Buzz BBQ

VERDICT: Cold, heavily smoke-flavored food served in a crappy atmosphere.

I had to beg and beg to go to this restaurant.  Greg just wouldn't give in.  He just "knew" that Buzz BBQ would be crappy, just like his bad experiences at other BBQ places in town like Memphis BBQ and the now closed Buckingham BBQ.  Anyway, Buzz BBQ won the Las Vegas Review-Journal Poll Best BBQ of Las Vegas in 2008 and 2009, so how bad could it be?

After eating at Buzz, you realize what a sham these awards are.

By the way, Taco Bell won for best Mexican when I first moved to Vegas.

I finally broke down Greg's resistance with the help of his mother.  We pulled out all the stops.  We even accused him of not wanting to try anything new; something that he relishes to do to me.  I didn't even care if it turned out to be bad.  At least, I would have gotten to try it and get rid of the nagging feeling that I'm missing out on something great.

Right when I opened the door, Greg's eyes seemed to say, "I told you so".  The atmosphere was just hideous.  The walls were painted red and there was a rustic, giant patio arbor covering most of the restaurant. It was brightly lit with cheap-looking tables and brown 70's banquet chairs.

Nothing says cheap like a banquet chair.

Let me break away here and tell you of one of my pet peeves.  I hate it when there is a large, empty restaurant and the hostess sits every group right next to each other.  Why do I have to have the inconvenience of being crammed elbow to elbow when there is plenty of space?  Cramming is, of course, what happened.  The hostess decided to put a large party of frat boys right next to us; they even had to pull tables together.  There were at least 10 other tables to choose, but no, people love to crowd.  In the end, it was for the best.  We got to hear one of the frat boys say, "Collard greens is a green".  Another responded, "so, it is an actual vegetable?"  To which, Greg responded to us, "Quite the Mensa meeting going on over there."

There was quite a wait for our food.  Greg and I shared a three meat combo with ribs, brisket, and andouille sausage.  

1.  The food was cold, despite the waitress bringing it out after I heard "order up" from the kitchen.

2.  The only flavoring on the meat was smoke.

3.  The andouille sausage was really just polska kielbasa (if I wanted kielbasa, I would have heated some Hillshire Farms up at home.)

4.  The sides are not even worth the effort to complain about them.

I would feel remiss if I didn't mention Greg's Mother's obsession with real butter.  She always feels insulted when a spread is offered with bread.  After all, she was the one that felt it necessary to bring her own butter to The Tournament of Kings.  Obviously, Buzz BBQ uses a spread instead of butter.  Greg's mother immediately threw it down and declared how they were monsters for trying to deceive their customers.  It really is just another reason out of many to never go to Buzz BBQ again.

The meal ended with a lot of "I told you so" moments.  Greg never did say it though.  I felt like an idiot all by myself.

Update:  Buzz BBQ (at least at the Northwest location) has gone out of business.  

Agave

UPDATE: Now closed for business....color me shocked.

VERDICT: This restaurant looks great, but doesn't deliver good food.

First, I should let you know that I ate here for free.  I used a Groupon that I paid for with credit.  You see every time someone signs up with Groupon through the highlighted links and then ends up buying a Groupon, I get a $10 credit.  Don't click on the ads on my blog, but rather click on the Groupon links.  It's free to join and I have to say that it is a lot of fun too....do it, do it, do it...I want $10.

Anyway, the restaurant itself is impressive although an unfortunate shade of pink.  The unique architecture is further marred by the addition of TV's playing sports over the bar.

I immediately knew that I wasn't going to like the meal by the menus.  The menus have what appears to be a cover made out of copper.  That seems all well and good, but copper is not something you want to touch before eating.  Don't believe me?  Take out a couple of pennies and hold them in your hand.  Now smell your hand.  Gross, huh?  If you have a good sense of smell then you are going to smell this every time you raise your fork to your mouth if you don't wash your hands after handling the menu.  I am of the opinion that if you don't have a good enough sense of smell to notice this then you probably aren't a very good cook.

