Pasties in Las Vegas, But Not the Good Kind
Pasties in Las Vegas, But Not the Good Kind
Imperial Pints Off the Strip
I had been playing cards in the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center for about 72 hours (not straight, but still) when I stumbled out into the late afternoon sunlight with my buddies, in search of food and drink. It was about 100 degrees out.
The thing about Las Vegas that is especially galling to a New Yorker is that you can’t walk anywhere. Or, you can, but it takes 10 times longer than it seems like it should, based on how far X destination in the distance seems to the naked eye. The new SLS Las Vegas, for instance, was the closest other place to our hotel, the all-but-orphaned Westgate—and yet, of an evening, when we decided to walk towards its shimmering white LED lights, it took about 20 minutes all told, even though the place was technically “just across the street.”
That’s why, when a friend suggested we hit the British pasty shop that he had eaten at the night before, we chose to pile into a massive black SUV rather than hoof it in the heat.
I was zonked. Playing cards for that long will do that to you. It’s not really a feeling of tiredness, though, rather just total and utter spent-ness. Like you had $1000 in your brain’s pocket at the start of the weekend, and now all your brain has left is some lint and a button. So I had only a mild sense of “what’s going on here?” in my head as the SUV took us what seemed like way, way off the Strip, into neglected back-alley Vegas.
If you have never been off the Strip, you should go. It’s shocking, especially when seen in quick succession after all the money and electricity going supernova in the middle of the desert.
The strip mall that the restaurant was in was basically dun-colored, with generic white lettering for the shops, which were arrayed in a square around acres of empty asphalt. The storefront we were aimed at did not look promising, announcing “CORNISH PASTY CO” above a tinted glass door that would not have looked out of place fronting a particularly dicey strip club.
Then we went inside, and the place could have been airlifted intact out of hippest Brooklyn. A horseshoe bar river delta’d into a prep area and kitchen, the latter two parts of which looked like the site of a controlled explosion, as sweaty, burly chefs with rolled bandannas tied around their foreheads rapidly constructed, on floured workstations, uncooked cornish pasties—sort of like upright calzones or non-terrible Hot Pockets—from dough and a variety of fillings.
Mercifully—the place was hot and heaving—they also had a half-dozen interesting beers on tap, in three sizes: 14 ounces, a 20-ounce imperial pint, and an insane 34-ounce barbell of a beer. I ordered an imperial pint of the Firestone Union Jack IPA and a Shepherd’s Pie pasty.
There are times when a cold beer is more satisfying than anything else you could possibly drink—more restorative than cold water in the desert—and this was one of those times. With a friend on either side of me at the bar, we cheers’d our beers and I took a long swallow, the cold liquid sloshing into my mouth and hitting the back of my throat like a hoppy flavor bomb. Soon our pasties arrived—a massive, steaming slab of ground minted lamb, peas and carrots, onions, cheese, and potatoes for me—and we drained our beers and ordered another round.
Then I noticed the emergency vehicles that had begun to collect in the parking lot: the telltale reds, whites, and blues of fire trucks, cop cars, and ambulances. One of the chefs ducked his head out from the kitchen to look out the front door and said, “Is our building on fire again?”
Sure enough, somewhere within the strip mall was on fire. We started to smell smoke and, not long after, firefighters in full protective gear hustled into the restaurant and back into the kitchen, where they jammed their axes up into the drop ceiling, trying to find the fire, before running back out again. Yet still we ate and drank on.
Then the firefighters came back in and ordered everyone out, in that kind of booming command voice you rarely ever hear unless some legitimate shit is going down. People began abandoning their tables, and soon we found ourselves back out in the hot Vegas night, now become a four-alarm fantasia, an emergency-dappled mirror image of the spectacle on the Strip.
The chefs had jumped ship, too. One particularly felonious-looking cook exited the building and immediately swung his leg over the saddle of his beat-up, low-slung Harley and kick-started the engine to life, roaring off helmet-less into the night. Eventually we departed on foot, buzzed a bit from alcohol and excitement, kicking rocks out of the parking lot as the lights receded behind us.
We found ourselves on a back street, our hotel a shimmering white mirage in the indeterminate distance, looking like a spaceship. We charted our course by it, walking down dark, all-but-empty streets and passing intermittent spouts of water shooting from black tubing, watering nothing but parched stones.