A Kidney Stone of a Decade (2010-2019)

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Let’s face it: 2010-2019 was a kidney stone of a decade.

We couldn’t pass it fast enough.

Consider the following:

10 years ago, Las Vegas was on the balls of its ass.

Down for the count.

Kayoed.

Poleaxed.

On queer street.

And so was I.

The Great Recession (which was really a depression), hit Vegas hard and lots of people harder.

In the span of two years (2008-2009), everything went from coming up roses to straight-in-the-shitter.

Incomes shrank, property values dried up, careers tanked. Everyone was simultaneously on-edge and stupefied by the economic implosion.

It took five years for Las Vegas to see any light at the end of the tunnel, and for some of us, a few years more.

If the first half of the decade was taken up with gloom and doom, the second half made some of us long for the good old days.

Because with the economic recovery (and Vegas’s bounce-back), came other sinister forces: insipid social media, political nihilism, and social polarization on a scale no one could’ve imagined ten years ago.

In my world, I split the decade past in half — into those bleak times of economic despair (2010-2013), and then from 2014-2019, when everyone got on Facebook and Instagram, camera phones improved, and the whole world became a maelstrom of narcissistic bloggers, and internet advertising inundation.

If the last 10 years taught this old dog anything, though, it was that the yin and yang of life is ever-present and never-ending. Because with all of our financial troubles in those five early years of ’10-’14, were also when our food writing persona reached its peak.

The financial remuneration may have been small, but from our Iron Chef and Top Chef Masters episodes, to local TV and radio, to publishing the first editions of EATING LAS VEGAS – The 52 Essential Restaurants (2011-2013) with Max Jacobson and Al Mancini, it was all quite a ride for a few years. (To this day, The Food Gal® muses that all that fun was one of the reasons I was hanging on by my fingernails.)

And then, as mentioned above, 2014 rolled around and suddenly everyone became an instant expert.

And as “influencers” rose, blogging (which requires, you know, like actual writing) waned. I attribute this as much to the improvement in camera phones as anything else….because, as they say: a picture is worth a thousand words, and if you can just snap a pretty pic, who needs to write anything?

Image(Me, influencing)

It’s the rise of those “influencers” that has given me pause for four years now. Not because I don’t enjoy their tasty snaps, but because, fundamentally, what they are doing is promoting themselves and the restaurants they cover, not looking at anything with any sort of critical detachment or rigor.

At its core, “influencing” is advertising, even though no one wants to call it that.

By the same token, I tend to give Yelp (which also came out of nowhere a decade ago) a pass, because Yelpers (be they informed or idiots) are just tossing it out there whether they liked something or not. They’re not quietly in cahoots with the places they go to, trying to drive business to a restaurant (and by extension to themselves), by telling everyone how “yummy” everything is.

Look at the comments of any food influencer on Instagram, and you’ll see hundreds of comments along the lines of “looks fabulous!” and “get in my belly now!” One wonders if these things really move the needle for restaurants, since, if you look at the numbers, if 587 people exclaim “I can’t wait to go there” to any restaurant anywhere, and even a fraction of them do, then the place would be a raging success.

It’s a fair bet that there are restaurants all over town who are still looking for customers on a Wednesday night who’ve had an influencer garner hundreds of exclamations from their followers over some oozing pizza pics.

For example, check out this feed from someone calling themselves “The Las Vegas Foodie.”

This person claims to have 187,000 followers. A picture of a Big B’s barbecue sandwich claims that 35,706 people saw the picture and “liked” it. Hundreds chimed in with “sooo good” and “that brisket”-type comments, while a few naysayers gave the grotesque belly bomb a thumbs down. The point is if 36,000 people are fans of, or slavishly engaged over, a barbecue restaurant (and hundreds more are proclaiming their love for its sandwich), there should be a line out the door 24/7 for this place. You can take it to the bank: there is never a line out the door at Big B’s.

By the same token, this dumb video of a milkshake being made supposedly is liked by 285,000 people — which is 100,000 more people than “Las Vegas Foodie” has followers.

It’s all quite ridiculous, but this is the world we live in now. Writing about everything except current events and politics has been devalued. People want to be spoon-fed pablum. Big media controls your news feed; social media pictures control just about everything else.