I decided to go safe.  I got the carne asada burrito.  It was flavorless and the meat was extremely chewy.  The brown beans were dry, undercooked, and bland.  I could only finish a small portion of the burrito before giving up.  I would much rather have Roberto's.  Greg got a taco sampler and found he couldn't finish his tacos either.  While he enjoyed the tacos "Al Pastor" (with pork), he couldn't finish the potato and portabella taco.

I've noticed that the people that like this place tend to talk about the cocktails a lot.  I'm thinking that you have to be drunk to like this place.  This barely missed being on my "Worst of Vegas" list, solely because the chips and salsa were good.

Martinis

UPDATE: Martinis is now out of business. 

VERDICT: Come here to talk about your 6-figure deal, not for amazing food.

I got a Groupon for Martinis.  It cost $15 for $35 worth of food.  I didn't even know where Martinis was, but I saw it was near and thought I would give it a try.  I'm all about the Groupons, I recommend all Vegas people take advantage of them.

First, Greg and I noticed the large amount of "luxury" cars in the parking lot.  I'm talking about cars that aren't bought because they are nice, but rather bought to show wealth.  At least, that is what I think of Mercedes and BMW.  They certainly aren't bought because they don't break down and let's leave it at that.

When we entered at around 6:30, we were faced with a crowded bar area.  I mean packed with loud "successful" people, trying to talk louder than each other, as they discussed about how much money they have in some sort of money-fueled mating ritual.  These were the type of people that use phrases like "six-figure deal", "team building", and "after this, I'm going to the gym".  Greg, of course, wanted to leave immediately, as did I.  However, I didn't want to be stuck with a Groupon that I already paid for.  I didn't want this to be a lesson learned about pre-buying food. (Groupon is great...try it, I get $10 if you use my links and buy something).

Luckily, someone was there to assist us to the dining room, which was separated by a wall with fireplaces from the yuppie-packed bar.  The restaurant area was nice and sufficiently separated from the din.  She said that if we waited around, the live music was going to start later.  This only made us want to finish our meal quickly and leave.

We had the pork and shrimp dumplings.  They were good, but only came with 5 tiny dumplings for a substantial price.  I had the flatbread pizza. Among its toppings were pepperoni, Greek olives, and jalapeños.  I love jalapeños, but with the olives, the pizza was too pickle-y.  I ended up taking them off.  Greg had the shrimp scampi, which he reported was good, but the shrimp was slightly overcooked.

All in all, it was good, not great and a little spendy.  A place to see and be seen, which is just not my scene.

Salad Creations

UPDATE:  Another one bites the dust....This location is out of business

VERDICT: Prepare to barf from either the horrible salad or the outrageous price.

How can you mess up a salad?  Salad Creations will find a way.

This place is weird.  It gave me strange vibes, just like Create did.  There just has to be something about the word "create" that inspires craziness.  I have learned my lesson though and am not going to flat-out call this restaurant a cult....but let's look at the facts.  They serve salads at a salad bar where you aren't allowed to touch anything.  Meat is at a super premium at $2.50 per added serving.  They serve you everything in a generic metal bowl.  Even though they serve everything in a metal bowl, they still only trust the customers with super-small, super-flimsy plastic utensils.

All this that you see before you cost $18.00.

They have this bar set up, where the worker places the food in the bowl for you after you either choose one of the featured salads or choose your own toppings.  Greg got a small Florida Sunshine Cobb for $7 (a large is $9).  A got a large 5 toppings.  The various lettuces are behind the counter in these large hanging bins.  It gives the illusion that they have cut the lettuce fresh.  Perhaps they have, but it tasted like bagged lettuce with the bagged lettuce taste (don't argue with me, I'm a super taster).  All I'm saying is that if it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck, then....   The salads were horrible.  Greg labeled them "casino-grade", which is merely satisfactory only if it comes free with a meal.  

Look at their stupid hats!  Is that Carol Burnett with the mop?!?

