2018. James Beard Award nominations have come their way. Elizabeth, founder of the hospitality consultancy Blau & Associates, has judged on Iron Chef America and invested on CNBC’s Restaurant Startup. Kim’s road to this kitchen ran from Toronto to Raffles in Singapore and Le Méridien in Dubai before Las Vegas claimed him. For all the global scale of their careers, though, the center of gravity has never moved. It is this room, these tables.

“The restaurant has evolved and grown with us,” Kim says. “The real thing is the people we have worked with and have grown with over these years — from runners and bussers to servers to management positions.” Corporate Chef Todd Harrington has stood beside them throughout, and his summary is the restaurant’s motto in five words: “We have always been like a family.” The giving runs the same direction — support for Three Square, Communities In Schools and a long list of local causes is simply part of how this household operates, at home and at the restaurant alike.

So this November, join us in raising a glass: to fourteen years of farm-to-table cooking that helped change how this city eats; to the staff who have grown up inside these walls; and to Elizabeth and Kim — our colleagues, our friends, and the finest hosts we know. Happy anniversary. Save us our table.

Honey Salt, 1031 S. Rampart Blvd. (Rampart Commons), Las Vegas, NV 89145; 702-445-6100; honeysalt.com. Lunch Monday–Friday from 11:30 a.m., dinner nightly, brunch Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m.