Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas Part II
6 February 2007If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I landed in Vegas on Thursday and immediately hooked up with the Irish expat mob. We started the Vegas culinary odyssey with a stop at the River Boat casino 2nd floor restaurant and pub. The in-the-know locals were stacked up waiting in line: it was steak night and for $9.99 you got and amazing cut of meat. I selected ribeye; the old school waitress said they went through a thousand pounds of beef every Thursday. This volume allowed them to demand and get really fine cuts of beef. For some weird reason the Casino had a mini-brewery on the premises: you could see the vats and machinery and plumbing through a plate glass window as you stood in line waiting to be seated. The beer was amber and delicious and incredibly fresh and pungent. It was literally hosed from the mini-brewery into the restaurant – you could see the fire-hose that carried the brew into the restaurant. I was bone tired and dehydrated. So I drank about ten mugs of beer and ate the beef and felt like an inebriated tick full of blood ready to pop. That was the end of my 1st travel day. The real trip commenced the next morning. El D hit just the right note for a man with a slight hangover by taking me to the surreal, retro-futuristic “Hash House a Go Go - Twisted Farm Food.” It was the most incredible diner I’ve ever been to. Uber-hip, this weird emporium was all aluminum and industrial bolts interspersed with real straw haybales and functional farm implements. It was hip-ness beyond hip. It was camp and coy and light-years beyond your puny tourista imaginings. Food was served by a tribe of out-of-shape Euro-inspired semi-Goths. These were pierced tattoo people dressed all in black and wearing makeup applied with a trowel. I half expected to see Dieter, Dana Carvey’s Saturday Night Live Euro-trash techno-meister come pirouetting out the kitchen doing the trout dance. The food was uniformly spectacular…gigantic buttermilk pancakes served on a mega-platter - my supposition is there is CIA (Culinary Institute of America) chef masquerading as a hip farmer running this kitchen. The specialty was hash, but instead of Libby’s corned beef hash out of a can, the served tenderloin of beef hash with shitke mushrooms, goat cheese and scallions. This was one of a half dozen hash varieties. Hip Hash a Go-Go was pricey. Still, I gave its excellent food and royal weirdness an 8.8.
That night I reunited with the Pavelizer and we took a cab to New York, New York, the big casino on the strip. We were a little early so we stopped in for a pint at Nine Drunken Irishman, another upscale casino bar tastefully done up. Pavel was famished and ordered a salad; the Irish scone bread that accompanied the nice collection of greens was superb. Pavel swooned as he ate the bread. I suspected he was an old country bread-inspired flashback. Perhaps some long forgotten black bread back in a small family bakery in the Ukraine. I had a pint of thick Guinness. The Irish are a bold race and make a very convincing argument that Guinness is food, not an alcoholic drink. We didn’t really want to leave as Van Morrison began to sing “Into the Mystic.” Off to another part of this imitation of New York City inside a building. The original Gallagher’s is in the New York theater district and among the NYC steakhouse hierarchy is generally considered in the top five: Pete Lugar’s and Sparks hold down the top two slots. Since I first ate at Gallagher’s some 30 years ago, their dry-aged steaks have been my beef benchmark - I’ve had a better steaks since and a whole lot worse steaks since - but Gallagher’s has been the benchmark and remains a high one. What does a beef lover say about a joint that has a meat locker visible from the passing sidewalk? As you approach the restaurant and prepare to enter under the famous green awning, you peer into the front window only instead of seeing smiling happy eating customers you are confronted with a room full of rib-eyes, New York strip steaks, filets and giant sirloins – all hanging at different lengths on butcher string from the ceiling of a temperature controlled room…the beef dry-aging in precise temperature until the cuts are perfect. Properly dry-aged beef has an almost gamey taste. What better way for an eatery to say Welcome Beef Lovers!
I still get choked up remembering the first bites of that perfectly grilled, dry-aged piece of grass-fed beef at my namesake Manhattan eatery three decades ago…Anyway I was reassured as we approached the entrance of this perfect replica restaurant when I saw they had replicated the original (visible from the street) dry-aging room. We entered and were further reassured by the smell: the fat sizzle of dry-aged beef is orgasmic. The seating was crowded. The waiter staff performed a great imitation of the collective attitudes of the original NYC wait staff. In NYC steakhouses the waiters tend to be older opinionated guys, grizzled, knowledgeable and slightly gruff. (I could fit in with these guys.) The prototypical NY steakhouse waiter has a definable accent and attitude; our Vegas guy had it - but my sense was he was an actor, obviously coached, and a good actor – but an actor. As I took the first bites of my cowboy rib-eye I knew instantly that I was disappointed: the replica steak cooked by the replica chef served to me by the replica waiter in the replica restaurant did not measure up to the benchmark original by a long shot. I should have known that going in - instead of hoping such things wouldn’t matter – they do matter. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but replica dry-aged rib-eye is not as good as original dry-aged rib-eye. I gave Gallagher’s a 7.6. Not enough value in relation to price and the steak itself was something I thought I could replicate on my grill at home. The next day our meat odyssey was interrupted by the troublesome fact that Pavel was entered in a deadlift competition of some significance. I had to realign my mind from foodie on tour to athletic coach. I did so by arriving at his hotel suite many hours prior to the start of the actual competition. I settled in and began commiserating with the ever-interesting Russian on a hundred topics as we whiled away the hours. Kickoff was estimated for 5:30 pm. At around 3pm we were joined by strength brethren Brett Jones. We would all chill together. Both men were entered in the 181-pound class and both would need to pull a lot today. I appreciated the professional attitude displayed by both men leading up to this competition. We sat and sipped Pavel’s powerful coffee while relaxing and laughing; this duo was a joy to sit with pre-meet – compared to some of the space oddity head-case athletes I’ve had to handhold and contend with prior to competing in years gone by.
Part III – the deal goes down…
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