Vegas Behind the Scenes

I love this photo—this weird, blurry snapshot of the Las Vegas Strip taken with my Blackberry. The vantage point is the balcony of the room at the Cosmopolitan where our editor-in-chief, James Oseland, had set up camp for a month. (By then we were calling it "saveur West.") He was in Las Vegas filming the latest edition of Top Chef Masters; executive food editor Todd Coleman, kitchen director Kellie Evans, and I had flown out to join him for a week. When I snapped this picture, we'd just come off a day of non-stop reporting and shooting. That particular brand of giddy exhaustion that can set in after 48 hours in Vegas had hit all of us, hard. And then Jim invited us out on the balcony. He said, "Look. Just look at that." It was like the scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of her black-and-white world into a Technicolor dream. I was instantly revived, and hungry for more.