They are trying to market themselves as the healthy alternative, but if they use bagged salads they are falling short.  Bagged salad is often contaminated with bacteria and poop.  Salads are not diet food.  A typical salad at Salad Creations almost always has at least 40 grams of fat or more.  It's the dressing that gets you, so order the vinaigrette.  

The urban dictionary actually has an entry for Salad Creations, which includes, "A place where 30 year-old lonely women come to bitch at the employees about how much they weigh."  This speaks wonders on how Salad Creations is preying on health-conscious consumers and consumers with body image problems. 

Don't buy into the Salad Creations lies.  It's unhealthy, bagged crap.

Try the more reasonably priced, Souper Salad.

Original Pancake House at Aliante Station Casino

VERDICT:  New York-style seating (cramped) with over-priced breakfast food, but still good.

UPDATE:  This location is now closed and replaced by a restaurant I've been told is horrid.

I never get to eat breakfast at breakfast places, because they are only open during the hours in which I sleep.  Before you start to think that I'm super lazy, please understand that I worked nights and it would be a daytime equivalent of a restaurant open from 10:00pm to 6:00am.  In other words, this is an operation that was only open while I slept and if you apply heavy-handed philosophy, that means that it didn't really exist....until now.  I'm pleased to announce that I'm daydreaming about quiting my job and have taken to sleeping at night while on hiatus from working.  Greg suggested we go out to breakfast.  This is something that I haven't heard of in seven years.  I jumped on the opportunity.  Although secretly I wanted to go to one of the egg-themed restaurants: Cracked Egg, the Egg and I, or Egg Works.  That's only because I had a dream of eating at a restaurant called "Egg".  I was delighted to learn that there were restaurants with "Egg" in the title upon waking.

The Original Pancake House at Aliante Station Casino is small.  If you don't get in a booth, then you are going to be sitting close to someone that you don't know.  That's fine, but not the best if you are going to break-up, fight, or plan a bank robbery.  Greg and I were not in a fighty mood as we are always in perfect harmony and bank robberies are so white trash.  The seating was not an issue.  I had coffee and it was predictably good; a breakfast place should have good coffee.  I got the bacon lovers special, which seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect I wish I ordered something a little more extravagant.  I got seven pieces of  thick bacon, scrambled eggs and three small pancakes.  The bacon was pretty good, but not the best.  The scrambled eggs were cooked perfectly, which seems easy enough to do.  I have had runny scrambled eggs at other restaurants that I won't name that rhyme with "Lenny's".  In fact, I only order scrambled eggs in restaurants because of the habit of short order cooks of deciding that over-easy and over-medium are the same thing and both should have runny whites.  The pancakes I got with my food were exceptional.  They were just plain pancakes, but they were really good.  I didn't think there was much difference in the quality of plain pancakes, but now I know better.

This is a picture of one of their pancakes...That's not a pancake, that's a meal!!!

Greg's omelet was huge and unique in design and flavor.  It was some sort of corned beef concoction.  I wish I had ordered one of their unique pancakes.  Now that I know that they do pancakes so well, I will have to try them in a future date, as long as I remain happily unemployed.

Pick Up Stix

UPDATE: R.I.P. Pick Up Stix, now out of business.

VERDICT: You have to know what to order at this Chinese take out, then it is good.

Las Vegas has a lot of Chinese restaurants.  I love Chinese food...who doesn't.  The problem with the Chinese food in Las Vegas is that it is too authentic.  It tends to appeal to Chinese taste buds rather than American, so what you end up with is more fish heads and chicken feet than chop suey.  Chop suey is actually American in origin, so if you can find a Chinese restaurant with chop suey, they cater to American tastes.

The Chinese restaurants here either smell like moth balls for some odd reason or they use a spice that makes everything taste like old, wet straw.  I'm being harsh, of course, I'm sure there are good Chinese restaurants, but I'm seriously done experimenting for now.

