How strange that you, of all of us, would prove to be the most hopeful.

I put off my Vegas Recap until I was ready.

Have tickets.

Am ready.

So.

Straight Flush

Mix
Once again, perfect scores across the board for High Roller Night. The main dining room at MIX was reportedly designed, successfully, to make one feel like one was dining inside a glass of champagne. The view…MIX occupies the top two floors of the new tower at Mandalay Bay, and looks straight down the strip. It is the exact view from the poster that has, in annually updated form, hung in my places of residence since 1999. (I am told the optimal view is had from the stalls in the ladies’ room, but I did not have enough to drink to see.) In lieu of an appetizer-entree combination, I opted for the special, and had my first experience with tournedos Rossini. I will, God willing, have many more experiences with that remarkable dish. Luna’s veal chop with sweetbreads was delicious, Vacation Wife knowingly ate lobster eggs, the rhum baba was exemplary, and and the MIX staff explained that their version of “Mom or Sister?” was called “Hooker or Daughter?”. Exceptional.

Four Of A Kind

Craps I
I have never been a big craps player. I prefer — or preferred — sportsbooks and video poker. But at the end of the night, I was talked into playing craps, and the experience was extraordinary. I may never play anything else. Craps, in my first experience, is a license to PRINT money. I went in with $100. I left the game three hours later (it was light out) richer by eight whiskeys and $350. Here is my understanding of how craps works: I put some money on a line. An old Chinese man rolls. Then we put more money next to that money, plus a bunch of money (if you’re me) on four, six, eight, and ten the hard way. Then the old Chinese men rolls again, and you get given a bunch of money, and your lawyer jumps up and down, giggling like a schoolgirl and screeching “I can’t believe this!” Then you repeat. I wish I had played craps sooner; I might be retired.

Jean-Philippe Patisserie
This is what they have in Heaven where on Earth we have Paneras. Fifty different pastries by the architect of the Bellagio Buffet’s dessert station, and I have to have the plain sugared brioche because I know that I will eat it disbelieving that such perfect brioche exists. It is not a textbook brioche; it is better. It is a fantasy of a brioche, the brioche that chases dieting French patissiers through their dreams. And if you time your outbound flight correctly, you can make Jean-Philippe your last stop before McCarran.

Full House

Bouchon, breakfast
Newly opened. Hadn’t heard anything but glowing praise. Praise wasn’t glowing enough. I had a meal I would normally expect to be ordered by number: Corned beef hash, poached eggs, toast, coffee. But it was not diner breakfast. It was a king’s breakfast, if the king in question were immensely wealthy and a regular contributor to eGullet. It was corned beef hash as art on a plate. Coddled eggs. It is possible the toast was made by hand, with a toasting fork and a kitchen torch, and I would not rule out the possibility of the coffee beans being roasted and ground individually. Laughably overdone, as when the ketchup arrived, unbidden, in a cool ramekin under a silver dome. And if there’s anything I love, it’s unnecessarily overdoing anything.

rumjungle
Long convivial dinners are important on vacation. The kind where you leave the restaurant five hours later and a couple hundred bucks apiece lighter, with a tableful of empty plates and coffee cups and brandy snifters behind you, bidding farewell to the staff by name and tallying the score, wine bottles drained vs pounds of steak consumed, on your way to the cab line. But you want to make a stylin’ exit from a restaurant? Take my team to rumjungle, and swagger out counting empty rum bottles.

The Wynn Buffet
The historic defeat of the Bellagio Buffet by the Wynn Buffet…

Flush

The Bellagio Buffet
…has already been documented at length.

Burger Bar
So here’s the story of Burger Bar: The owners of Mandalay Bay managed to lure Chef Hubert Keller, of the legendary Fleur de Lys in San Francisco, to open a second Fleur de Lys in Mandalay Bay. This was a huge score in the food world. Hubert’s terms called for him to move his family to Las Vegas and oversee the design and construction of his new restaurant, to ensure that the new place would meet his standards and specifications. A very short time before the grand opening of Mandalay Bay, the construction of the new restaurant was way behind schedule, and the manager of Mandalay Bay went to Chef Keller and said “Hubert, a terrible thing has happened! There is an unavoidable delay. Your beautiful new kitchen will take many more months to complete.”

And Keller said, “But what will I do in the meantime? I have moved my family to Las Vegas. My children have started school. I cannot just pick up and return to San Francisco until you are ready! What will I do to keep my skills sharp?”

The manager said, “Um…you want to run the burger joint?”

Which is why, at Burger Bar, you can get a lobstertail-on-brioche “burger”, or a dry-aged Black Angus hamburger with heirloom tomatoes and artisan cheese, or a Kobe beef burger with foie gras and black truffle, and why Luna can dip fries in sauce Périgueux.

