It’s come to our attention that some of our more demanding readers expect full blown reviews with each of our posts — when (sometimes) the constraints of time, attention, energy, laziness, excessive imbibing, and actually having to earn a living to support our ourselves make such extensive prose difficult on a daily basis.

So instead of letting anyone down, we thought we’d begin a feature we’ll hereinafter (ELV loves talking like a lawyer-at-law) call Friday Snaps, Slaps and Snacks — a weekly compendium of places that, for one reason or another, do not merit much more than a cursory shout out or put down.

For example, it would be hard for us to compose an entire post over a tiny taste of Spanish caviar we had at Caesars recently:

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…but will tell you it had the brightness, fishiness, salinity and nuttiness of a fine Caspian Sea oscetra. As you know, wild caviar from Russia has been banned for the foreseeable future and lots of farm-raised stuff is now on the market. The pearls don’t seem as big or bright or as intensely flavored with these new products, but for farm-raised, this brand was pretty scrumptious.

Something unapologetic-ally scrumptious and quite reasonable is the tuna “burger” at Brasserie Puck:

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…that comes with fries so good they may challenge Bouchon’s for Vegas french fry hegemony.

But before we got to that beautiful piece of tuna with spicy slaw on a perfect bun, we started out the day with some chilaquiles and a breakfast burrito on a warm, just made tortilla at Casa Don Juan:

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Now CDJ isn’t the best Mexican joint in town by any stretch. But it’s one of the few decent eateries in downtown; the owners and staff couldn’t be friendlier; and if you know what to order: shrimp diablo, puerco por dos, chilaquiles, and the raw fish cocteles, you will eat well and reasonably. Skip the burritos — always loaded with too many canned, refried beans for our taste.

Speaking of something to skip, how about another meal at Golden Steer:

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The Steer’s food is consistently lousy, but we like going anyway — if for nothing else to be able to groove to Bobby Darin on the hi-fi whist sipping a mar-tooni at Dino’s booth.

But our last meal — bready, overcooked oysters, practically white romaine lettuce for our Caesar salad, cheap ingredients on on the baked potato, a barely-grilled steak — was so bad, Frank and Sammy had to be rolling over in their graves. Not even three mar-toonis could wash the memory away…

But let’s end things (and start the weekend) on a high note shall we? We at ELV were pretty hard on Mastro’s earlier this week, and by and large it deserves all the opprobrium it gets from anyone demanding more than a franchised steak. But the butter cake served here is truly a thing of beauty, and we would be remiss in our duties to our fans, if we didn’t run a few tasty snaps of it.:

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Have a nice weekend from all of us at ELV.