Response to Kelsey's Food Blog 1

Having recently been to Vegas and enjoyed the food sparing no expense, I understand the dreamy haze of the place.  This piece sits more with travel blogs to me.  Primarily, the place and secondarily, the food.  

Restaurants in Vegas are situated in a unique setting.  Paris, Venetian, Caesar's Palace, New York, New York, Rio, etc.  Each casino is its own miniature city.     

You wrap the reader up so well in the place, and the food is a detail.    It seems like you want a particular focus, but are ending up somewhere else.   It's easy to include so much of the atmosphere when you're writing about a place like Vegas, but if you're writing about the food, tell us more about the [wonderful] food! 

Restaurants are a different story.  Vegas is full of them and you capture that image really well.  I think if you were looking for a way to write about eating, you should work with the dining experience.   How did the landscape, architecture, lighting, service, table linens, and smell lead to a thoughtfully crafted plate of food?  How did the place make you feel about the food?  Would you have felt differently about a foot-high sandwich if you found it in the food court of a mall in Iowa?

This is a great paragraph: 

"The architecture and decor [are] glamorous and opulent without being stuffy, and the meals themselves are innovative and inspired, and just plain delicious. I've come to the conclusion that to survive in a restaurant industry with so much competition, restaurants on the strip have to be conscious of the unique culture of their location and translate that into food that people will remember."

I think that huge, twenty dollar sandwich with cheap cocktails epitomize the Vegas dining experience.  Show us Vegas through the food if that's what you want to do.  Show us the food in Vegas if that is what you want to do.  

9/14 In the process of remixing Kelsey's blog

Remix: Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:  A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream with Kelsey Hastings's Las Vegas Food Blog

Thompson's work is in courier new, and Kelsey's is in normal.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.   My head was spinning, my eyes hurt, and the only real sleep I'd had in two days was what I could manage on the Great Red Shark, but it was all so worth it.  I am living in the afterglow of a weekend in Vegas. Anything I could have imagined about Las Vegas didn’t live up to the feeling of standing in the city for the first time, breathing in the ether. And now that I've been there, my words can’t do it justice. That first look onto the famous Las Vegas Strip is forever burned into my brain: a backsplash of mountains against a city painted in colored lights, the stars glowing as bright as the abounding neon.    The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab.  We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers...and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.  They say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I will carry this experience with me for the rest of my life.

    Although we barely scratched the surface of what Vegas cuisine has to offer, I did not have a single bite of food that I didn't fall in love with. The architecture and ambiance of the restaurants is nothing short of fascinating, and the meals themselves are innovative, inspired, and just plain delicious. I've come to the conclusion that a restaurant’s survival on the Strip is dependent on a consciousness of the unique culture of Vegas and an ability to translate that into food that people will remember. 

     We were hungry upon arrival and had sampled almost everything, and now--yes, it was time for a long snort of ether.  How long can we maintain?  My heart felt like an alligator.  We quickly checked into our hotel, my attorney and I changed into our Friday best and hit the Venetian Hotel & Casino. My heart races just thinking about this place.  Its bright blue skies painted the ceiling gives the impression of perpetual daytime.  We wandered through the lobby.  We were in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo!  And someone was giving booze to these goddamn things!   We walked down cobblestone streets, past a river.  I'd never seen so much blood! I pointed across the room to a group that seemed to be staring at us.  "Holy shit, look at that bunch over there!  They've spotted us!" We put on our golf shoes and got out of that place.  It was easy to lose yourself in the excitement, but we wanted dinner.

Ironically enough, the first place we went was a restaurant in the heart of the strip called First Food & Bar. I ordered my usual four club sandwiches, four shrimp cocktails, a quart of rum and nine fresh grapefruits.  We sat there, hoping for bread and butter to quiet our unsettled and noisy stomachs.  Our server stepped up with  four golden brown soft pretzels, stacked high on a platter with metal ramekins of mustard butter, honey mustard, and my personal favorite - mustard vinaigrette. They were warm and delicious, and a real creative touch.  By this time, the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. My food arrived...Philly Cheese Steak Dumplings, which were like potstickers, and filled with juicy steak, mushrooms, peppers, and melted cheese, a Singapore Sling with mescal on the side and a beer chaser.  This food stayed true to the allure of Vegas: completely decadent and surprisingly unique. 

