Casino Enterprise Management

Gambling and eating have a long shared history. The gambling palaces at European spa resorts like Baden Baden and Bad Homburg were renowned for their restaurants, as were the tony men’s gambling clubs on St. James Street in London in the early 19th century. Even the finer illegal gambling halls in America were known to put out a nice spread for their guests. But over the past few years, dining and casinos have gone to an entirely new level, thanks to major changes in how Americans eat and the growing rivalry between resorts.

The Las Vegas Strip has been the epicenter for the sea change in casino eating. This makes sense, because the Strip has had not only the largest concentration of casinos in the world for decades, but has been one of the most innovative regions in the industry as well. The two facts are linked; competition gives operators ample incentive to try new things. Strip resorts are competing for a large but finite pool of similar customers. While there is certainly a wide range of prices for the Strip’s hotel product, on the gambling floor, casinos offer roughly the same merchandise (games) at approximately the same “price” (i.e., the house edge). With nearly identical product lines, how do you give potential customers an excuse to walk past five other resorts to get to yours?

Once, the answer was personal: Serious gamblers, whether they came by junket or as independent travelers, played at a casino because they had a relationship with someone there—a casino manager, a shareholder or another big player. That worked fine when casinos had 10 or 20 table games and 200 slot machines; they literally could be places where “everyone knows your name.”

Obviously that isn’t true in most casinos today. Casino hosts work overtime to build personal relationships with even middle-level players who visit frequently enough, but it is impossible to expect hosts to know every single customer, and it is folly to think they’ll be able to do much to a customer through the door for the first time.

American casinos seemed locked in a losing pattern. There wasn’t much a casino president could do to distinguish his house’s gambling action (though a scarce few, such as Benny Binion, did this successfully), and he didn’t have much else to set his casino apart.

As early as the 1960s, the solution presented itself: The way to a gambler’s heart, executives deduced, was through his stomach. So Strip casinos started paying more attention to food.

For the previous 20 years, casino restaurants had served solid food that came squarely from the center of the culinary mainstream. Prime rib, sirloin steak, and liver and bacon were the order of the day. It wasn’t bad, and it was cheap, because food, like entertainment and lodging, was primarily a loss leader; casino revenues effectively subsidized these departments.

Most casinos had a dinner theater and a more casual coffee shop. Due to the caprice of gamblers, the coffee shop was usually open 24 hours a day.

The only real innovation to come out of early Strip casinos—if you could call it that—was the chuck wagon, the ancestor of the modern casino buffet. The Strip’s first casino, the El Rancho Vegas, also pioneered with the chuck wagon. It was a simple enough concept: Rather than making hungry midnight gamblers sit down and wait to be served, the casino put out a modest spread of cold cuts, salads and other treats for them. The “Buckaroo Chuck” (it cost $1) was a success for two reasons. First, it was convenient; and second, by letting diners eat all they wanted, it let them feel like they were getting the best of the deal. This has been a keynote of casino buffets since, though long lines have lessened the convenience factor at many resorts.

For the most part, casino restaurants had generic menus and service. The most creative thing about them was usually their names; the Desert Inn had the Painted Desert Room, the New Frontier had the Venus Room, and Sahara’s coffee shop was called the Caravan Room. But there was nothing distinctive about them.

That began to change in the late 1950s. The Stardust broadened the Strip’s palate with Aku Aku, a Polynesian restaurant that played on the then-current rage for all things tiki. The casino also hosted seafood restaurant Moby Dick, a venture that would have been unthinkable in the desert city a generation earlier. Other casinos followed, opening their own seafood restaurants (the Dunes’ Dome of the Sea) or making stabs at ethnic cuisine.

Then, in 1961, Chester Simms at the Flamingo decided that the Strip was ready for true gourmet dining. As manager of the casino, he supervised the creation of the Candlelight Room, the first true gourmet restaurant on the Strip. It offered what was at the time a novelty: fresh Maine lobsters flown in daily from Boston. The Candlelight Room closed in the late 1960s, a victim of the management shake-up after Kirk Kerkorian’s purchase of the Flamingo, but it was influential. Soon other casinos were dipping their toes in gourmet waters.

