You Know You’re An Old Vegas Foodie If…

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You know you’re an old Vegas foodie if you remember:
 
The Green Shack
The Swiss Cafe
The Alpine Village Inn
The Hilltop House
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Larry’s Villa (the steakhouse, not the toothless stripper joint)
Ferraro’s when it was trimmed in pink neon
Nora’s when it wasn’t any wider than an SUV
Chateau Vegas when it was a mob hangout
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Hugo’s Cellar when it was cool
The Golden Steer when it was good
When you first ate a Capriotti’s “Bobbie” (probably around 1996)
When the Rio Wine Cellar was run by a weird-ass Brit named Barry Larvin
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Don the Beachcomber
Morton’s and Palm being our two best steakhouses
When there were only 3 sommeliers in the entire town
Little Joe’s BBQ joint at Plant World
Cosmo’s Underground
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Hamilton’s Cigar Bar
Taco Cabana’s roof caving in
The House of Lords
Nick’s Supper Club
Lillie Langtry’s and its carved wood interior:
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That’s Italian – which barely was…since it was owned by a smarmy Frenchman who smothered everything in cream sauce
When Andre’s was the coolest place in town
Nicky Blair’s
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Bob Taylor’s Ranch House… when you had to look for the blue light
Frogeez
Pamplemousse when it was a celebrity hangout…not a tourist trap
The Monte Carlo Room at the Desert Inn
Dickinson’s Wharf
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The Dome of the Sea….with a moveable harpist!
Commercial Center when it was crawling with decent restaurants….a dozen of which were Asian, with 4 Korean joints in the middle of it all
The Venetian being where Herbs & Rye now is located
Prepare to eat, prepare to DIVE:
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 The original Bacchanal Room
Piero’s when the chef was actually named Piero
The Palace Court when Burt Reynolds hobnobbed with men in leisure suits:
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Finally, you really know you’re an old Las Vegas foodie if you remember…
Women in helmet hair dining with men in tuxedos in a purple fern bar:
Image(The Imperial Room at the LV Hilton)
Many thanks to Classic Vegas for many of these tasty Vegas snaps.
 
 

Oldies Not Goldies

imageIt took me almost two years but I finally did it: forced myself to eat in every one of Las Vegas’s venerable establishments. The oldest restaurants in town. Those slices of history that have hung on for decades, bucking trends and stemming tides.

And you know what I found?

They’re all terrible.

Not terrible terrible as in inedibly terrible, but so dated, shopworn and threadbare that there is no appreciable culinary reason to go to any of them.

Continue reading “Oldies Not Goldies”