Greetings from Las Vegas. This is Day 5 of our trip report, covering Saturday, October 15, 1999
Earthquake? What earthquake?
We awoke this morning to news of the California earthquake that was also felt by most people in the Las Vegas Valley. Not us, though, as we slept right through it. I'm a heavy sleeper, but it appears that not everyone in the Henderson/Green Valley area was affected by the quake, as we've talked to a number who, like us, were not awakened by the temblor.
In late morning we drove over to The Venetian to meet friends for lunch. This was our first visit to this new Strip resort, and we were immediately impressed by its lavishness and attention to detail.
I first enjoyed dim sum more than 30 years ago when I was living and working on Taiwan. A Chinese tradition with origins more than 2,000 years old, dim sum are appetizer-sized portions of food selected from rolling carts as they are pushed among the tables. Working near Boston's Chinatown as I do, I manage to make it over there with colleagues once or twice a month to enjoy dim sum lunches.
Many on-line folks have asked where to find good dim sum, or just good Chinese food, in Las Vegas. Having eagerly awaited our visit to Royal Star at The Venetian, I can unequivocally suggest that you need search no farther than this exquisite restaurant on The Venetian's Restaurant Row.
Royal Star is the creation of noted restaurateur Kevin Wu, and if you are from the West Coast, you may be familiar with his Royal Star in Santa Monica. The Las Vegas incarnation offers a full menu of Hong Kong-style dishes, but it is the dim sum service that rules every day from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The restaurant's décor is simple but stunning. The design invokes a serene elegance that blends natural materials such as shimmering slate floors and dark color accents in veneers of natural wood. Chinese artifacts complete the fusion of contemporary design with traditional art in an 8,000-square-foot space that seats about 200.
Our luncheon companions were our friends Judy and Joe Fitzgibbons from Virgina, along with Joe's mother Rita from Massachusetts. As we dined, I was able to ask questions of restaurant manager Tom Chan, who provided me with a packet of materials describing the creation of the restaurant and the special group dinners and banquets Royal Star offers.
For those not experienced with dim sum meals, here's how it works: Each rolling cart contains a small variety of dim sum. The server removes the covers from the dishes and shows the contents to the diners, explaining the items as necessary. When each selection is placed on the table, the server rubber-stamps a cumulative slip that remains on the table during the meal. There are three price levels for Royal Star's dim sum: $3.00, $4.00 and $5.50. When the meal is over, an employee counts the number of stamp impressions for each price and totals them together with tax for the final amount.
Royal Star offers more than 50 varieties of dim sum, and here they are:
At the $3.00 level: crisp spring roll; golden mashed potato dumpling; crisp glutinous rice dumpling; pan-fried Chinese scallion cake; turnip cake; mashed taro cake with diced chicken; BBQ pork puffed pastry; seafood puffed pastry; mini chicken pie; curry beef triangle; Chinese radish and Scallion pastry; shrimp stuffed eggplant; baby leeks; pan-toasted chicken and vegetable; crisp fried shrimp and cilantro; baked mini egg tart; sweet sesame ball; Chinese steamed cake; pineapple puffed pastry; egg cream steamed bun; sago cake.
At the $4.00 level: shrimp har gow; scallop dumpling; spinach dumpling; cilantro fish dumpling; chow chu dumpling; pot sticker; pork shiu mai; chicken dumpling in soup; medley of vegetable dumpling; BBQ pork bun, baked or steamed; chicken and mushroom steamed bun; sweet Cantonese sausage bun; mini translucent vegetable steamed bun; small meat dumpling (mini steamer) bun; Chinese watercress beef ball; stuffed tofu pocket; wind-dried tofu skin roll; vegetable knot; black bean spare rib; chicken feet (gold grabbling); chilled mango pudding; chilled coconut and red-bean pudding.
At the $5.50 level: rice paper sesame shrimp roll; seaweed shrimp roll; crisp string giant shrimp fry; lotus-leaf chicken; shrimp pork rice noodle; BBQ pork rice noodle; beef rice noodle; mushroom rice noodle.
As we chose dish after dish, I was enjoying the eating too much to take careful
note of which ones we had from the above list, but we sampled about 15 different
choices. Each item was delightful, and as tasty as the best dim sum I've eaten
anywhere else. If you like Chinese food, especially dim sum, you will flip cartwheels
over Royal Star after you've dined there.
When tax and gratuity were figured in, our total cost for the dim sum lunch was $24 per person, and we had to work hard to run up that relatively modest bill.
After bidding our friends adieu, Roz and I explored The Venetian's interior spaces and continued to be impressed. The place was very busy on this weekend day, including the casino. The canal with its gondoliers does not look out of place, either, but we'd have no trouble finding a better way to spend $20 than taking a short boat ride to nowhere.
Before too long, we were amazed to find ourselves face to face with Don King and Brad Pitt. Well, their likenesses, anyway, as well as about 80 others in Madame Tussaud's Celebrity Encounter at The Venetian.
Let me tell you, folks, this attraction is much better than I ever expected it to be, and is worth every penny of the $12.50 adult admission charge. The mannequins, many of which were personally posed for by the celebrities, are so lifelike, even standing inches away from them as you are permitted to do, that you will be amazed. They are grouped by categories in several viewing areas, with entertainment superstars in one area, sports figures and rock stars in their own rooms, Vegas legends in another, etc. Along the way there is a special room where photos and video are used to show the wax-figure modeling process, including photos of celebrities being measured for their figures. Then, at the end of the exhibit, visitors go into a small theater where an enjoyable eight-minute film capsulizes the history of Las Vegas.
