In ELV News…
ELV has been feeling a bit under the weather lately, so his postings have been few and far between over the past few days.
And by “few and far between” he means non-existent.
Archive for the ‘Rant’
BLUE RIBBON – Word to the Wise: Skip the Fish
No one can take advantage of you unless you first give them permission. – Marcella Ruth Schroader Curtas*
Does this look like a $350 meal to you?
We didn’t think so either.
STEAK ‘n SHAKE Ain’t Always Right In Sight
The pickles used to be on top of the burger, the chili used to be greasier (and slightly less spicy), the Chili Mac was bigger, its “secret sauce” was plain ketchup, and the steakburgers were steak-ier…
JE–SUS F*CK–ING CHRIST…couldn’t they get anything right?
But the milk shake, they got right. As good or better than any you’ll taste….anywhere. It is the ne plus ultra of soda fountain shakes and it puts every other fast food “shake” to shame…save maybe In-N-Out’s.
Is ELV being too picky? Well, yeah, and we’re kind of joking too. To be fair, founder Gus Belt and his widow (who was running the operation when ELV fell in love with it in the 6os), probably aren’t rolling over in their graves over what’s happened to their creation…unlike, say, the McDonald Bros. or Harlan Sanders.
In fact, the composition and taste of the dishes we remember so well is remarkably similar to the core products that launched this operation. Where it goes off the rails is in offering everything from salads to swiss and mushroom to…wait for it….chipotle/guacamole burgers!
WTF? Is any of this necessary? Do people walk into Steak ‘n Shake looking for a *&(#%$ chipotle burger?
Imagine, if you will, leaving Las Vegas to seek your fortune in say…New Hampshire. For years you’ve been addicted to In-N-Out burgers, love the short, high-quality menu, went there as a kid, and consumed them through high school. Suddenly, thirty years later, the bigwigs running INO decide to expand to Nashua (pop. 107,217!). You can’t wait. You regale family and friends with tales of fresh cut fries and “animal-style” double-doubles. Then, salivating with suspense, you run to the opening of New Hampshire’s first installment of this iconic institution and find a salad bar, bbq and bacon and (*&^#$% GUACAMOLE BURGERS on the menu!!!! How would you feel?
Yeah, that’s how ELV felt.
Betrayed.
Steak ‘n Shake was the In-N-Out of its day. Simple. Delicious. Perfect.
Stick with the basics – the classics that made it a Midwestern icon — and you’ll get a reasonable facsimile of the tastes that made this place famous, and of the satisfaction ELV, and so many others, have secreted in their memories.
Order anything else and you’re on your own.
ELV’s lunch came to $12.78 + a $3 tip. In 1970, it would’ve cost him $1.50.
STEAK ‘n SHAKE
In the South Point Hotel and Casino
9777 Las Vegas Blvd. South
Las Vegas, NV 89183
702.796.7111 (no reservations, be prepared to stand in line for at least 15 minutes)
Eat This Book!
From the 5-Star Robuchons to hole-in-the walls you’ve never heard of, Eating Las Vegas has more than 120 recommendations from the city’s top three food critics, broken down by:
–The Top 10
–The Essential 50
– And by category, including Late Night, Old Vegas, Celebrity Watching, Cheap Eats, Burgers, Pizza, Desserts, Sushi, Beer, Wine Bars, Cocktail Programs, and Chinatown.
In Eating Las Vegas, John Curtas, Max Jacobson, and Al Mancini spotlight the 50 restaurants they could all agree are essential stops for foodies, visitors, and locals seeking an unforgettable meal. In the city that boasts more than 2,000 places for dining out, this groundbreaking guide ushers you through the best of what this dining destination has to offer, with reviews covering the best of the city’s most lavish dining rooms to off-the-Strip ethnic gems. Once you’ve made your way through all 50, you can truly say you’ve “eaten Las Vegas.”
