Question of the Day - 16 September 2014

We checked out the "Dining" listings on our site and found a total of 1103 live records in the database, which would equate almost exactly (with an excess of just 2.6 restaurants!) with the ability to eat three meals a day at three different venues for a three-year period, if everything remained completely static. This is not the total number of restaurants in Las Vegas for several reasons; however, it's probably a decent ballpark figure to work with. It includes:

• All restaurants housed within casinos, with the exception of Buffets, which we list separately, and fast-food outlets (we list collectively under "Food Court," if one is present.)
• We don't list fast-food restaurants outside of casinos (with the odd exception, like In-N-Out Burger, due to its cult status, or the 24-hour Viva! McDonald's on the Strip).
• We do include some of the more upscale or popular chains, like Outback Steakhouse (especially if they cater to special dietary needs, which Outback does with both gluten-free and calorie-conscious menus, plus it's very kid-friendly and carries large-print menus for the vision-impaired). We generally include only one listing, however, which is always the casino-based venue if one exists, with the various other area addresses included under that single entry. Hence, our database does not reflect that there are seven Outbacks, or five Metro Pizzas, in the Vegas Valley.
• We confess to having -- at least for the time being -- given up on the attempted task of listing an up-to-date reckoning of all the current food trucks operating on the Vegas Valley circuit. We put up a valiant effort for a good couple of years or more, but have found that with name-changes, openings and closings, seasonal trucks, mechanical breakdowns, and other variables, this task is as thankless and futile as trying to herd cats. Hence, we do not pretend that this portion of our Dining section is currently comprehensive or up-to-date. In fact, we recommend you simply ignore it for now and we'll get back to it when we can, but you can estimate that there are probably around 30 of them.

When it comes to the ratio of openings to closings, there has been a seismic shift across the past few years. Judging by a recent perusal of foodie blog EaterVegas' "Certified Open" feature, which shines a light on some of the smaller new-restaurant arrivals around town, combined with the contents of our own email "in" box and updates in the monthly LVA newsletter, we'd estimate that there's a new restaurant or cafe debuting every one to three days, which our gut tells us well exceeds the current closure rate. If we had to take a stab at answering your question right now, we'd estimate that you could almost certainly eat for about four years without risk of restaurant duplication.

This is a complete reversal of what was going on at the height of the Great Recession, when we witnessed a seemingly inexorable tsumani of shutterings, including many major and/or established/hyped players exit the Sin City dining scene over a three-or-so-year period. As a reminder, these included the likes of: Alex; Ruth's Chris; Chinois; Fellini's; Capozzoli's; Cafe Heidelberg; Daniel Boulud Brasserie; Rosemary's; BOA Steakhouse; Macayo's Mexican Kitchen; Bradley Ogden; Andre's; Al Dente; Tony Roma's; Rm Upstairs; Gardunos; La Scala; Seablue; Beso; The Tillerman; Corsa Cucina; Stratta; Les Artistes; Trader Vic's; Switch; Carluccio's Little Italy; Firefly Tapas (a total of three closures, though not all due to economic factors); Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba; Coachman's Inn; Kokomo's; Michael Mina's Knobhill Tavern; P.J. Clarke's; Hachi; Rare 120; Nora's Wine Bar & Osteria; Restaurant Charlie and Bar Charlie; Ciao Ciao; Lynyrd Skynyrd BBQ & Beer; McFadden's; Tilted Kilt; B.B. King's; American Burger Works; Woo; CatHousep; Roy's; Valentino; Circo; La Scala; and Bally's Steakhouse, to name just some.

Of course, several of these venues have been reborn as new incarnations -- Switch is now Andrea's, Bally's Steakhouse has morphed into BLT Steak, Rick Moonen's upstairs spot at Mandalay Place was reinvented as Rx Boiler Room, and P.J. Clarke's is about to reopen as a second Border Grill, for example -- but a good number of the casualties were of a permanent nature.

As a relevant aside, this whole ongoing state of flux, combined with the meteoric ascent of Sin City to the heady heights it has now reached as a more-than-credible dining destination, has led us to a profound rethinking of our approach to covering the Las Vegas restaurant scene. As we come close to the rollout of our new website (yes, it really is happening and is on schedule to be ready before year's end), we will continue to list every significant hotel restaurant, but we're going to narrow our neighborhood-eatery listings, which will be honed to include only our top picks for each genre/style, across the spectrum of price points, where available. (You can eat a great Japanese meal for under $25 or $500+/head, depending on what you're looking for.)

The listings will evolve continually as new places come and old ones go or fall out of favor, but we will not attempt to be comprehensive: Monitoring the Chinatown/Koreatown corridor could almost be a full-time job in itself, with new ramen joints and curry houses opening at a rate that's certainly too rapid for us to keep up with, unless we opt to eat Asian food exclusively for an entire month. We'd rather recommend those places we've tried, and that we know are worthy of referral and open for business, than to send our readers on a wild goose chase out to the 'burbs, only to discover that such-and-such awesome hole-in-the-wall ceased to be open for lunch the previous week. But we digress...

Returning to the question in hand, our earnest consideration of your query has actually prompted us to pose a few pertinent questions of our own:

• When it comes to chains and franchises, would someone need to eat breakfast at all four Blueberry Hills locations to have completed your survey satisfactorily, for example, or could our mystery diner eat one Capriotti's sub and check that whole sandwich chain off the "to-do" list?
• What if a restaurant serves very different menu items for different meals? Could you, or would you be obliged to, eat lunch and dinner at Estiatorio Milos (Cosmopolitan)? Or dim sum and dinner at Ping Pang Pong (Gold Coast)?
• What if there's a genre of food that our hypothetical diner simply can't abide? Would he or she be forced to eat Korean or Cuban regardless of any distaste or allergies, for the sake of completeness? Perhaps that's where the "unlimited resources" come in to play, with the ability to hire a proxy eater when necessary?
• Regardless of whether this quest is numerically feasible, is it physically so? Meaning, if our diner were really to eat three meals a day at three different restaurants, would cardiac arrest likely put an end to this challenge long before he or she ran out of new dining spots, especially bearing in mind that at least one repast along the way would need to be devoured at the Heart Attack Grill?

If there's one person who's living proof that it is somehow possible literally to "Eat Las Vegas" and live to tell the tale, that would be restaurant critic John Curtas, who has been gorging himself and blogging about it for years. So, we'd like to take this opportunity to link to EatingLV.com where, in the absence of a printed 2014 edition of our collaborative restaurant guide Eating Las Vegas, John has taken it upon himself to produce a solo list of Las Vegas' top restaurants. We join him at #29, Chef José Andrés' Bazaar Meat, which just debuted at SLS. Stay tuned for the rest of the "Essential 50"!