     The next morning started at a diner called Ellis Island. From the outside it looked like a fairly casual place, adjacent to a Super 8 Motel. We walked in around 11AM, and there were already big crowds around the crap-tables.  The whole place was full of noise and drunken shouting - it was at this point I realized that without a doubt, I was not in Kansas anymore. We waited almost an hour for a table, but that didn’t matter when I took my first bite of thick cut honey vanilla French toast, with extra crispy bacon and fresh squeezed OJ. Everything got a little sweeter after playing the Sex and the City slot machine (and winning).  I went back to the bar/casino that was actually the Mint Gun Club--where I began to drink heavily, think heavily, and make many heavy notes...Only in Vegas.

     For dinner, we all had our hearts set on a Churrascaria, or  Brazilian barbecue, at the Mirage Hotel & Casino, but Vegas has a way of changing your plans. We drank our way right through the last seating and my attorney said, "As your attorney, I advise you to go over to Japonaise." Which was in the same hotel.  The dining room was lit only by candlelight, bursting at the seams with Asian artwork, and the seats were so low to the ground it was almost like eating on the floor.  In all of the excitement I found myself ordering a fancy schmancy drink made with cucumber. I don't usually prefer vegetables in my cocktails, but this was an exception triggered by the atmosphere of the place. We ordered one of everything from a late night menu of cocktails and appetizers, but it wasn’t enough.   These appetizers were approximately one bite each and before we knew it we had inhaled everything and were still desperately hungry.  So we did what anyone in their right mind would and soaked a Kleenex with ether and mashed it under our noses.  

   Ether is the perfect drug for Las Vegas.  In this town they love a drunk.  Fresh meat.  So they put us through the turnstiles and turned us lose.  Round two was a deli reminiscent of New York City, appropriately named Carnegie Deli. Sandwiches on this menu were $20 a pop.  These things were bigger than any sandwiches I've ever seen; I'd say they were a good four feet tall, but then again I had been drinking all night. I opted for potato knishes while my attorney went for one of the sky-scraping sandwiches, piled high with corned beef, turkey, and homemade coleslaw, on pumpernickel slathered in Russian dressing. A good sandwich comes on slow.  The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening...and then ZANG!  Fiendish insanity, strange glow and vibrations...a very heavy gig in a place like Carnegie Deli.  The knishes were better than I've ever had, creamy potato filling inside of a crisp puff pastry. It was the perfect late night snack after a late night of penny slots and getting verbally molested (by  a drunken stranger while I was trying to win some money to pay for all the food I had been eating...the nerve.)  

"Do they pay you to screw that bear?" he asked me.

"What?"

"He's just kidding," my attorney said, "C'mon--let's go downstairs and gamble."

     We promised ourselves we would come back to the Mirage for the Brazilian barbecue the next night, but once again our plans fell through because by dinnertime we were still full from brunch at Egg and I.  We had fresh coffee and were waiting on our meals, when I commented quietly to my attorney that I should have ordered a banana muffin, as I could smell them baking from the dining room.  All of a sudden, just like magic, the manager dropped by with two freshly baked banana nut muffins on the house. We laughed about the manager's muffin telepathy, but our laughter became stifled as soon as we took our first bite. These muffins were hands down, the best I've ever had.  A thing like this could send a muffin person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. The texture was dense and cake-like, and they were warm and gooey with the perfect amount of natural sweetness from the banana, and saltiness from the walnut chunks.  It was too much.  The line between madness and muffins was already hazy; the time had come to pull back...to retire, hunker down, back off and "cop out" as it were.

     We opted for buffet on our last day in Vegas, and just like everything we had eaten previously, it was extravagant and overblown in the best way possible...and when it comes to things like this, you don't fool around. It being our last day, there were signs that we might be losing control of the situation.  Here we were on this fine Nevada morning, this cool bright dawn on the desert, hunkered down at some buffet...and with the feeding frenzy about to start, we were dangerously disorganized.  We ate all we could eat as our grand finale to all the gluttonous acts we'd committed.  After, we finished with my favorite activity of the weekend - blackjack.  We were told, "Always quit winners." I parked myself at a table and right smack above my head is a half-naked fourteen-year-old-girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine's neck.  The madness went on and on and I pretty much had to be dragged out kicking and screaming in order to catch our flight. I was full of food and not so full of money.  For losers, Vegas is the meanest town on earth, but I wouldn't have had it any other way.  We came here for the American Dream.

     One of our many lovely cabbies informed us that "Las Vegas wasn't built on people winning money." He's probably right, but this is not a town for psychedelic drugs.  Reality itself is too twisted.

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