CUT Las Vegas Hands Dinner to a World's 50 Best Bar for One Night Only

The wine pairing is the part of a tasting menu nobody touches. It is where the sommelier's authority sits, course after course, and the kitchen builds around it. On Wednesday, November 18, CUT Las Vegas hands that half of the dinner to a bar.

The bar is Handshake Speakeasy. Eric van Beek, its co-owner and lead mixologist, comes to The Palazzo that night for Beyond the Vine, the series Byron Puck built to test one idea: a cocktail can carry a course the way a wine does, if it is made with the same discipline. The dinner starts at 6:00 p.m. It happens once. The Venetian Resort lists it on its own Culinary Crossroads page as a one-night-only collaboration — a multi-course menu of dishes and cocktails paired thoughtfully, built to explore where kitchen technique and mixology meet.

This is not a guest bartender pouring drinks at the bar while the kitchen does its usual work in the back. Each dish and each cocktail is developed in conversation with the other, and both sides get equal weight in the room. That is the whole mechanism. A pairing usually starts from the plate and asks what wine flatters it; here the drink is written alongside the food, so acidity, texture and temperature get negotiated between two craftspeople instead of dictated by one list.

CUT can hold its end of that negotiation. Wolfgang Puck's Palazzo steakhouse, run day to day by executive chef Matt Hurley, is billed by the house itself as one of the most highly coveted dining reservations in Las Vegas, and race week is when the Strip's dining rooms run hottest — the Formula 1 Heineken Las Vegas Grand Prix fills the city, and tables like this one become the week's second competition. Placing the experiment here, that week, is a statement about how seriously the house takes it.

Byron Puck's side of the table is earned the slow way. He is president of the Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group, and his training ran through rooms cooks name with care — Alinea in Chicago, Le Bernardin in New York, El Celler de Can Roca in Spain, Guy Savoy in Paris. Moving through the world's cocktail cities afterward, he kept seeing kitchen discipline behind the bar: the same obsession with ingredient, technique and finish. Beyond the Vine is his attempt to put the two benches in one room and let them work. He has followed Handshake for a while, he says, because everything the bar makes is thoughtful and intentional — pushing at boundaries without losing the details.

Van Beek's credentials need no inflation. Born and raised in Amsterdam, he won the Bacardí Legacy Global Cocktail Competition in 2018, then moved to Mexico City and co-founded Handshake in 2021 with Marcos Di Battista and Rodrigo Urraca. The room they built is a 32-seat Art Deco speakeasy tucked inside a hotel in Juárez, and it cooks as much as it pours — a culinary approach to drinks, with a menu that took World's Best Cocktail Menu at the 2024 Spirited Awards.

The rankings followed the work. Handshake took No. 1 on The World's 50 Best Bars list in 2024, the first bar in Mexico to top it. It held No. 2 in 2025. On the 2026 list, announced in Milan on October 7, it stands at No. 6 in the world and was named The Best Bar in North America. Three straight years at or near the summit is not a hot streak. It is a standard, maintained — and it is the standard walking into CUT's dining room for one service.

The evening's presenting partner adds a quieter thread. MUJEN Spirits makes shochu, Japan's distilled spirit — brewed is sake; shochu is distilled, which is why it can sit where vodka or gin sits in a cocktail and still bring its own character. MUJEN was founded by Sondra Baker and Bruce Bozzi and is made with Sengetsu, a family distillery in Japan's Kuma region that has been working for 120 years. Three expressions carry the range: Ai Lite, Original and the aged X. For a dinner about how a base spirit is made, a partner whose product starts in a still rather than a cellar fits the argument.

What a guest actually gets is a progression. Courses arrive with drinks built for them — not drinks chosen for them after the fact — and the menus draw from both houses, CUT's steakhouse grammar and Handshake's culinary cocktail work. Van Beek talks about technique and curiosity in the same breath; Puck talks about intention. Put plainly, each man is being asked to do the other's job halfway, in public, for one night.

Practical notes, stated plainly. No ticket price has been published for this dinner in any source available at publication, so none is quoted here. Reservations run through DoorDash Reservations from The Venetian Resort's Culinary Crossroads page, where the Beyond the Vine listing carries the booking link for Wednesday, November 18. One seating, one night, in the busiest dining week of the Las Vegas year — the room will not stay bookable for long.