Which raises the question(s): Where will people get their information in the next decade? Is the world going to devolve into nothing but video “stories” and political diatribes?

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter would like it no other way. They want you to get all of your information (from the food you eat to the movies you see) from their advertising platforms, and as they slowly boil the privacy frog (by using your data to target you), the value of anything besides a tweet or listicle or a flashy snapshot becomes lessened.

The public, who, let’s face it, never liked to read much anyway, is happy to buy consumer products based upon an influencer’s photo, just as it is comfortable with a President conducting foreign affairs through his tweets. The less you have to think, the better, which is exactly how the people selling you things want it.

Ten years ago I was on a panel with the then-heavyweights of the food-writing world: Barbara Fairchild, Jeffery Steingarten, Dorie Greenspan, Alan Richman, Andrew Knowlton, et al. In the audience were several nascent food bloggers (like Eater LA’s Lesley Balla) who asked us what we thought of the budding internet interest in food and restaurants, and if they (the magazine editors/writers) thought that social media would/could ever affect their business model. “They all brushed the question aside,” Balla told me, “and acted like it was no big deal.” Recounting the story to me a decade later, she sounded both bemused and wistful, “I don’t think they had any idea what was coming, and never knew what hit them.” Indeed.

It will be interesting to see what hits in the next 5-10 years in the food writing world…or if another sucker-punch knocks us out altogether.

Happy New Year!

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My Worst Meals of 2019

Image(Yeah that’s me, dunking on bad food)

Sick of “Best Of” lists?

Tired of “Top 10” torpor?

Had it with holiday hype?

Then Being John Curtas has a refreshing intermezzo for you….

Sorry if these ruffle a few feathers, but since real food writing is fast becoming non-existent in Las Vegas, we thought we’d supply you with some information that flies against the all the bought-and-paid-for drivel.

For the record, none of these meals was truly terrible; all of them are good restaurants; most diners would enjoy them without batting an eye. But each fed me one or two or three things that had me shaking my head throughout the meal, and grumbling to myself that there was no reason to return.

In a small way this breaks my heart. In my world, I want every meal to be transforming, life-affirming, jaw-dropping, and transcendent. I’m rooting for the restaurant every time I walk through the door. Leaving a restaurant mumbling about a dish puts me in a bad mood for hours, sometimes days. The Food Gal has been known to consult everyone from therapists to divorce lawyers whenever darkness descends upon my countenance after a dining disaster.

And sad to say, it only takes one misfire to sometimes ruin an entire meal for me. Especially in a place I know and love.

In fact, the way I feel about my favorite restaurants is a lot like love…or at least lust. As with the latter, sometimes it doesn’t take much to cool your ardor. With sex, the line between “I want to kiss you all over” to “Ewww” can be pretty thin. With food, all it takes is a pseudo-Caesar with some caperberries in it.

Image(Not even a 9 year old would eat some of this stuff)

My Worst Meals of 2019.

Bavette’s

I had a pretty good steak dinner here. Two of them, actually. But I couldn’t see what I was eating. At these prices, you ought to be able to see what you’re paying for.

Burnt Offerings

We so wanted to love this place. I so wanted to be able to crow to my Jewish friends how I’m now “keeping Kosher” (at least for one or two meals a year) and actually admit to enjoying it. But the tough meat (at a place that brags about its smoking skills) was a sin that Yahweh himself could not forgive.

Carson Kitchen

Calm down. Don’t get your panties in a bunch. My two lunches here this year were perfectly fine. But as game-changing as CK has been, it hasn’t followed its success with anything further on the local scene. Instead, it’s being used as a flagship for expansion in other cities. Bravo for them, but the menu and the concept here has gotten stale. There, I said it.

Image(Dumb Dish of the Year – bony fishy fish on burnt toast)

La Strega

People love La Strega, so who am I to argue? Well, I’m me, and for what that’s worth: the apps were more than a little disappointing (I almost broke a tooth on some stale, toasted baguette, the tartare tasted like hospital food, the Caesar has caperberries in it). Pizzas and pastas can impress though (if you go for overload, subtlety isn’t in this kitchen’s vocabulary), but the feeling I got on my two trips here was that La Strega is that all-too-common creature: a restaurant where everything sounds better than it tastes. The menu might be fine for restaurant-starved Summerliners, but at its core, it is safe and boring…which is just what its customers want.

