Eating Crow at DAVID CLAWSON

David Clawson opened the David Clawson Restaurant on October 1, 2014 and I’ve been avoiding it like the plague ever since. The reason for my evasion is simple: I have loathed the Henderson/Anthem area of Clark County with every fiber of my body for twenty years. So unpleasant do I consider the entirety of the Southeast quadrant of our humble burg that I would rather be sentenced to a lifetime of eating Slim Jims and Hostess Twinkies than endure the mind-numbing, soul-killing drive up or down Eastern Avenue to expose my sensibilities to the commercial wasteland it celebrates.

Henderson/Anthem is so generic, pre-fabbed, cynical and craven it makes the Strip look venerable and historic by comparison.

It is a collection of monochromatic developments centered around franchised businesses with nary a place to walk or ride; an amalgam of residences and businesses with all the charm of a Subway sandwich shop. There is no place to walk; there is no place to drive. It is a community without any sense of one,  formed for one and only one reason: to make housing and strip mall developers rich.

Get the point? I hate the place. I only go to  Henderson/Anthem at the point of a gun. (Or to go to Valley Cheese & Wine)

Until now.

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Live By The Strip, Die By The Strip: How It Dooms Our Local Dining Scene

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Our local dining scene is pathetic with Chinatown, non-existent without it. — Former Las Vegas Strip F&B Executive

There are many reasons why the prospect of ever having a viable, neighborhood restaurant scene in Las Vegas stinks more than a pound of overripe Epoisses.

The easiest thing to cite is our complete lack of agriculture. Second on most people’s list would be our primarily blue collar populace — who are more concerned with spending as little on food as possible….in order to wile their days and nights away losing their paychecks at the nearest video poker machine.

Thirdly would be the relentless assault on our real estate by national chains and franchised brands — all of whom pounce on our blank-slate real estate developments like blood-sucking remora on the back of a giant (casino-bred) whale-shark. Their advertising muscle, and the top dollar they pay to park all those CVS drugstores and Domino Pizza franchises, virtually ensure that no mom and pop business will ever appear in a brand new shopping center. The best a locally-owned restaurant can ever hope for is to scout distressed locations in older strip malls and hope they can wrangle a good deal out of a landlord, who, despite experience and evidence to the contrary, will always be convinced that a Jimmy John’s or Subway or Walgreen’s is right around the bend, just waiting to sign a 10+5+5 triple net lease* for the space at twice the price per square foot.

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Facing Reality: The Strip Has Lost Its Luster

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I recently sent a holiday e-mail to one of the titans of American gastronomy (not the fellow pictured above – more on him later). The dude I was sending season’s greetings to has major food chops. He’s what I call a restaurant intellectual, as well as being a noted cookbook author and food writer of great renown. My holiday greeting was filled with the usual “2014 was a wonderful year as we discovered the joys of making compost”  blather, but in the midst of all the trite, yuletide good cheer I strangely found myself typing these words:

 It’s funny that I choose this year to do it, because unlike the last twenty, this one has been a fairly dull one when it comes to our dining scene. Of course the party had to end sometime, but after the restaurant revolution of 1998-2010, these past few years have witnessed little, if any, interesting work being done by chefs and hoteliers, save for the occasional Japanese joint tucked away in places most gringos fear to tread.

 In fact, the biggest revolution of all has taken place in my head, where I have become increasingly disenchanted with the tourist-trap pricing of our major hotels. It seems after almost two decades of entreating people to embrace the Strip and its celebrity-chef wonders, I find myself choking on the prices, and deploring the inorganic, top-down nature of our food culture. In this sense I’ve also come around to understanding certain journalist’s (and the James Beard Foundation’s) lack of respect for our casino-driven food “culture” – which has warped and stunted any real growth in our neighborhood food scene.

 So basically I’ve become 1984 in reverse – I’ve learned to hate Big Brother (after once being his biggest fan).

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