LAS VEGAS—If American men ever grow up, it'll kill Las Vegas.
Here's a place where a boy can throw away play money, smoke cigars inside a restaurant and drink until dawn (or beyond)—something he would never do at home, unless home was a fraternity house.
He may eat all he can from a $10 buffet, ride a roller coaster in and out of a building that's a mock-up of Manhattan and kiss a girl (or a boy) whom he'll never see again.
Vegas is Fantasyland for adults, from Cirque de Soleil's exquisite and other-worldly show 'O,' to flowers in the desert, to all the hotels that look like every place but Nevada.
Take the new Palms Casino Resort. It looks like a hotel, but it's actually a big playground. The same hip music rocks in all corners, from the sexy pool area called Skin, to the casino, into every restroom. For weeks, the program Real World decamped here on an entire floor, one of television's more unreal reality shows shot in a fantasia.
If you're over 30, use plenty of botox to feel in at the Palm's Ghostbar, its sky-scraping lounge and presently Vegas's most sought-after, after-hours venue.
And the food at the Palms's premier restaurant, N9ne [sic], is both naughty and nice.
N9ne sells all the kinds of food that you do not eat at home: 22-ounce, Chicago-cut, prime-grade porterhouses, say, or garbage salads with salami and hearts of palm.
It does so in a sleek, silver-and-sparkle space that's more Copacabana, less Commander's Palace (N9ne is a restaurant that has a d.j. on Fridays and Saturdays).
But the desserts at N9ne are the nines, toys you can eat, vacation vittles. 'After people eat here,' says chef Brian Massie, 'they're so full, we try some things that are catchy, that remind them when they were young.'
And, so, N9ne serves wee ice cream cones, or peppermint patties, or small snow cones (flavored with booze, of course), or root beer floats.
But everybody orders 'Campfire S'mores.'
'When you see those s'mores coming through the restaurant,' says Massie, 'you smell 'em and you want 'em.'
That's because the graham crackers, chocolate and marshmallows come with their own little fire and you get to make your own.
What fun.
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NEW ORLEANS—Four warhorses have been going at the New Orleans food scene for decades, back to 1840 and the establishment of the first of them, Antoine's. The others (and their birth years) are Commander's Palace (1880), Galatoire's (1905) and Arnaud's (1918).
But for the case of Commander's Palace, the others are mired in their pasts. To this day, Antoine's prints its menu in French and still sells buckets of its signature 'huitres Rockefeller.' Shrimp Arnaud has been on the menu at Arnaud's since Day One.
And Galatoire's Web site makes bold to advertise that 'the beauty of Galatoire's is that things almost never change.'
At Commander's Palace, they shake things up every once in a while. 'Sixty percent of the dinner menu changes every few months' says chef de cuisine Ethan Powell. It's a treat to look at the restaurant's older menus—even only a few years back—and to compare them to today's.
In the year 1991, three of the dozen dinner entrees were of veal; five, of beef. Most of the entrees had martial-sounding names like 'Veal Kottwitz' and 'Fresh Fish Grieg,' a practice long gone from today's menus. (Seven entrees mark the current dinner menu at Commander's Palace and only one each is of veal and beef.)
The older menus use cooking terms such as 'paneed' (lightly breaded, quickly sautéed) or ornate country club-like descriptions such as 'steamed pulled ginger chicken.' If you were a double-cut Iowa pork chop, would you want to be 'touched by a foie gras sauce (1995)'?
The current brunch, lunch and dinner menus carry one or two items from the restaurant's beginnings—notably the turtle soup—and are, like most restaurant menus today, simple and straightforward.
'People expect more complex flavors today,' says executive chef Tory McPhail, 'but they don't want frou-frou food. We're about good Creole cuisine, that's all.'
Commander's Palace, like many up-to-date restaurants around the country, is also about regional foods, something reflected on its current menus (Belle River crawfish, say, or Anson Mills grits).
'I'd say that New Orleans' unique cooking makes it the only place in the country for 100 percent regional cuisine,' says McPhail, 'and it's been like that for years.'
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