eCityZen

Eating Las Vegas

August 30th, 2007 | by antoine |
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In a city where over the top means you’ve only just begun and too much isn’t half enough, the Vegas buffet takes pride of place.

This isn’t fancy-schmancy dining – where you get a dime-sized nibble of salmon topped with a sprig of watercress and squirts of four different-coloured sauces for $72.

This is the sweet smell of excess – industrial eating in all its belly-busting, butt-ballooning glory. Stack a couple of plates on each arm, grab a shovel and dig in.

“From 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., we get about 3,500 people through here,” says Gabe Zapata, the manager for Flavors buffet at Harrah’s.

“That’s about 1,100 people for breakfast, about 1,000 for lunch and around 1,400 for dinner. On holiday weekends or when NASCAR is in town, we get about 4,000 people per day.”

Buffets are everywhere in Vegas – ranging from the fabulous to the merely filling.

And, even in this era of the celebrity chef, the buffets’ tried-and-true formula of a vast array of food and relatively reasonable prices, is still a winner with the guests and an important draw for a casino.

“The first question people ask me is `Where do I catch the bus (back to the airport), and the second one is `Where’s the buffet?’,” says Jamie Nielsen, Harrah’s public relations manager.

That’s why buffet managers are always trying to get the edge on the competition with fancier fare and more lavish presentations. And, in true Vegas style, that sometimes means going to extremes.

“We did something we called `Buffet Boot Camp’,” says Zapata. “All the top buffet operations people were put in one room where we spent 28 hours over two days coming up with all sorts of ideas. Wild ideas … things like eyeball tacos.”

That would be real cow eyeballs.

“That’s East Coast,” says Zapata. “I remember this one lady who made them at a stand on a streetcorner in New York and people would line up for miles to get them.”

While you probably won’t be seeing eyeball tacos anytime soon, you get the point … there’s no holds barred in this battle of the bulge.

As the specialty room chef at Harrah’s, it’s Debbi Lewis’s job to pull off the logistic marvel that is a typical Vegas buffet spread. Born in New Jersey, she decided early on that a culinary career was in her future. She honed her skills at her folks’ hot dog stand after the family moved to Florida, graduated from culinary school, has taken courses with the CIA (Culinary Institute of America), and climbed the restaurant ranks, from dishwasher to executive chef.

She brings all those skills to bear as she marshals the resources – human and alimentary – in the Flavors operation.

A typical day begins early, with the first cooks arriving around 5 a.m. to start preparing the breakfast foods.

“Cooking the bacon alone is a huge task,” Lewis says. “We have one guy and all he does is cook bacon … that’s his shift, eight hours a day cooking bacon.”

Other staffers start in on batch preparation – large quantities of soups, sauces and gravies – while the bakers stoke up the ovens to make mountains of fresh bread, buns, muffins, cookies and other desserts.

“Our biscuits are made fresh every 20 minutes,” says Lewis. “Sometimes we have trouble keeping up with them because they go so fast.”

At any given time, there are 18 to 22 cooks at work in the Flavors kitchen, along with a small army of servers making sure that everybody has drinks and plates are cleared away from the tables when diners go up for seconds … and thirds, and …

Shifts overlap so there’s no down time, and it can get hectic, Lewis says, but everybody works together to maximize quality and quantity.

“Our staff is all very proud of what they do,” says Lewis. “I use a lot of their ideas; that gives them the feeling that they’ve really contributed and that’s extremely important.”

That input helps to guarantee that the menu never gets boring. While there are some stick-to-your-ribs staples that no buffet would dare omit – fried chicken and mashed potatoes, for example – they try to put a new spin on things, from world cuisines to making the best use of local produce.

“Our suppliers will tell us, for example, what fish they have this week, or what are their best vegetables,” says Lewis, “and we’ll adapt our menu to suit that.”

And, as the person responsible for customer satisfaction and optimum use of her food budget – which tallies up to $ 1/2million per month – Lewis has a foolproof method for keeping track of what works and what doesn’t.

“I look in the trash,” she says. “If I see a lot of any one dish in there, I know there’s a problem that we have to address.”

Nothing they can’t handle, though, along with other concerns such as accommodating people with dietary restrictions like intolerance for MSG or salt, or sugar-free options for diabetics, or if, even among all those choices, you just want something that you don’t see.

“Our staff is trained never to say no,” Lewis says proudly. “You can get just about whatever you want.”

And isn’t that what Vegas is all about?