While Las Vegas Sleeps…

I spent Saturday afternoon out in Pahrump, Nevada, at the Sin City Chamber of Commerce’s annual picnic, chili cook-off, and hoe-down (it’s at the Chicken Ranch, so, har-har!) and I was very, very tired when I made it home to Vegas Saturday night. I took a shower to wash off the day, ate some spring rolls and some pho tai nam (which is like my favorite comfort food,) and was asleep just as the sun was setting. It was great for me, actually, because I’ve been experiencing some pretty serious, ass-kicking insomnia. So I woke up on Sunday morning at like 6am, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and wanting to get out, enjoy the day, and have some breakfast…

There isn’t one on my end of town, but I definitely do enjoy going to Omelet House, here in Las Vegas, for a nice breakfast (if you go, go to the one on West Charleston - the quality is better, in my experience, even though the strip center it is in looks pretty old and rundown.) I usually get the Bugsy Siegel, which is as beefy and kickass as you’d expect from an omelet with this name, but lately I’ve been getting a Country Club, add avocado, please.

So after driving up the 15 and exiting west on Charleston, my cohorts and myself pulled up to the stop light in front of Frankie’s, right near UMC Hospital. Across the intersection and in the middle of the street I saw a guy being chased by two other men. It was initially a little alarming until I got a second to pay attention to exactly what I was looking at. The men doing the chasing were in solid blue and solid green. The man running away from them - in a rather scattered, clumsy way - was in all white. You guessed it! A hospital patient escaped from treatment and two orderlies were chasing after him trying to get him to return to the hospital! This poor guy had on nothing but a hospital gown! The reason he was running so clumsily was because the blacktop road was probably stinging the hell out of his bare feet, slowing his jailbreak. What a sight! I wonder if I will ever need to make a sudden, daring escape from University Medical Center? I can promise you that if I do I will definitely have sneakers right under my bed. This poor guy was completely unprepared for this kind of adventure. Fortune favors the prepared.

After our morning’s entertainment we had a great little breakfast. I was up so early I had all sorts of things accomplished before lunch. We had so much time, in fact, that I should have taken Nick for a haircut.

Tags: breakfast, daring escapes, hospital, Omelet House, omelets, patients, UMC, University Medical Center

I like to think I know a little bit about this town we call home - Las Vegas. The truth is, Las Vegas is big enough and has spread out enough that it’s really hard to keep up with all the new spots. There are hot spots and there are sweet spots. There are even best-kept-secret types of spots. There’s usually some overlap with those different types of places.

Last Friday my friend Dorothy, upon my suggesting that we drink fine wine until standing becomes challenging, said she has just the place. I thought I had just the place because I was in the mood for my favorite zin, and that can only be obtained at one of Emeril’s restaurants due to a contract with the winemaker, but she insisted. She had to make me feel a little guilty for always suggesting the place and not listening to others’ suggestions, which I don’t think is the case at all, but whatever her angle was, it worked. I’m glad it did!

I love wine. No, I mean I seriously love good wine. I like smelling it, I like tasting it, I just really love the whole wine experience. You might say I’m something of a wine snob in training… I know just enough to be dangerous, but it’s fun. Like some people say about sex, even when it’s bad it’s still good: wine always leaves you with a smile within a few minutes of it going down the proverbial hatch.

The problem with the process of trying new wines - figuring out what you like and don’t like about them, et cetera - is that you go to a wine shop, make a selection, take it home, maybe cook a meal, then you enjoy your bottle. By that point you might not feel like going back to the store to get another bottle or two. In a nutshell, the process takes time. In a restaurant the selection is, of course, bigger, but they also charge a 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 markup (or more) on what the bottle would actually cost either them or you in a retail shop. That comes with the territory, naturally, but sometimes you just want to have a decent meal and really try a number of wines without all the overhead.

