Chapter 26 - Quiet, Steaks Sleeping

According to Boy: Two or three times a year Evie and I visit Las Vegas. It seems that all the technical trade associations choose that city for their conventions.
At first, we avoided going to the shows, because we did not like Las Vegas. After a time, however, we decided that we would have to go there for our business.

It took a while, but now we love the city. And the funny thing about it is, neither of us ever gamble. We try to feed twenty dollars into a slot machine; but that’s it—never any more than twenty. On our most recent stay in "Sin City," we were on the plane home when I realized that we had forgotten to contribute our obligatory twenty dollars.

There are several things we really love about Vegas. One of them is the food. We are not really into the buffets. We would never get our money’s worth, because neither of us really eats with quantity in mind. We have our favorite restaurants—mostly Italian. We always make the circuit, eating in each of them at least once, sometimes more, depending on the length of our stay.

While it is not actually a restaurant, we always get a delicious crepe and a bottle of cider at a little café in the Paris Hotel. We love Paris, and that little shop is the closest we can get to the real thing without sitting on a stuffy plane for six hours.

Then, of course, there is our favorite place of all in Las Vegas. That is New York New York—the hotel. We always stay there, if possible. Recently

one of our daughters got married at the MGM in Las Vegas. Even then, we chose to stay across the street at New York New York. Sometimes I think I like the feel of walking through the shops in that hotel even better than walking through the Village. That might have something to do with my getting older.

There is a tremendous deli in the hotel, with long lines just like at our favorite deli in New York. We always have them make us a sandwich.
Then, as the subject of this chapter would suggest, there is a steak house in the middle of the hotel shops that features the aging of steaks. It is called Gallagher’s. Every time (and I do mean every time) Evie and I walk by this place in the hotel, we comment about the little shop in the Village that we walked by every day that featured aging steaks in the window.

For the most part, Evie and I try to eat healthy foods. To us, that means we do not have red meat every day. Finally, however, after sensing the dry-aging steaks in the window of Gallagher’s calling out to us, we went in and ordered. The only word I can think of to describe the experience: "unbelievable." We did go in a little early in the evening, so we would have plenty of time to walk off the calories. But the experience was great, and we will likely do it again.

After we had finished the meal, Evie and I both wondered why, when living in the Village all those years, we never bothered to stop in and have one of those dry-aged steaks we walked by twice a day. We would get all dressed up on a Friday night, and take a taxi uptown to some French or Italian restaurant we had read about. But, we never entered the door of that original dry-aged steakhouse in the Village.

In fact, we are not even sure that it was a Gallagher’s—it could have been some other restaurant. Or, it might have been a store selling dry-aged beef. I am not sure. I am certain, however, that at the time it seemed to us to be unsanitary. We would study the steaks hanging there to note identifying characteristics of the individual steaks, then we would check to see when that particular steak would be removed and replaced. But it never entered our minds that we might actually eat some of that meat. It just did not seem right to us that someone would put steak in anything other than a refrigerator. That’s why our interest ended right after we had passed the window. Our loss.

We are now making up for our 1969 paranoia. Gallagher’s in Las Vegas is becoming one of our regular haunts.