Sometimes I opine about Las Vegas

10 Vegas Commandments Kat Kinsman

Tasting Table editor-in-chief Kat Kinsman is here to set the record straight: Your notions of Las Vegas as a cesspool of gaudy filth unworthy of your time and money are completely misguided. That’s not to say, of course, that Sin City is without its tawdry temptations. “I lost my vegetarianism on a $3.99 steak-and-egg special at the Tropicana’s coffee shop within an hour of the first time I landed, and I thought I was rolling pretty high.”

Kinsman has been prowling the Strip since 1999, when she says a new era of Vegas dining and drinking began to take shape with the opening of the Bellagio. “I’d argue that it’s turned into one of America’s great culinary destinations, based on sheer number of killer culinary opportunities per square mile. Now some of the world’s finest chefs and bartenders boast outposts that they *gasp* actually show up or cook/mix drinks at on a regular basis—AND mere mortals can get a reservation.”

Based on many years of trial and error, Kinsman gave use the inside scoop on her fool-proof guide for eating and drinking in Las Vegas. With her commandments, you too may experience one of the “sharpest juxtapositions of grotesquerie and bliss possible.”

Get my 10 Vegas Commandments at First We Feast

Sometimes I opine about burgers

First We Feast asked me to weigh in on my bucket-list burger, along with 17 other food world folks:

Kinsman says: “Las Vegas appeals to many of us in large part because of its implied absence of personal responsibility. Bedtime? Irrelevant. Last call? Nonexistent. Moderation? Oh, please. The limit does not exist (save, of course, for your bank balance)—it is bounded only by the scope of your imagination. And wouldn’t you know, it applies to burgers, too.
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Sometimes I write about my favorite cocktail

From the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Gravy quarterly #56:

You will never make my favorite drink incorrectly. I will not allow that to happen. Not in a didactic, bossy, or witchy way—I don’t have printed recipe cards in my purse or the proportions tattooed up my forearm. I’m just fully prepared to enjoy whatever version of a French 75 you’d care to serve me. Life is too short to be doctrinaire about my cocktails or deliberately set myself up for disappointment. At least not when there are bubbles to be drunk.

I have a thing for this drink. It hits all my buttons: tart (usually lemon juice, sometimes lime), sweet (sugar, simple syrup, or orange liqueur), fizzy and fancy (Champagne or a reasonable analogue), strong—and here’s where it gets interesting. By the reckonings of most old-tymey bar books and fellas with with wax-tipped moustaches, the hard booze used can be either gin or Cognac. Either is right, so neither is wrong—and I might as well try plenty of ’em just to make sure. It’s not just because I love to sip a French 75 in the cool of a hotel lobby in a city where I’ve never been before, pair one (or two), with a rare, long weekday lunch that makes me feel like I’ve thieved an hour from the gods, or nurse one at a sleek, bland airport bar as my flight time gets shoved back, and back again.

It’s not just the drink; it’s the conversation and surprise that’s served alongside it, especially at a place where they’re not often ordered. I’m not a jerk, strolling into a beer hall or a honky tonk, demanding my twee little beverage. But if I see the makings on the bar, maybe a lightly abused piece of citrus and a stab at a cocktail list, I’ll take my chances.

Read the rest of I’ll Take My Chances

Sometimes I write about Seymour Britchky

OK, I do frequently, but finally I did so at length for Tasting Table.

You never dine alone in New York. There may be a single place setting, one napkin, a solitary fork trailing through the rustic berry crumble, but there is always a ghost next to you at the table. It’s a small city of infinite souls, constantly writing, erasing and rescribbling its history on top of itself.

As you take a bite of grass-fed steak tartare, you think to yourself, Didn’t this restaurant used to be called something else? I think that’s the chef who worked downtown at . . . where was that? I could have sworn this used to be the bar where . . . remember? Remember?

The details fade. The addresses change. The names get hazy. For two all-too-brief decades, self-appointed restaurant critic Seymour Britchky made it his mission to capture it all in shockingly astute, hilarious, quotable prose before disappearing in his own right to become one of the city’s best-fed (and, essentially, forgotten) ghosts.

Read “Suddenly Seymour Disappeared” at Tasting Table.