Altogether, we think this is the most comprehensive, honest, and entertaining restaurant guide we’ve ever seen. It’s essential reading for every foodie and makes a great gift for any Vegas fan with an appetite.
Click this link to read a sample review.
Click here to see one of the restaurants from the Vetoes section that didn’t quite make the cut, and why.
Click here to read the Best of Chinatown.
About The Author(s)
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John Curtas John A. Curtas has been Las Vegas’ reigning voice of food and restaurant commentary on KNPR, Nevada Public Radio, for the past 15 years. During that time, he has also been the first restaurant critic for Las Vegas Life magazine and the Las Vegas Weekly (for which he still writes), and is the man behind the “Eating Las Vegas” food blog (eatinglv.com). Nationally, he’s written for Time Out Las Vegas, Fodor’s Las Vegas, Best Places Las Vegas, and for John Mariani’s The Virtual Gourmet. He’s a voting member for the James Beard Foundation restaurant/chef awards and San Pellegino World’s 50 Best Restaurants, as well as a frequent guest on Food Network programs, including two stints as a judge on “Iron Chef America.” |
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Max Jacobson Max Jacobson has had a rousing career spanning almost 30 years in food journalism, but he’ll be happy to fly under the radar if he loses some weight. His career took flight in 1984, when he signed on at the Los Angeles Times as a writer on Chinese and Japanese food, and expanded into food and wine writing shortly thereafter. He was fortunate to arrive in Vegas when the food scene really began to blossom and has been a food writer and editor there since 1999. |
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Al Mancini Al Mancini discovered his passion for food while living in New York City, where he attended law school by day, tended bar and made pizza at the infamous punk club CBGB by night, and explored the Big Apple’s dynamic dining scene during every spare moment in between. For the past eight years, he’s served as the restaurant critic for Las Vegas CityLife. He’s also written extensively about food and dining for numerous local lifestyle publications, such as 944, Where, What’s On, Desert Companion, and Luxury Las Vegas, and has served as a contributor to the international guidebook Time Out Las Vegas. |
Summerlin 20th Birthday Cake Competition
Shhhh, don’t tell anyone, but ELV hates cakes. Angel food cake, anniversary cakes, birthday cakes, wedding cakes, chocolate cake, sponge cake (aka genoise), …he hates them all almost as much as he hates cupcakes. There’s just something about the fluffy, generic, air-infused quality of cooked cake batter that puts him off, and reminds him of all the crappy, Betty Crocker cakes that were forced upon him as a child. Exceptions are made for cakes soaked in rhum, pound cakes and Boston cream pie (which is really two cakes separated by custard).*
VERANDAH CAFE + some cupcake hatin’
On our list of genres of restaurants we loathe with every fiber of our body, hotel restaurants generally land in third place, right behind “family” restaurants and franchises.
Why do we hate them so? Because, by definition, they have to be all things to all people, and like Moliere says in The Misanthrope: “The friend of all mankind is no friend of mine.”
Admit it: Hotel eating in America sux. We’re not talking about “featured,” dinner-only restaurants in classy joints like the top Vegas hotels or the fancy dancy places in big cities. Those joints came into being partly because of the renaissance brought about by Bradley Ogden in the late ‘8os, when he made the dining room at Campton Place in San Francisco a go-to eatery on every foodie’s itinerary. No, we’re talking about every hotel coffee shop or cafe or bistro/coffee shop/cafe-coffee-i-teria in America that has the same fuccen menu as every other in-house mediocre (or worse) food service operation that is only there to provide fuel to the weary traveler — who neither knows, wants or demands anything but expense-account sustenance that won’t make them ill.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a greasy spoon attached to a Motel 6 or inside a Ritz-Carlton, your menu will have (in various degrees of quality):
Pizzas;
Pastas;
Sliders;
A Caesar salad;
Burgers;
Mac-n-cheese;
A steak or two (a filet and a strip);
Three fish dishes (always including salmon);
A turkey or other club-type sandwich;
A vegetarian “option,” and:
Some kind of roast chicken something or other.