Locale

Locale amused us more than La Strega, but is still flawed in fundamental, incurable ways. The menu is too big and actually the inverse of La Strega’s — too hip for the room, too complicated, trying too hard to separate itself from the pack. If it were downtown (or playing to a black-belt foodie audience) it would give Esther’s a run for its money. Out in the sticks, its prospects for success are questionable. The old saw: “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink,” ought to be rephrased here into: You can lead Las Vegas to interesting Italian food, but they’ll still want chicken parm.

Forte Tapas

What once seemed fascinating (kachapurri, Bulgarian mixed grill, pelmini, Stroganoff fries, etc.) tasted tired and rehashed. The verve of the room, the brightness of the recipes, snappiness of the staff, all had disappeared. It didn’t help that they served us one corked wine, and another at a nice, warm bath-like 80 degrees. I think I liked this place better when it was filled with Russian mobsters in track suits.

La Comida

For the last seven years or so, La Comida was on our regular downtown rotation. But we ate there twice at the beginning of the year and something was different. The menu read the same, but the management was different, the food had changed, and not for the better. These things can be subtle, but sometimes it’s just a matter of some under-seasoned meat, less vibrant guacamole, cold corn and stale tortillas that tells you they don’t care anymore. Haven’t been back since February. Don’t intend to go back.

The Nomad Restaurant

What Daniel Humm did with Eleven Madison Park in New York was phenomenal. What he and his investors are doing in Las Vegas is predictable. The Nomad is a chain restaurant pretending it’s a gourmet one. Worst service of the year too, by a country mile.

Image(Oh no, they’re serving us sardines on stale toast! Mr. Curtas is not amused.)

Oscar’s Steakhouse

God bless Oscar’s. It so terribly wants to be a top-tier steakhouse but it so consistently fails miserably at it. To paraphrase “A Christmas Story”: it’s not that bad…but it’s not that good either.

Pepe’s Tacos

The Food Gal® and I were starving at lunch one day and pressed for time while driving on N. Decatur. Suddenly, like a Mexican apparition it shimmered before us: a bright yellow awning beckoning, “Come hither, partake of our tacos poor pilgrim, enjoy our asada sopes, Help Wanted.” So in we trudged, seduced by hunger, the advert (and stomach pangs) having relieved us of our common sense. From now on we’re sticking with Del Taco.

Sara’s

They start you off here with some gargantuan, brontosaurus bone-in beef rib-thing they serve as an appetizer. Yes, an appetizer. This is supposed to impress you. Our Dover sole was the worst piece of fish I’ve had in a decade. Strictly for those wowed by dark rooms and hidden doors.

Image(Pearl can’t bear to look at our best of the worst)

The Kitchen at Atomic

We went in for a steak. We were told that they only had one, 48 oz. rib eye left. We settled on other meat: a hangar and something else. None of it was very good and the flatbread was a mess. I had four meals here in 2019 and loved 3 of them. We’ll leave it at that.

Tim Ho Wan

Don’t believe the hype. This is a copy of a copy of a copy of a famous dim sum house. You will not eat badly, but you will wait in line to eat food that’s done better (and cheaper) across the street at Ping Pang Pong.

Water Grill

I enjoyed my one meal here…in the same way I used to enjoy McCormick and Schmick’s….in 1998.

Image(Some of these meals deserved a good sabering…and needed more champagne)

Years ago you would’ve found me wallowing in a lot more mastication misery. These days, I am much more selective about where I eat — discrimination and an encyclopedic knowledge of the Vegas food scene keep my “worst meals” at a minimum.

In the past, I would go to the opening of an envelope, but time, taste and age have left me little interest in whatever “fast casual” concept some ambitious restaurateur is launching to take him/her to the promised land. This knowledge alone has saved me from a lot of indigestion, and further enhancement of my already dyspeptic personality.

I really don’t eat badly these days, even in the restaurants noted above. As you can see, my “worst meals” usually amount to a few dishes that missed the mark and put a damper on the overall experience. These failings shouldn’t be looked upon as a condemnation of the whole operation. At all of these places (save poor old Pepe), your average diner can have a most enjoyable meal.

But unfortunately for restaurants, I am not your average diner.