At the Dunes, the Top O’ the Strip restaurant featured, for a time, a menu inspired by La Tour D’Argent, a famous and long-lived Paris penthouse restaurant that specialized in duck. Soon casino restaurants would be blazing their own trails, but in the mid-1960s, they still could not stand on their own as legitimately posh eateries.

That began to change with the opening of Caesars Palace in 1966. Its Bacchanal restaurant, under the watchful eye of head chef Nat Hart, took casino cuisine to a new level. With a half-Latin, half-English menu, the Bacchanal had to be good, and it was. It received rave reviews from the start and opened many eyes to the possibilities of good food and wine on the Strip. Hart would prove to be influential in training the next generation of casino chefs; through his Nat Hart Gourmet School, he personally taught more than 2,000 aspiring chefs.

Three years later, Kirk Kerkorian opened his International Hotel, a casino whose selection of restaurants lived up to the name, with German, Japanese, Mexican, Italian and French cuisine in addition to the usual coffee shop and steakhouse. Since then, most casinos worth their salt have made it a point to satisfy a variety of tastes. Even when the International became the Hilton in 1972, it continued to champion culinary diversity.

Variety is the spice of life, but some people prefer to stick to familiar foods while on vacation. Las Vegas casinos hosted chain restaurants as early as the 1960s—Don the Beachcomber opened at the Sahara in 1962, and Benihana of Japan debuted at the International in 1969. Today, franchised restaurants run the gamut from fast food to haute cuisine.

In the 1980s, casino buffets became far more elaborate and important. Originally featuring mostly cold items, by the end of that decade, they were accepted parts of the typical casino. They tended to emphasize quantity over quality, and few casinos promoted their all-you-can-eateries as unique dining experiences. They were, for the most part, places for patrons to quickly stuff themselves in between pulls of the slot handles.

Casino dining underwent a sea change in the 1990s, and as before, the Strip was the innovator. This time, celebrity stepped to the fore, and with the added star power, Las Vegas—and later casinos elsewhere—took its place in the gourmet firmament.

The celebrity chef invasion began in 1992, when fabled Los Angeles restaurateur Wolfgang Puck opened a branch of his famous California eatery Spago at the Forum Shops in Caesars. Puck would go on to become a Las Vegas fixture, putting his name to Chinois, also in the Forum Shops; Postrio at the Venetian; Trattoria del Lupo at Mandalay Bay; Wolfgang Puck Bar and Grill at MGM Grand; and most recently, CUT at the Palazzo.

Spago’s was an immediate hit, and within 10 years, a flood of famous culinary eminences had descended on Las Vegas. Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, Alain Ducasse, Bradley Ogden, Nobu Matsuhisa, Michael Mina, Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud, each of them famous far beyond the restaurant world, opened Strip restaurants.

In 2005, MGM Grand scored a coup when it lured “Chef of the Century” Joel Robuchon out of retirement to open his only fine-dining restaurant in the United States. His eponymous restaurant features six- and 16-course tasting menus, and has been hailed as one of the finest in the United States. That’s a bold claim, particularly in a town that not too long ago was renowned for shrimp cocktail and chuck wagon buffets. But it’s not an outlandish assertion. It would be hard to find a higher concentration of haute cuisine anywhere in the world.

Other casinos have also entered the ultra-gourmet sweepstakes. In 2006, Restaurant Guy Savoy, the famed chef’s first eatery outside of France, opened in Caesars Palace, and new casino plans give as much importance to their choice of signature celebrity gourmet as they do the resort’s architecture.
Dining on the Strip has certainly come a long way, and the rest of the casino world is not far behind. In Atlantic City, the Borgata has opened eateries by Strip luminaries Wolfgang Puck, Bobby Flay and Michael Mina, as well as a branch of famed 137-year-old New York steakhouse institution the Old Homestead.
As competition heats up in other jurisdictions, casinos will undoubtedly amp up the star power of their culinary offerings. If history is any guide, the coming years will see the spread of the “restaurant wars” to casino markets from California to Connecticut, leading to a welcome proliferation of better dining opportunities for casino patrons everywhere.

David G. Schwartz sit he Director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of several books including Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. He can be reached at dgs@unlv.nevada.edu.