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"  Those of you who enjoy watching people eat delicious meals on television most likely know and love Giada de Laurentiis, the Grand Dame of the Food Network. Giada is the petite Italian girl who makes killer dishes and then is paid to enjoy them on camera. (Dream job, let&amp;#039;s be real. I make those same &amp;quot;mmm&amp;quot; noises when eating a tub of hummus while watching TV, and I&amp;#039;ve yet to receive a check.) She is, without question, the greatest interpretive eater we have as a nation. Did I mention that she also has such beautiful hair that Herbal Essences pays her real American money to be one of Clairol&amp;#039;s shiny-haired spokeswomen?  Related: ELLE Women in TV 2014 Given Giada&amp;#039;s rise to prominence as a woman who not only cooks delicious foods but also manages to not eat it all in four bites, it only makes sense she&amp;#039;s now the first woman to helm her own branded restaurant on the Las Vegas Strip. So when the kind people at Clairol&amp;#039;s Herbal Essences dialed my extension (HAIR JOKE) and asked if I&amp;#039;d like to join Giada for the opening of GIADA at The Cromwell, I slowly put down my hummus, stepped into a sequined garbage bag courtesy of RentTheRunway, hopped a flight, got my Hungarian locks blown out at the Salon at Caesar&amp;#039;s Palace, and said &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m ready.&amp;quot; Here is photographic evidence of my &amp;quot;readiness,&amp;quot; courtesy of my friend Instagram Filter:  There was only one thing left to do: Meet Giada herself, hoard several trays full of appetizers, and, hopefully, find out how many hours a day she spends doing Pilates in order to look like this: Related: 6 Healthy Recipe Alternatives for Your Favorite Summer Dishes and Drinks  But first, the restaurant. GIADA&amp;#039;s has a classy, laid back California mansion vibe; it looks like the kind of place I&amp;#039;d want to kick back and watch The Bachelorette in. Sadly, this dining establishment is sans televisions, but a girl can dream.  What was the real Giada like? In the back of her restaurant, in a small private dining room, I sat down with the master chef herself for a one-on-one interview about the usual: pasta, Starbucks, and her vantage point as one of the most successful female chefs in a famously male dominated industry. First things first, congrats on the new restaurant. How are things going so far? It&amp;#039;s going really well actually. We&amp;#039;re completely booked for the months of July and August. I think we have the most reservations of any restaurant in Vegas on the strip right now. I really hope that we can handle it!  You&amp;#039;re the first woman to have a restaurant in Vegas with your name up on the marquee. What&amp;#039;s it like being a part of this boy&amp;#039;s club? It&amp;#039;s so funny because, for the longest time, I never saw myself as a female chef versus a male chef. I just saw myself like everybody else. Just trying to make a living and trying to do my job really well and sort of inspire, especially home cooks, to make Italian food at home. It didn&amp;#039;t matter whether I was a man or a woman.  Over these years, I&amp;#039;ve noticed opportunities sometimes don&amp;#039;t come to a woman in this business the way they do for men. And I&amp;#039;ve started to think about it a little bit more and realize that if I&amp;#039;m going to actually make a difference and I&amp;#039;m going put my own stamp on things, I have to kind of fall back a little bit on my femininity. I never want it to be something that defines me, like most women. We just want to be taken seriously for what we do, no matter what gender we are.  I started to realize I actually do have to think a little bit more about my femininity and how that is different. That is something that I have to offer that men don&amp;#039;t have. What makes you unique is sort of what makes you last over time, right? So that&amp;#039;s sort of how I was inspired for this place in Vegas. When I started to look around, I realized there weren&amp;#039;t very many women here on the strip\u2026I mean female chefs. There&amp;#039;s plenty of women.  (We share a laugh. Giada continues\u2026) A lot of people here who work in this industry just said that they didn&amp;#039;t feel a woman could handle the pressure. And that&amp;#039;s why it&amp;#039;s the boy&amp;#039;s club. It&amp;#039;s also a very tight-knit boy&amp;#039;s club that they don&amp;#039;t let women in. I&amp;#039;ve said this over and over to many women in my business\u2014you kind of have to learn the ropes. It&amp;#039;s like a game of chess or Monopoly. You have to learn how to play the game. It&amp;#039;s not a bad thing! Everybody plays it. You just have to learn which moves to make, and you have to be willing to walk away.  