Casino Royale is a small 152-room casino-motel with a fantastic location at dead-center Strip, on the east side between the Venetian and Harrah's and directly across from the Mirage.
The building has been in existence since the 1950s, when it opened as Frank Musso's Restaurant. Musso was a partner in the famous Hollywood eatery, the Musso and Frank Grill, which has been around since 1919 and is still going strong. George Clooney and Brad Pitt eat at Musso & Frank's in Ocean's Eleven as they hatch their scheme to rob three Las Vegas casinos. The Rat Pack, when they performed next door at the Sands, often ate dinner at Musso's, which put it on the map.
In 1964, Musso's turned into Joey's New Yorker Night Club. In 1978, it became the Nob Hill Casino, with a Travelodge attached. The Nob Hill, which was one of the great low-roller joints on the Strip at the time, was famous for 10-cent roulette; it closed in 1990, but the frilly San Francisco theme endures. Tom Elardi, son of Margaret Elardi who owned the Pioneer casino downtown and the Frontier on the Strip, bought Nob Hill and the Travelodge and reopened them in 1992 as the Casino Royale.
It has a pastel-painted Victorian-style exterior, with Disney-style turrets, gables, and mansard roofs. The busy low-roller casino has 400 slot machines (last time we looked, 8/5 Bonus was the best video poker), a couple of table-game pits ($5-minimum blackjack and 100X odds on craps), a good funbook available to new members of the Club Royale slot club (.33% cashback for reels and .17% for video poker), and a bar that makes the LVA Top Ten on occasion with dollar beers and good drink specials.
The surface parking lot behind the casino is one of the great parking plays in Las Vegas; if you can get a space, it's a 30-second walk to the thick of the Strip. The parking garage behind the lot is kinda small and tight, but still a good option in a pinch.
Casino Royale has four eateries: Noble Roman's Pizza, Subway, Denny's, and Outback Steakhouse upstairs (the window seats have a good view of the Mirage volcano).
The rooms are your standard Travelodge motel accommodations, with your choice of a king or two double beds; they can be a bit noisy from the reveling close by. The rates are among the lowest on the Strip, however, and regularly make our monthly lowest-room-rate list (with weekdays as low as $49, weekends $79), so with its great location, it's a potentially excellent room play. And you can check availability and prices online at casinoroyalehotel.com.
As far as any link to the eponymous James Bond movie is concerned, as far as we know there is none, although the film may have inspired the casino's name (it certainly wasn't the other way around, as some writers have asked us, since the book, by Ian Fleming, was originally published in 1953, pre-dating the naming of the casino by almost four decades). Casino Royale was actually the first novel in Fleming's James Bond series, although the original movie was preceded by several other Bond films. In fact, in spite of the star-studded cast (which included Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Orson Welles, and David Niven, who plays an old Bond who's brought out of retirement), Casino Royale is not generally acknowledged as being an official Bond film, but more of a spoof. The remake, which we haven't yet seen, shares some characters with the old version, but, we understand, introduces a young James Bond who has not yet received his "license to kill," and gambling-wise revolves around the game of poker, rather than baccarat.