So, in comes Pick Up Stix....a chain.  The very thing that I want to rally against.  This chain though has good Kung Pao Chicken, no fish heads, and only uses spices I can recognize.  The first time I went, however, I hated it.  I had the horrible orange peel chicken.

There are three types of "tasters" in the world.  50% of people are "regular tasters", 25% are "super tasters", and 25% are termed, "non-tasters".  This happens to be reflective of the number of taste buds that are on the tongue.  As the name implies, super tasters can taste more and non-tasters taste very little at all.  I am a self proclaimed super taster.  I can determine if a cow has been grain fed or grass fed by the taste of milk.  So, I have this to say.  People that like orange peel or anything with citrus zest are non-tasters.  It is like eating the most bitter, inedible garbage.  It's just horrible.  There's a reason everyone throws the peel out.  Everytime, I see someone adding zest to food, I just cringe.  Pick Up Stix adds strips of orange peel.  Silly Pick Up Stix, that goes in the trash.

The other thing to avoid is the sweet and sour.  It has lemon peel.  Blah.

Everything else though is good and fresh.  The vegetables tend to be a little undercooked, which I like and is better for you anyway.  Avoid the teriyaki.  I've never had it, but I've seen people complain about it and it goes against my rule of never ordering Japanese food from a Chinese restaurant.  Wednesday is wonton Wednesday and all cream cheese wontons are 25 cents each, so try to go on Wednesdays.

Pizza Hut - Lunch Buffet

UPDATE:  RIP Pizza Hut pizza buffet.  Out of business.  I guess I'll have to travel to the 80's to try you again.
VERDICT: An genuine 80's experience right down to the price.

If you are looking for a review of Pizza Hut, you are an idiot.  Everyone knows what Pizza Hut has and tastes like by now.  If you have bad service or experience at a Pizza Hut chances are that in a month it will be different anyway because of turnover.  I guess you can critique management style.  All in all, I find that most Pizza Huts are the same and if they aren't they become the same eventually.

I'm here to talk about their lunch buffet at this particular pizza hut.

You have a small window during the week to get to this Pizza Hut to experience the Pizza Hut lunch buffet.  These were a lot more popular in the 80's when almost all the Pizza Huts were more than just a take out counter, but they all had dining rooms as well.  In fact, I recommend dressing in your best 80's attire when visiting this Pizza Hut.  The atmosphere is a shining example of the pinnacle of conservative 80's decorating.  They have green glass lanterns hanging from plain gold colored chains.  Fake spider plants and fake ivy are scattered throughout and the tables are the traditional particleboard with obvious fake wood grain laminated on top of it.  They even have a clock that says time for pizza and the second hand zooms quickly around  every 5 seconds.  Of course, the actual time on the clock is wrong.  I'd say this is the perfect place to bring someone that has romantic notions about the 80's.  This is what it was really like, not tubular, not awesome, but rather a restaurant's attempt of recreating the atmosphere of someone's poorly decorated study.  Heck, take the kids for a history lesson.

It is $6 without drink.  The drink is where they get ya!  It comes with a salad bar and a pizza bar with pasta and breadsticks.  They are pretty good about getting pizza out, but you got to fight the other people to get to the fresh stuff.  They're pretty greedy there.  Greg saw a lady take six pieces of a fresh pizza.  What the???  I think I had three pieces max with a salad and I felt stuffed.  I managed to cram one more piece in though because of the buffet mentality.

7000 W Charleston Blvd
Las Vegas NV 89117

(702)363-3612

Hours posted above

crEATe - Restaurant or Cult?

UPDATE: The cult must have met their alien leader.  Now out of business.

VERDICT: Expensive and odd.

 Greg was all about going to this new restaurant called "crEATe", which was basically a burger bar.  I've noticed it before as it is painted bright lime green and looks rather sleek.  We walked in and immediately became disoriented.  Greg turned to me and said, "Do you want to leave?", but he always says that in restaurants.  I swear to god, he's got some sort of strange phobia of new restaurants.  I stood my ground, because who wants to drive around saying, "I don't know, where do you want to eat?"