For people who love wine and a good meal, thanks to Dorothy, I have found a place that might represent the perfect model for wine and food lovers: Marche’ Bacchus. As I understand it, Marche’ Bacchus started as a wine shop. There are rows of bins and racks on the walls with a a great selection of wines. They have a little bar where you can take your wine selection and for a $10 corkage fee they’ll open your bottle, decant it if necessary, and serve you at their bar inside the wine shop. They added a small cafe to their wine market a couple of years ago and it appears they have expanded it to its current size and menu, with outdoor dining on one of the three fingers lakes in Summerlin (it’s temporarily enclosed and heated during Winter.) The whole place still has the market in front and is still small and quaint. The great thing is, you don’t get the multiple price that is charged in a restaurant for your wine, and yet, from the smell of it, you can enjoy your wine over a tasty meal, all in a great environment outside, if you like. When that bottle runs out, you have an entire market to choose something different in the adjacent room. It’s sort of an interactive take on wine and dinner. I love it!

Thanks Dorothy!

I’ll be visiting Marche’ Bacchus again soon for more wine and will actually eat a meal, at which time I’ll be writing a review over at the new site we’re working on, Las Vegas Critics.

Tags: cafes, dining, las vegas secrets, Summerlin, wine

I love sushi. I’ve loved it for years. I’m not a sushi “snob” per se but I’m definitely not a sushi novice or the type of person that only eats a few things. I love sea urchin (uni.) I love sweet shrimp. I love Spanish mackerel. When I eat sweet shrimp (amaebi) or Spanish mackerel (aji), my regular sushi chefs - BJ and Bruce at Sushi Avenue - don’t even need to ask if I want the shrimp heads or mackerel bones deep fried and served with the sushi… That’s just the way it was meant to be eaten! I like all the stuff most people think is weird. In fact, the only sushi bar item that I don’t like is monkfish liver (ankimo.) That’s just no good on account of how it’s liver and all, but some people love it, particularly some Asian folk.

Over the years I’ve tried a number of sushi buffets and all-you-can-eat types of places. I always end up asking myself “why?” I’d honestly rather pay twice as much money for half as much sushi of good quality than wish I hadn’t bothered with the stuff you typically find on these types of restaurants’ serving lines. [Note: There is one notable exception to this rule I have experienced in Brian's Beach, which is a small all-you-can-eat sushi place off of West Flamingo that makes whatever you want when you order it, keeping the freshness levels higher than most of its competitors.]

Years back, when I first started coming to Las Vegas regularly, a flight attendant on Southwest was talking to me on the flight out - just raving about this buffet sushi place in Vegas that was the best she had ever had. She told me it was on Decatur near Flamingo - a place called Makino. I couldn’t resist her story about this holy grail of raw fish so my girlfriend and I checked it out. One of two things were true about that girl: either she’d only had very limited experience with sushi in general or she was on some sort of kickback program for sending Southwest Airlines customers to the place. It was anything but great. It wasn’t old fish or anything like that - it just wasn’t very good sushi. It was the standard sushi buffet type of place with huge blocks of rice under thinly sliced pieces of so-so fish, accompanied by the usual inexplicably pan-Asian, cheap to produce, filler, B-list seafood items that no one is ever really excited about eating but thinks “I guess I’ll try one of these” as they sheepishly put one, no, two on their plate. I never went back.

I hadn’t been south on Eastern from the 215 since they finished a couple of new retail centers recently. It seems like they were just building them, but as I cruised that way the other night with a couple of friends, I saw that not only were they finished, they were full of new businesses. On one corner was a brightly and colorfully lit new restaurant was a shiny new sign that read “Makino.” It could only have been the way the place was lit up… I was drawn to it like a moth. Okay, granted, we were hungry and the three of us are sushi addicts. I remembered my last experience from the other Makino several many years back and so I had Liz run inside to do some recon on the buffet spread to see how it looked and also what the price was, just in case they had lost their minds or were trying to pay for the new joint in a hurry. I remembered that it was around $25 per person and when Liz came scurrying back to the car with a smile I was feeling a little better about the place already. As it turned out it was $23.95 and she said it looked “pretty good.”