Madame Tussaud's Celebrity Encounter features several nice touches that combine to make it a good value for the money. As you may have heard, visitors are permitted to pose for photos with the mannequins, and are even allowed to touch them. The height of each figure is exactly as it is (or was) in real life, and part of the fun is the surprise of discovering just how tall -or short- some of your favorites are or were. In the areas featuring musical artists, snippets of each performer's recorded music are played on a non-stop basis. And I also liked the fact that the written biographical summaries next to each figure do not sugar-coat some of the negative aspects of their lives, but are written objectively. For instance, do you know how many times talk-show host Larry King has been married?
Allow about 60 to 90 minutes to tour Madame Tussaud's Celebrity Encounter.
And now, for your reading pleasure, here is a fairly complete list of the celebrities you will find enshrined in wax at Madame Tussaud's. I have listed them in the approximate order in which you will encounter them and I apologize in advance for any misspellings.
We thought many of the figures were exactly as we know, assume or imagine them to be, and we thought a few didn't look at all like our image of them. In the list that follows, the ones we thought were uncannily accurate are in ALL CAPS, and the ones we thought were not that good are all in lower case, including first letters.
WOLFGANG PUCK and his restaurant-designer wife, BARBARA LAZAROFF; JERRY SPRINGER; BRAD PITT; Jodie Foster; Eddie Murphy; Cybill Shepard; hugh grant; Bette Midler; John Bon Jovi; Luciano Pavarotti; Barbara Streisand; Naomi Campbell; mel gibson; Sean Connery; WHOOPI GOLDBERG; AL ROKER (fantastic); Gerard Depardieu; Joan Collins; Cher; Michael Crawford; Oprah Winfrey; ELTON JOHN; Elle MacPherson; sylvester stallone; Meryl Streep; HARRISON FORD; LARRY KING; Ivana Trump; REV. ROBERT SCHULLER; Muhammed Ali; Evander Holyfield; DON KING; WILLIE SHOEMAKER; Young Babe Ruth; Martina Hingis; John McEnroe; JOE MONTANA; Little Richard; STEVIE WONDER; tina turner; GLORIA ESTEFAN; Michael Jackson; Madonna; Jimi Hendrix.
Pause to catch my breath.
James Brown; Bono; Bruce Springsteen; mick jagger; Frank Sinatra as a young man; SAMMY DAVIS JR.; Shirley MacLaine; Marilyn Monroe; Judy Garland; LIZA MINNELLI; dean martin; TONY BENNETT; joan rivers; Bob Hope; GEORGE BURNS; Johnny Mathis; Neil Sedaka; SIEGFRIED & ROY; Glen Campbell; kenny rogers; Tammy Wynette; TOM JONES; Liberace; Shirley Bassey; engelbert humperdinck; LANCE BURTON; Debbie Reynolds; LOUIS ARMSTRONG; ELLA FITZGERALD; Elvis; Elizabeth Taylor; PAUL NEWMAN & JOANNE WOODWARD.
Ready for an early supper, and not wanting anything as filling or elaborate as our wonderful dim sum lunch, we drove over to The Olive Garden on East Flamingo. We enjoy this restaurant, and we always seem to have a wait to be seated. I had veal cutlet (hold the cheese) with spaghetti. Rosalyn ordered Chicken Capri, which is boneless chicken breast over angel-hair pasta in a red-pepper sauce. This was accompanied, of course, by Olive Garden's salad bowl and soft garlic bread sticks. About $26 for this meal.
Next we started for the Las Vegas Hilton to see Wynonna's closing performance. On the way, we stopped at a Barnes & Noble store to buy a book on southwest and desert landscaping, part of the process of preparing for the landscaping of our new home. In the book, the author recommends three places in Southern Nevada to see examples of desert flora and landscaping: the Southern Nevada Water District's Desert Demonstration Gardens; the expansive cactus garden at Ethel M; the demonstration garden on the UNLV campus. We were pleased to note that we've visited all these gardens and have recommended them in previous trip reports.
We reached the Las Vegas Hilton with a couple of hours to spare, so finally, on our fifth full day in town, I did a little bit of gambling. First I dropped $100 on a dollar double bonus video poker machine, but then I made that back and more playing blackjack for about an hour. So we ended our first gambling session $150 on the plus side.
As many know, the Wynonna of today is not the Wynonna of the days performing with her mother Naomi as The Judds. Before the show began, the announcer predicted she'd rock the house, and it was truly a kick-ass show. Wynonna was preceded by a pleasant but bland singer-guitarist named Kevin Welch, who did a six-song set before a 15-minute intermission. Then Wynonna came out and blasted everyone out of their seats with a loud, bluesy, straight-ahead performance that was as much rock as country. This girl has attitude, and her band and three backup singers helped rock the joint. It was also great to see how she handled the throngs of fans who besieged the stage bearing flowers and gifts.
Finally a pleasant drive back to our Sun City Anthem villa.
One last note: Those of us who have taken the drive up East Bonanza to the Mormon Temple at the base of Sunrise Mountain know that this site offers one of the most spectacular views of the lights of Las Vegas, spread out below like a twinkling carpet. For a different and almost equally spectacular panorama looking from the south toward the Strip and the rest of Las Vegas by night, try driving to the top of Eastern near the Seven Hills and Anthem developments in Henderson. All you have to do is cross Eastern at Lake Mead (just off Exit 5 from I-215), and enjoy the ride as Eastern gradually elevates. When you get as high as the road will take you, take in the view and prepare to have your breath taken away. - There's a lot of construction going on in this area, and I'm sure many of the vantage points for enjoying this view will soon be gone forever.
--Best wishes from David …in Las Vegas
