Aaron Lee
Winnie & Ethel's Downtown Diner | Las Vegas, NV
April 2026
Aaron Lee, a Reno, Nevada native, began his career on Lake Tahoe, where he spent years snowboarding before working a seasonal gig in the kitchen at The Beacon. Lee officially caught the hospitality bug after moving to Portland, Oregon and decided to take cooking seriously after landing a job in the kitchen at Pok Pok, becoming inspired by Northern Thai ingredients and flavors under Rising Stars alum Andy Ricker. He eventually moved to California to help Ricker and his team open an offshoot location of Pok Pok in Los Angeles. Lee came back to Nevada in 2019 to work at Chef James Trees’ restaurant Esther’s Kitchen in Las Vegas. The restaurant’s ingredient-driven, Italian comfort food shaped Lee’s own cooking philosophy. He discovered a passion for serving accessible, nostalgic, and satisfying food made from scratch.
Eventually, Lee and his wife, Mallory Gott, came across a billboard for a local restaurant competition, “The Great Las Vegas Coffee Shop Giveaway” hosted by J Dapper. While working full-time as a sous chef at Esther’s, Lee committed to the intensive competition, forming a business proposal and developing his own menu before eventually rising to the top of an 80-contestant pool and winning the grand prize, which gave the couple the means to open Winnie & Ethel’s Downtown Diner in Downtown Las Vegas, named after his grandmother and his wife’s great-grandmother.
Now, Lee’s diner focuses on scratch-made food that’s comforting and scalable, but executed with details in mind, like their malted pancakes with Steen’s cane syrup. At Winnie & Ethel’s, Lee relishes in seeing neighborhood locals become regulars. He hopes to one day open another restaurant in a neighborhood that appreciates soulful food done with tremendous care, perhaps in a ski town like the ones he grew up snowboarding in.