We tried their miso soup to start. It was really vegetable-y. Different, but pretty good and interesting for a change. We got down to business with the sushi next. I guess I should give you the bad news first: buffet sushi is still buffet sushi. Big shocker, right? I’ll say this, though - the rice blocks were less big than the original Makino. They had large trays of sashimi, in the most common varieties of fish, of course. I had some pretty decent tuna. What can I say?

Then there are those pesky B-list seafood items… The only reason I am bothering to write and publish this review is because of the sushi buffet’s seafood co-stars! For once in my lifetime of dining out the supporting actresses of the buffet serving line stole the show! Hell has apparently frozen over… The chefs at Makino prepared several types of raw seafood salads with squid and octopus that were really tasty, not filled with, uhm, filler, and not overly coated with some weird or sweet sauce that gets in the way of the fish. There was a hot section on the buffet, as well, with a good yakitori item, grilled Escolar (superwhite/ono) steaks, and a number of other yummy-looking things I didn’t get around to trying because of my diet and aversion to sauces. There was a noodle bowl prep station and last but not least, a dessert section that actually looked like desserts you would want to eat! (I know that you know that I am speaking the truth about that Asian buffet dessert situation… something really has to be done!) The dessert buffet area was led by a five-layered fountain of liquid chocolate complete with bananas and strawberries on sticks for your dipping pleasure. Nice touch.

I really enjoyed the way the owners and designers used lots of lighting and color in the place. It was a fun little meal with a couple of my best friends in the world. Since you can’t seem to hardly even get a decent cheeseburger with fries and a drink for less than $20 in this town anymore, $23.95 for this meal seems like a bargain. It’s off-Strip but a short drive and might be a nice, reasonably priced change of pace to your over-Strip’ed vacation.

Tags: food, Restaurants, reviews, seafood, sushi

I realize that vengeance is not a emotional drive one should attempt to exude upon inanimate objects. Okay, well, this object isn’t 100% completely inanimate to start with, and to be honest, I think it might have developed enough artificial intelligence to make this battle, nay, war, personal.

I eat my last meal of the day at odd hours. Sometimes midnightish, sometimes 3 or 4am… Las Vegas has tons and tons of restaurants but the good ones tend to close by 11pm or so, maybe midnight on the weekends. One place that I enjoy eating at fairly regularly is Grand Luxe Cafe, which is inside the Venetian. They have a pretty wide selection of menu items, all of above-average quality and they are open 24 hours a day, at least the one in the hotel, there, happens to be. Even the more limited late night menu is pretty good and I get this amazing salad probably 3 times a week on average.

When I go in there, regardless of the time of day or night, I have - for a couple of years now - engaged in a little custom of going to this one slot machine in the middle row between Grand Lux and the restrooms right across the way. It’s a quarter machine, no biggy, that accepts either one of two credits per spin and has a maximum payout of either 800 or 1600 credits. I’m going to start calling this machine Squeaky. Why? The thing is so tight you can almost hear it squeaking. So every time I leave Grand Lux, I walk over, put in what is now a compulsory $20 and start jamming through it, fifty cents at a time, until I either hit the jackpot or lose it. This is all so much to the dismay of many friends who watch this behavior in awe, wondering if I even realize just how pathetically bad this one machine is. They repeatedly demand I try “this one over here” or “that one there…” They don’t get it.

I know it’s tight. I mean, of all the virginally tight machines in the Las Vegas Strip, I seem to have found the single most tight slot machine of them all. And by “virginally” I mean to say that I am convinced that this slot machine is yet to “go all the way” and pay out one single jackpot ever. Le sigh….

So on it goes… Me and Ol’ Squeaky. Every time. I put in the $20; it takes it in less than 5 minutes. I’ve never even hit three bars. Tonight it toyed with me. It gave me two of the jackpot symbols in a row before giving me a sad blank on the end. Oh, it knows. It knows what it is doing. And this means war.

So in order to seek some personal solace through sharing my pain and perhaps enjoying a bit of sad camaraderie, I shall from time to time post the ongoing saga of Christopher and Ol’ Squeaky here on While Las Vegas Sleeps…

Tags: Entertainment, gambling, gaming, Grand Lux Cafe, Southern Nevada, Venetian