It never fails, and menus are so standardized, you can walk into any (and we mean any) three meal a day hotel restaurant anywhere in America and order without ever looking at a menu. Just say: “I’ll have the club sandwich,” or “Gimme a steak with the pasta with tomato sauce,” and some incarnation of it will be in the kitchen, waiting for you (or one of thousands of saps) to order it. Try it sometime and save yourself the agony and insult of actually reading the bill of fare.
The menu at the Verandah Cafe inside the Four Seasons Hotel inside the Mandalay Bay (whew!) is no different, with two big differences: everything is upscaled and tweaked in such a way that you will forget you are looking a hotel dining room menu, and when taste time comes, you will be impressed.
We’re not going to go overboard with praise here. Blue crab “Louis” was way too cold and compacted — a clear indication of refrigerator-sitting, and the Land and Sea sliders (made with “Kobe” beef and more blue crab) were hardly the best versions we’ve had, but everything was a great deal better than you find in any three meal a day dining room in town — save for MOzen.
When you eat out as much as ELV does, the quality of ingredients is palpable from pretty much the first bite, and here you can just taste that Executive Chef Michael Goodman Chef de Cuisine Clarence Villanueva are getting top shelf groceries, and treating them with respect. You get that from the big chunks of good crab in each of the two versions above, and in the huge, properly cooked mahi mahi fish tacos finished with a nice mango pico de gallo.
This is cliche food, but it is cliche food made tolerable by good chefs who want to make the dishes as well as they can make them…which is all you can ask of hotel coffee shop.
Now, a note on cupcakes (because being served one at Verandah sent us into a tailspin on this loathesome dessert).
ELV and his staff hate cupcakes. We hate the very idea of cupcakes. We think cupcakes have become famous or popular or trendy or whatever they’ve become in the past five years because secretaries love to consume and swoon over them during time-wasting office birthday parties that no one really wants to be at but for the fact they can consume a pasty, overdecorated, over-sugared, childish, gimmicky little cake and pretend they’re ten years old again while they don’t work and swoon and go “goody-goody” over a peanut butter/oreo/licorice/fruit chews/cinnamon special.
Which is an insult to all ten year olds, since the last time we thought cupcakes were cool was when we were about six. And don’t tell ELV you like them ‘cuz they’re “fun.” They’re fun the way playing in a sandbox or eating cheap, Halloween candy is “fun.” You should’ve outgrown these things a long time ago, because they taste like over-sugared shite (all of them) and bring nothing to the party but memories of being six years old.
No serious or semi-serious foodie tolerates even the mention of a cupcake. Take a poll and you’ll find that underpaid office workers generally love them.
The fact that there are TV shows dedicated to making cupcakes is an insult to all that is good and pure and holy in the food world. Miss Cellania should be taken out and shot.
Zeus hath spoken.
VERANDAH CAFE
In the Four Seasons Hotel
3960 Las Vegas Blvd. South
Las Vegas, NV 89119
702.632.5000
The Food Dude Diary – by John Mariani
ELV note: The following was published this past Saturday in John Mariani’s The Virtual Gourmet online ‘zine. In satirical form, it pretty much captures the illiterate idiocy that permeates the way most guys under 40 think (or think they should think) about food and restaurants — which has created a deadly dull cycle of negative reinforcement between food television and its brain dead audience.
All of it makes ELV long for a time when fops like this guy ruled the restaurant writing roost. At least they were original, witty, incisive and smart…and you never heard the words “yo” or “dude.”
Here is the link to the original article, which will also link you to a certain review of a certain Arthur Avenue Italian restaurant written by a certain critic whom you know and love.
MASTRO’S Blows
ELV wants to know one thing and only one thing: Who did Mastro’s have to blow to get such a prime piece of real estate in the Crystals Mall?
Restaurant reviews, quips, picks and pans-with some seriously salivating history-from the man who eats his way through Sin City every day.
