Where I Was This Weekend

The photo below should give you an idea of where I was this weekend:

Click the photo to see a larger version.

That’s the sign for the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. I was in Vegas, but I stayed at the Mirage. What it lacks in dirty girls, mud wrestling and bikini bull riding, it makes up for by still having cold beer and being considerably less skanky.

I was there for a family vacation weekend to celebrate my mother-in-law’s birthday with Wendy, her mom, her dad, her brother and his grilfriend and her aunt and uncle. I’m at the age where vacationing with family is enjoyable again, and having recently come from a quick trip to Ireland where I caught up with my mom and sister and several cousins and aunts and uncles at my cousin Kara’s wedding, the past few weeks have been tiring but fun.

Recommended

While the highlight of the trip was celebrating the birthday of the other woman I call “Mom”, most of you readers would probably view the highlights of the trip to Vegas as…

We had the big birthday dinner on Friday night at the craftsteak steak house, located in the MGM Grand Hotel. craftsteak is part of Tom Colicchio’s family of restaurants under the “craft” name and follows the philosophy currently being espoused by the better Food Network chefs: prepare food simply, but do so extremely well. The restaurants use ingredients from specialty providers and small family farms.

I started the meal with an excellent vodka-and-limoncello martini. As an appetizer, I had the heirloom tomato salad, which was made with slices of twelve different types of small-farm-grown tomatoes ranging in size from a cherry tomato to grapefruit-sized and ranging in colour from purple to yellow, dressed in simple herbs and a wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil dressing. Wendy’s starter was a very delicious corn soup; while most corn chowders taste like cream soup flavoured with corn, the predominant taste of this soup was very fresh, very sweet corn. I plan to have it the next time I visit Vegas.

My main course was a 16-ounce cut of grass-fed sirloin, cooked medium rare. It was a very good cut of meat, deliciously prepared and unhindered by fancy sauces or too much spice. Wendy had the 10-ounce bison, also medium rare,. I had a bite, and it was also quite good. We selected a number of side dishes to share; my favourites were the assortment of mushrooms (hen of the woods, chanterelles and oyster mushrooms), sweet corn and grilled maui onions.

For dessert, I chose the ice cream sandwich, which was actually two sandwiches of homemade vanilla ice cream between two homemamde chocolate chip cookies. It may seem a bit prosaic to those of you who like their desserts a little more frou-frou, but these were really good ice cream and cookies made by a very good dessert chef.

On Saturday night, we saw the new Cirque du Soleil show titled Love. This show uses the music of the Beatles as the basis for the Cirque du Soleil acrobatics and special effects that we’ve all come to know and love. Having seen a number of Cirque shows over the years, I’d put this one in the top three and would also recommend it to rock fans for their first Cirque show. To my boss Ken, who’s going to vegas in a couple of weeks and hates gambling even more than I do: go see this show.

For more details about Love, see this Rolling Stone piece and this National Public Radio report.