Meet The Team / Allen Salkin

At the very moment that shouts of terror -- "Get down! He has a gun!" -- ripped through the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas yesterday morning during a $1.5 million stick-up, chef José Andrés was standing at a roulette wheel watching the ball finally settle against the number he'd been betting all night.

"All of a sudden in the distance you see this person running and one person screams 'Get down!' And then you see everyone get down on the floor, the whole casino at once," Andrés told Slashfood.

He hit the deck along with his pal the artist Mikel Urmeneta.

"It was very weird to see an entire casino laying down, everyone on the floor," Andrés said.

"Jamie's American Road Trip," a six-part series that Jamie Oliver says has already aired in 120 countries, may soon find a home on American television. "It may finally appear in the country whre it was shot," he told an audience at a screening of the series in New York (Nov. 15). He was also promoting a related cookbook, Jamie's America: Easy Twists on Great American Classics and More.

In the third segment of Slashfood's three-part video interview (also see posts for part 1 and part 2), Oliver explained that he did, in fact, kill the alligator he is shown carrying in one of the books photos.

"Game or fair game is different wherever you are in the world," he said. "In England it's rabbit and hares and pheasant. In Louisiana, it's alligators."

Watch out, Los Angeles school officials! You may become next season's prime-time TV villains.

Jamie Oliver, the English chef who won an Emmy for his show "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" (which portrayed some school-lunch bureaucrats in West Virginia as ensuring that children are given meals sure to make them obese and short-lived), is bringing the show to L.A. for season 2.

When producers wrote to officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District, asking for permission to film in the schools, it was denied.

"Our feeling was that his time would be better spent or invested in other communities," an L.A. school official told the Los Angeles Times.

In part two of Oliver's exclusive three-part interview with Slashfood, he lays down a warning to the district.

We can't imagine "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" without Jamie, but, if things had gone Oliver's way back in 2008, the show would have been hosted by "American Idol" star Ryan Seacrest.

In the first segment of an exclusive three-part Slashfood interview with Jamie Oliver (parts 2 and 3 run tomorrow and Wednesday), the English chef reveals that he didn't want to host the American version of the show he had launched in England, and asked Seacrest to take on the job. "I had heard he was into food politics," Oliver said.

Although Oliver had experienced success on American TV with his "Naked Chef" series, on Food Network, he had been trying to pitch a prime-time show here for six years, based on the television docs he'd made in England about trying to improve school lunches and the local diet in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. But he was doubtful that he was well-known enough in the States to pull off it off here. So he emailed Seacrest, who he didn't know at the time.

Seacrest expressed interest, but after Oliver sent him a full proposal, the American Idol host said 'It's not for me, but I'll help you do it,'" Oliver recalled.

Wolfgang Puck is about to take on Europe with his first restaurant on the continent, a Cut steakhouse opening in April or May in London's Mayfair section. Puck's fourth Cut (joining others in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and Singapore) will be an 80-seat restaurant located on the ground floor of the Dorchester Group's newest luxury hotel 45 Park Lane, opening in 2011.

And the menu? "It's going to have more seafood," Puck told Slashfood. "The seafood is really great over there. And in the winter we'll have game birds -- grouse, woodcock, and all that stuff."

Puck's company is managing the new Cut. "It's easier for everyone that way," he said. The hotel fronts the capital, but doesn't have to run the business. "It's better for them," the Austrian-born chef said. "These hotels are not great at running restaurants. We are." (Among the Dorchester Group's properties are the Bel-Air, in L.A., The New York Palace, and Paris hotels Le Meurice and Plaza Athénée, as well as London's The Dorchester).

Puck, who has lived in Los Angeles since 1975, was in New York this week to promote a new line of canned soups and stocks, half of which are gluten free and organic. From Vegas to tinned soups to pheasant under glass . . . welcome to Wolfgang's World.