It&amp;#039;s just politics really. Right. You just have to learn how to play the politics game, and if you don&amp;#039;t want to play the politics game, there&amp;#039;s a really good chance\u2014and that&amp;#039;s not a bad thing\u2014but there&amp;#039;s a really good chance you&amp;#039;re not getting to the next level. That&amp;#039;s just the way it is. That&amp;#039;s the game of life. Some people play better than others.  Let&amp;#039;s shelve gender inequity for this next question: Is there a habit in the kitchen you see people do that drives you crazy? Or is there something that people do in your kitchen that makes you nuts? I think one of the things that drives me nuts in my kitchen is all the sweat. Nobody is wiping the sweat off their foreheads! It gets really hot in there and I feel like people should be more diligent about wiping themselves down and not letting it drip into the food.  That is beyond nauseating. It&amp;#039;s one of the reasons I can&amp;#039;t fully enjoy Chopped. Moving on, do people still spell your name wrong at Starbucks? Oh, absolutely. That&amp;#039;s why I don&amp;#039;t go to Starbucks.  There is basically nothing at Starbucks I will not put in my body. Everything but the bathroom key. Now, I saw on your Wiki page that you won a daytime Emmy. Do you have a dusting schedule for it?  You know that&amp;#039;s really funny. I have a couple of Emmys! Ahh congrats! I&amp;#039;ll be honest. They&amp;#039;re high up on a shelf in my living room, so unless you look up to the ceiling you won&amp;#039;t see them. But it&amp;#039;s funny, my daughter the other day said, &amp;#039;Mom, the angels up there\u2026I think they need to be cleaned.&amp;#039;...So yeah, they&amp;#039;re not on a dusting schedule, but they probably should be. The funny thing is I&amp;#039;m a neat freak and I clean up after everything! I&amp;#039;m just so short, I never looked up that high. It happens when you get older. You can&amp;#039;t see well. You can&amp;#039;t reach. You don&amp;#039;t look up much. You&amp;#039;re an expert in Italian cooking. What&amp;#039;s your favorite Italian city to dine in? Well, Sicily to me has the best food in all of Italy. It is the freshest. It is the cleanest. It just has the most flavor of pretty much anywhere in Italy. Naples has the best pizza in the world, and I mean everywhere. You could go to a truck stop in Naples, and they have phenomenal pizza. I think Americans a lot of times are too nervous and afraid to venture down to the southern part of Italy, but the south probably has the best food in the whole entire country. Northern Italian people will argue that point, but that is my personal opinion. Do you have a quick and easy summer recipe to share with the masses? Lemon Ziti. Combine lemon zest, lemon juice, parmesan cheese and olive oil together. Sometimes I put a little bit of red pepper flakes in and maybe one crushed garlic clove. Not chopped. Just crushed. I cook the spaghetti ziti and I add it, hot, to basically what ends up being a parmesan cheese lemon vinaigrette. Top it with a little bit of pasta water and that&amp;#039;s it! You can serve it with baked shrimp, chicken, plain, whatever you might like.  And with that, Giada headed into the main dining room of her grand restaurant, and began the endless task of meeting and greeting the hundreds of friends, family and fans gathered for the opening celebration. While this was going on in one elegant corner of the room, I was in the opposite corner shooting an episode of A&amp;amp;amp;E&amp;#039;s Mouth Hoarders. No appetizer could escape my grasp. DELICIOUS meatballs, the finest puff pastry bites, and\u2026this:  Because we were in a &amp;quot;public setting,&amp;quot; I had a mere two bites of this pasta, but be sure that if this were a more intimate atmo, I would have been wearing that wheel of cheese as a skirt and the pasta as a carb goatee. Luckily, I had these drink concoctions to wash everything down. It&amp;#039;s called &amp;quot;The Giada,&amp;quot; and there was a time I actually knew what was in them. This time is known as BD8Gs (Before Drinking 8 Giadas). At midnight the fantasy was over. I returned my dress, my makeup was smeared down to my knees, and the slot machines weren&amp;#039;t going to lose their savings to themselves. It was a great evening, and almost as Vegas as you can get. But, like, the classy Vegas. I just hope that Wheel of Cheese accepts my Facebook friend request. And now, to sleep this hangover off forever. Feel free to tweet at me to make sure I&amp;#039;m alive @michcoll. Goodnight. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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