The Double Down Saloon
Hot girls getting high in the bathrooms…bacon martinis…space invaders…a girl whose pickup line was “I have a very clean vagina”…genuine dank…leatherclad cheerleaders…smoke down to your knees…cold shots of ass juice…hot girls in our company getting stoned by piddling in the unventilated bathroom for ten or fifteen minutes each…having my shushin’ hand ready for when Luna noticed that the bass player’s upper hand was more of a stump…puke insurance… Here’s something interesting: I would have adored the Double Down beyond all description if the band wasn’t SO FUCKING LOUD I COULDN’T HEAR OR SEE OR THINK OR BREATHE. I think this one gets another shot, but first we check the website for times there won’t be an emo band playing so loud my teeth hurt. At noon, I think the Double Down is quietly a bottomless pit of dirtbags and degenerates. God bless it.

Straight

Le Buffet, Paris Las Vegas
A must-stop on the tour. Crepes made to order so well that a reader among you once put one in her purse to nip from throughout the day, like a third-grade teacher with a flask of Kahlua. Surprisingly good charcuterie, considering the pace of turnover, and miniature pain chocolat, of which I could easily eat a bucketful. Also wine, which means I don’t remember the exact nascence of the hilarity surrounding the soup bowl of drawn butter, but it was darn funny.

Enoteca San Marco
Mario Batali’s appetizer bar, on the Piazza San Marco. Black truffle honey, a plate of cheeses and salumi, unlimited grissini, and a split of Amarone to peoplewatch by. This place is awesome. I cannot wait for B&B.

Taqueria Cañonita
Really good Mexican food (wild mushroom tacos) and a snifter of sippin’ tequila añejo just across Venice’s gondola-laden Grand Canal from a high-end lingerie store. Las Vegas…ain’t nothin’ like it.

Three of a Kind

Zumanity
“Zumanity” is Cirque de Soleil’s dirty show — there’s nudity, simulated sex, raunchy comedy, and representation of all major gender pairings and most of the popular fetishes, all things of which I am generally wildly in favor. I don’t know if it was that it seemed kinda contrived (”Okay, here’s the deal: We want to shock middle-aged women from Wichita enough to get a rep and make them feel badass but not enough to draw letters of complaint to the casino.”) or that the big surprise moment to the rest of the crowd seemed to me as startling as would the melee subsequent to Harpo rolling a wagonload of pies into Congress, or just that I prefer the regular circus to the Cirque kind, but I wasn’t blown away by “Zumanity”. To me, it was interesting to see it once, but for the admission price, I’d rather have five or six lapdances and some hotel porn. (Though the reaction of the person sitting next to me* to the flying bondage girl was nearly as good.)

*Not you, Fireman, other side.

Two Pair

Bouchon II
Motivated by the breakfast, we give Bouchon a shot for dinner later in the trip. My order: French onion soup and steak frites. Luna’s order: Country pate and vegetable gnocchi parisienne. Hers is pretty good, especially the gnocchi. My steak is okay, the fries are nothing special, and their French onion soup is not as good as mine. (And I am not given to that complaint; I try to avoid things that I tend to make better. I’d rather learn something than preen.) And the service is really, really bad.

The Waterslide & Pool, Golden Nugget Hotel & Casino
Shark tank, check. Hot tub, check. Ability to swim up to shark tank, check. Comfy padded lounge chairs, check. Waterslide through shark tank, check. Overpriced yummy pinas colada, check. Alternative eye candy, check. Swim-up blackjack, no. Toplessness permitted, no. Child-free area, no. Much, much too crowded, yes. But that shark tank is awfully cool.

One Pair

Nathan’s, in the back of Fat Tuesday, downtown
Deep fried Oreos and a footlong ‘dog. Chosen under the criteria “What’s still open?” Fine for what it was, as it is impossible to either underperform or exceed no expectations.

Fold:

Glitter Gulch
Glitter Gulch has gone steeply downhill in the three years since I’d been there. Once the most convenient (overpriced, but convenient) topless bar in Vegas, it now appears to serve as a sort of combination retirement job/halfway house/sideshow for strippers. (”SEE the girl with one leg! GET the world’s oldest living lapdance! Get those singles out, folks — Now appearing on stage five, the stunning hottie Snaggletooth, and on the main stage, gorgeous and tempting Mastodon!”)

Craps II
Acting on sound and gracious legal advice, and secure in the knowledge that craps was a license to print money, I stopped off on the way to the cab stand to make a quick $350. Did not go as planned. The game moves faster in the sober light of day; at 4am and inebriated, I was in the zone. I could see the dice tumbling. At 10am the next morning, I would put some chips down, and the croupier would sweep them up. I felt like the automated tee at a driving range: Ready, gone. Ready, gone. Ready, gone. Ready, gone. There must be a trick I didn’t remember.

**

Next: Vegas 2008

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