Two of my sisters, their husbands and their just-turned-21 sons are in Vegas right now, staying downtown at the Golden Nugget for free thanks to a casino host and having a good time. The Nugget is a really nice place, but most of downtown is all about the El Cheapo, and El Cheapo Vegas is the Vegas I love.
Some of my favorite El Cheapo Vegas experiences:
1. The deli in the back of the Golden Gate. This is the home of the famous 99-cent shrimp cocktail, but you can get much better sandwiches back here on the cheap if you’re willing to grab a tray and wait in a cafeteria line. One of the best pastramis I’ve had anywhere was here a few years ago, although there are at least four places on the Strip that can top anything downtown these days on the pastrami front.
2. The craps table at Slots-a-Fun, a dumpy little clip joint outside of Circus Circus on the north Strip. This table sits right at the door-less entrance, has $3 minimums (with bad 2x odds, but who cares?) and if you can get on the west side of it, you can look out on Las Vegas Boulevard as all sorts of intersting slices of humanity pass by. I was there last August, and there was a group of frat boys having a fabulous time at the table, along with a gambling junkie who hauled along her kids. She made her kids wait outside, just a few legal feet away, while she gambled away what probably was the rent for that month. I tried to have fun with the frat boys and ignore the junkie, although that’s the problem with the north strip in general — it’s where dreams and dreamers go to die. Still, with the right crowd, I love this table.
3. Anything involving the El Cortez. There are people who have gone to Vegas every year for decades, and they still haven’t been to downtown’s El Cortez, which has a loveable bunch of customers who range from bargain hunters to dangerous psychotics. It has a fine cheap craps table and is a fine and lovely dive — at least, it is when it’s not too dark outside. That two-block walk from the ElCo back to the Fremont Street Experience can be the longest walk on the planet at the wrong time of day.
4. Big Elvis. Google him.
5. The diner in the back of the Barbary Coast. The BC won’t be there much longer — it’s a too-small-for-modern-standards hotel with a smoky little casino at the best gambling corner on Planet Earth — and I have had many a good meal in the rear diner over the years. I think I’ve paid for about half of them and the BC has been generous enough to provide me with the rest.
