Category: Las Vegas Advisor

Located at the Horseshoe entrance to restaurant row right off the casino in the walkway to Paris, Flavortown is a large sports bar with at least a dozen small TV screens scattered around the walls, a big video wall with three screens, each larger than the one next to it, and a 28-seat egg-shaped bar in the center. Ordinarily, a celebrity-chef’s overpriced restaurant on the center Strip, even one showing sports all day and night, wouldn’t interest us. But Flavortown is currently promoting a unique deal that caught our attention.

It’s not a buffet, but it is an all-you-can-eat brunch served Mon.-Thurs. from 8 am to 2 pm. You mix and match off the menu and keep eating until you bust. The starting price is $19.99 for bacon and eggs, biscuits and gravy, French toast, Caesar and house salads, chili, and brisket mac ‘n cheese. You can add on avocado toast, a club sandwich, or chicken and waffles for $5 and steak and eggs (seven-ounce strip) for $10. It’s another $29.99 for bottomless mimosas, Bloody Marys, and margaritas. 

Since you eat as much as you can, the diner next to us ordered three eggs instead of two with his steak and avocado toast, the latter two adding $15 for a total of $34.99. (In the photos, those are potatoes that look kind of like fried shrimp.)

At 11 a.m. on a Thursday, it was a half-hour wait for a table, but a few seats were open at the 28-seat bar, which has video poker machines in front of every other seat. (Careful, these are the worst pay schedules possible, 6/5 JoB and Bonus in all denominations from nickels to $5. And par for the course, people were playing.)

Initially, service was non-existent. Two bartenders split waiter duties and the guy next to us got a menu, ordered, and was served by the other bartender in the first 10 minutes, while our order wasn’t even taken for 15. Once it was, we waited another 15 minutes for the food — (bad) luck of the draw …

The eggs, which come without toast, and French toast arrived at the same time. It was all what you’d expect from a sports bar; the French toast was one inch-thick slice with a little bacon, a couple of hunks of caramelized banana, and good maple syrup.

When we arrived at 11, the place was packed and most people were ordering breakfast; by the time we left around noon, Flavortown had thinned out considerably and people were now ordering lunch. Typical for a sports bar, it’s big food, definitely quantity over quality. And though it’s nice to know you can eat eat eat, most appetites will be satisfied with just a couple of the offerings, either breakfast or lunch.

All in all, it’s a good gimmick and not a bad deal during the week at center Strip. With tax and a tip, we were out of there for $25.

We hadn’t valet parked in Vegas in decades, but on our visit to Gjelina at the Venetian, we were accompanied by a disabled person, so we opted for the convenience.

There were no surprises. A big sign as you pull into the porte cochere says, “Valet Parking $40 a Day.” Self-parking is $20 anyway, so we bit the bullet; the extra $20 for the well being of our guest was certainly worth it.

You drop off your trusty steed in the usual fashion: pulling up to the valet area under the portico in front, giving up your key, and receiving a claim ticket. But when you come out to retrieve your car, you do so at the Valet Pick-Up Kiosk.

You follow the few simple instructions on the screen. First, you scan the QR code on your ticket.

Then the credit card screen comes up. The arrow points to the card reader, where you pay by swiping, inserting, or tapping.

The last screen tells you that your car is on its way. You don’t have to talk to anyone; no one is there to talk to anyway, since the one or two valet attendants are busy running cars from the garage to the portico. Ours took another 15 minutes to show up on a Wednesday afternoon around 2:30.

With the $5 tip, parking at Venetian added $45 to our lunch tab at Gjelina.

Miracle Eats opened a couple of months ago with six outlets and one on the way. It was originally announced as a “food collective” and was assumed to be a food hall, but as you can see in the above image, it turned out as a run-of-the-mill food court.

That said, it’s obviously brand new, large and with lots of places to sit, and tastefully done with a fair amount of artificial foliage and well-designed lighting. There are also some nice touches, such as neon signs.

You first come to Chipotle, the only one of the seven eateries with inside seating; all the others are counters and seating in the court. Irv’s Burgers, the second in Las Vegas after the first, in the Eat Your Heart Out food hall at Durango, is opening soon.

Lobster Me (with an unfortunate support beam right in front of the sign) moved from its original location in the mall with a new look and updated menu.

Dave’s Hot Chicken has two other locations in the valley, one way out on West Sahara in Summerlin and the other two doors up from the Miracle Mile Shops in the Grand Bazaar at the Horseshoe.

Even more curious is Fat Tuesday, which has a second location in Miracle Mile, plus one each in the Grand Bazaar, MGM Grand, Harmon Corner, Mandalay Bay, Casino Royale, and on and on.

This is Tacotarian’s fifth location in Las Vegas; we reviewed it in the November issue of LVA.

The one that most concerns us is Carnegie Pizza, straight from Times Square in Manhattan, at which we have a great Member Rewards Online coupon. We used it last month and you can read our review here.

Miracle Eats was originally announced to have 10 food outlets, including Fat Sal’s sandwich shop, with one other location at Neonopolis, but other than the space for Irv’s Burgers, we didn’t see where three more eateries might go. If they’re still planned, we’ll let you know.

Our latest Member Rewards Online coupon is a BOGO at Carnegie Pizza in Miracle Eats at the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood. The coupon has two tiers: Diamond members ($3 a month) get 2-for-1 slices; full Platinum members can get the two slices or two whole pies for the price of one.

As you can see from the menu, slices start at $7 (cheese) and top out at $9 (spciy pepperoni, chicken), so with the coupon, you’re looking at $3.50-$4.50 per, which is good and cheap for good and center Strip. Big eight-slice pies are $40-$50; additional toppings are $1.25-$1.50 per slice and $5-$6 per pie.

To test the coupon and try the pizza, we brought two whole pies, a Margherita and a red pepper, mushroom, and sausage, back to the office. Classic New York pizza, the two pies lasted a couple of days and reheated perfectly in the air fryer (five minutes do the trick and even the crust got crispy again).

You pay for the more expensive pie, which for us was $52 (two extra toppings). With tax and a tip, the total bill came to just under $65. A little pricey, perhaps, but we were still out the door at $32.70 per 18-inch pie. Heck, a Domino’s 14-inch pepperoni pizza is $20 and these are 22% larger. We weren’t disappointed with quantity, quality, or price. The BOGO slices are a steal and if you have a big party to feed or another reason to consume two pies, you can save most of or the whole price of a Platinum membership with this MRO.