The disorientation came from the unusual layout.  There was a counter, but there is no menu visible above the counter as expected.  Instead the menu was behind us, against the wall, in the form of free-standing, black, electronic light boards.  The menus pretty much consisted of a list of different size burgers and a long list of burger ingredients.  Just as when I was starting to wonder how I was going to get my order from the complex menu all the way over to the counter, a man came out the greet us.

The man, who appeared to be a manager because of his age, quizzed us on what brought us in, "Was it the green paint?  You have a friend that has been here before?"  I think we just looked bewildered.  I don't remember answering the question.  I was just thinking that I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he chose a good paint color and I, just like everyone else, was drawn like a moth to the flame.  I just wanted to say, "We're already sold.  We're fatties, insert food now!"  Why do I have to answer a stupid survey, no matter how informal, when I do anything?

He explained the menu.  There were burgers that were already "designed" that could be simply ordered or you could make your own burger from the burger toppings menu.  The pre-designed burger menu had burgers named after art periods, "The Modernist, The Classical, The Renaissance, The Impressionist".  But the names were somewhat misleading.  The Renaissance had pineapple on it.  The Impressionist was their spicy, jalapeno burger.  They had a burger called The Dali (not a period, but rather an artist), that was inexplicably their southwestern burger.

The manager then explained that their were clipboards over by the counter, so we could circle our choices.  Then he kind of just stood there and stared blankly at us.  It became a little awkward.  I almost wished I had succumbed to Greg's restaurant paranoia and left earlier.  I looked to Greg and said, "well, let's go get a clipboard."

There really were a lot of toppings to choose from.  Nothing horribly gourmet, but the standard gourmet like bleu cheese, pineapple and chiles.  While we were deciding what to put on our burgers, which was actually quite a daunting task, a strange girl came around the corner, got right in our face and loudly declared, "The people at Nabisco have done it again!  This new chocolate Chex Mix is amazing."  This set off my crazy meter to the limit.  It wasn't what she said, it was the familiarity with us that she displayed; well that, plus the fact that she had chocolate Chex mix smudged on her mouth as she was shoveling in the last pieces that led me to believe she was off her rocker.

I replied, "Oh my!"  What am I, British?  I tend to say, 'oh, my!' a lot.  Anyway, I continued, "Do you work for Chex mix?"

"No, I just really like it."  She then went up to some people ordering at the counter and extolled the virtues of the new Chex Mix.  She returned to us a short while later to inquire if we had been here before.  We stated that we hadn't.  She explained that she worked here and that she was just here last night painting.  She claimed to really have been excited about the painting.  At which point, someone behind the counter, agreed that she was indeed very excited about painting.   Greg and I looked around, yet no one pointed out what was painted.  The walls were nicely painted, but it didn't look fresh.  The back wall had a lot of writing on it  saying junk like peace, life, sand...I don't know...new age junk.

The thing that got me was that she wasn't working.  She was just hanging out, eating Chex Mix and raving about it to the customers.  At no point, did she offer me any Chex Mix.  She did later get into a uniform, but it wasn't for another 15 minutes.

This is what led me to believe crEATe was a cult.  Everyone was too cheery and slightly off.  The atmosphere was disorienting.  They had their own vegetarian burger made with brown rice...if that doesn't scream cult, I don't know what does.  On their website, there is a news story that states, "Employees learn customers' names so they can personally greet them with a smile.  When Graulich gets a promising application, he said he will often observe the person at their current work site. It tells him whether that person is right for Create.  'You can't train personality,' Graulich says."

My burger was good, but Greg's burger was phenomenal.  He's the best chooser, that's why I make him make all of my sandwiches.  He then confessed that he had been there before and left because he didn't want to order food at a counter.  He rather be waited on.  Is that picky, or what?  I guess that's what makes him such a good sandwich maker.

http://www.createburgersandcustard.com/
7290 W Lake Mead Blvd.
586-0430