by Merrill Shindler
There was a time when Las Vegas entertained delusions of becoming a fun, wholesome destination for the whole family. Several of the casinos actually went so far as to build theme parks on adjacent property, with rides and entertainment that didn't involve pasties and g-strings. As a notion, it lasted about, oh, a nano-second before the city realized that people who went to Las Vegas with small children didn't spend any time gambling. And in Las Vegas, anything that discourages gambling is removed, with much haste.
The theme parks were replaced with even grander towers and more opulent casinos. And the idea of a family-friendly fun city was replaced with one of the great slogans of modern advertising – the oft-quoted "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."
And yet, in its own odd way, Las Vegas actually is a remarkably entertaining destination for children, despite its overwhelming reality as a Disneyland for Grownups. (In this version of Disneyland, Mickey smokes Marlboros and drinks Ketel One, and Minnie wears a belly shirt, has a pierced navel and an ornate tattoo just above her coccyx.) You just have to be willing to let go of the usual entertainments offered by the town 24/7; when you're there with the kids, the hours are closer to 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with time in between for naps.
I've had a couple of chances over the past few months to see how kid-friendly Las Vegas can be, taking two trips up there with my Vegas-obsessed nine-year-old daughter Sarah. Sarah's interest in Las Vegas began when I returned from a trip, with the obligatory snow globe (it's the snow globe capital of the world) and a sparkly deeply-discounted t-shirt from the about-to-close Celine Dion store in Caesars. I casually mentioned that the adjacent Forum Shops have a show built around talking statues (which look distressingly like characters from the old Clutch Cargo animations, with mouths that don't really move; they just sort of slide around). She became obsessed. She had to see the talking statues. Not as much as she had to see Hannah Montana. But they were high on the list.
And so, when a window of opportunity opened for a daddy-and-daughter trip in the week between Christmas and the New Year (though leaving before New Year's Eve, when Las Vegas turns into a bacchanal that rivals the orgies of ancient Rome, complete with open-air vomitoriums), Sarah and I were off to Las Vegas for two nights and a day – the perfect amount of time to get a hit of the place, without going into the sort of sensory overload that would leave her talking in tongues.
The first decision that had to be made was whether to fly or to drive. I don't like airports. And though flying to Las Vegas takes just an hour, the rituals of the airports add hours on at either end. The drive, by comparison, is four hours (plus another couple of hours for bathroom breaks, snack breaks, shopping breaks, and stopping to see the always disappointing Giant Thermometer in Baker; it's digital – it would be so much cooler if it were filled with some sort of red liquid). Plus, when you drive, you don't have to worry about packing – you just throw everything into the car. And all the hotels have free valet parking.
The only downside is…four hours across the stinking desert. Which we dealt with easily thanks to the wonders of portable DVD players. While I stared at the blankness of the miles rolling by, she watched a variety of films starring (a younger, pre-rehab) Lindsay Lohan, Hillary Duff and Raven. Occasionally I'd point out some dusty prominence, or a distant dune. I'd either be ignored, or dismissed with a curt "boring." In other words, it was your basic four hour drive with a tween; nothing I could have said was nearly as important as the Jonas Brothers.
I had opted for The Four Seasons, an exceedingly swank property concealed on the upper stories of The Mandalay Bay Resort. There were several reasons for this. First of all, there's no gambling (per se) in The Four Seasons; you want gambling, you go through a locked door into Mandalay. No gambling meant a lot less smoke in the air, and a lot fewer people who had had a snootful – at nine in the morning. Because it was the quiet time just after Christmas, the hotels were all offering discounted rates, so the price was right. And, the hotel had a Kid's Package – kid-friendly soaps and shampoos, Sarah's name spelled out in sponges, free DVD available at the concierge, a kid's menu. Also, it allowed her to feel like a princess – you really do feel like royalty walking into the Four Seasons.
We got into town at about 4 p.m. By 5:30, we were on our way to dinner. Sarah had asked for something fancy. And since we had tickets for the 7:30 performance of Cirque du Soleil's "Mystere" at Treasure Island, I decided on the deeply French Guy Savoy at Caesars. There were a few reasons for this: She had never tried French food before. Guy Savoy offers a small dish tasting menu in the Champagne Bar. And the manager said they would be glad to come up with some dishes a nine-year old might like.
Which she did. Sarah inhaled the Kobe beef sliders. She finished every bite of the risotto with white truffles. And she almost wept when she discovered that we had to leave before she had tasted everything on the dessert cart. Expensive. Indeed, very expensive. But as they say in those MasterCard ads, "Priceless."
"Mystere" went over well, though as one of the first Cirque shows in Las Vegas, it is showing its age a bit; it doesn't have the edge of "Ka" or "O." And anyway, it was a warm-up; we were going to Cirque's Beatles show, "Love," the next night, which had to be good. Even if you closed your eyes, it would be a wonderful show – the Beatles Triumphant.
We were back at The Four Seasons by 9:30. Sarah brushed her teeth, washed her face, put on her jammies, and climbed into bed to watch James and the Giant Peach. And then, it was bedtime for her. And staring out the windows at the lights of Las Vegas time for me. This is the downside of going to Las Vegas with a kid – the sense that there's a lot happening out there, and you only get to see shadows of it, like the inhabitants of Plato's cave. I was asleep by 10:30. In Las Vegas, that may actually be against the law.
The next morning began with breakfast at Bouchon, Thomas Keller's wonderful French bistro high above The Strip in The Venetian. It was a breakfast of croissants and jelly, toast and jam, every bite as perfect as can be. Newspapers hang from wall racks; I checked them out to see if the world had changed in the day I'd been out of Los Angeles. It still seemed to be pretty much the same.
From there, we headed for the Forum Shops to see the talking statues. We waited in a rotunda for the show to begin. And when it did, Sarah looked at me with a pained expression. "They don't look real," she said. "I know," I told her. "It's Las Vegas. Nothing is real." Luckily, there was gelato everywhere. And we soothed our disappointment with the intensely rich double chocolate gelato at Payard in Caesar. As I've found in the past – a little gelato is balm for a lot of hurt.
The rest of the day was filled with -- oh you know -- looking around. We went to Madame Tussaud's at The Venetian, and posed with Tom Cruise and Whoopi Goldberg. We went to the top of the Eiffel Tower at The Paris. We watched the fountain and music show at Bellagio. We had lunch at Sushi Roku (in the Forum Shops) where Sarah discovered she was mad for softshell crabs.
We went back to The Four Seasons, so she could chill for a couple of hours. (If you don't build chill-time into the trip, the little ones will flame out like racers at NASCAR.)
We changed for dinner, but decided we were too full from lunch to have a meal at six. So, instead, we had more gelato. (There's always room for gelato.) Then, we went to see "Love," which was only slightly beyond fabulous. And then, we headed back to The Four Seasons again, for Las Vegas was beginning to become a bit much for Sarah – even on the edge, the input in overwhelming.
The next morning, we had breakfast, loaded the car, and were on the road back to Los Angeles by nine. But before she turned on the DVD player, Sarah gave me an assessment of the trip. She told me she didn't care that the talking statues were a disappointment, for everything else had been so good. She wanted to see "Love" again. She wanted to stay at The Venetian. She also wanted to stay at Mandalay and The Wynn. She wanted to eat at Rao's. She wanted to see the Blue Man Group, and "Mama Mia." And she wanted to go shopping at the outlet malls, of which there are many. She made no mention of slot machines or tattoos. It was a good start.
Merrill Shindler is a restaurant critic, author, and the host of the Radio program "Feed Your Face" heard weekends on 97.1 KLSX |