Grand Lux Cafe

The way the story goes, Grand Lux Cafe began with a request from the owners of the Venetian Resort, Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas to David Overton, founder of the Cheesecake Factory empire, to build them a new restaurant. The Venetian brain trust had decided that penny slots, a complete re-creation of a Venetian piazza (including painted-on sky and working canal system) and nineteen (count 'em) other restaurants offering everything from the transplanted genius of Thomas Keller (Bouchon) and Mario Batali (B&B Ristorante) to cheap and sleazy Mexican weren't enough to get the rubes into their joint, and what they really needed was a restaurant that, while appearing to be an ultra-luxe, super-high-end dining establishment, actually offered the kind of crap that the T-shirt-and-flip-flops crowd adores. Agreeing to this devil's bargain, Overton then hopped on a plane and headed for Europe, where he studied opulent Italian trattorias, French bistros and the pastry shops of Vienna before, apparently, being knocked on the head somewhere between the Lainzer Tiergarten and Avenue Emile Zola, forgetting everything he'd seen and, while sitting in the departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle, just throwing together an over-the-top concept on a bar napkin, complete with a menu rife with transgressions against nearly every major culinary canon. The first Grand Lux Cafe opened in Vegas to wild success — no surprise. Operating 24/7 and seating 550, the place looks like a set from an abandoned production of Caligula (I've seen pictures) and serves, among other things, chilaquiles, duck pot stickers, Maryland crabcakes, Neapolitan pizzas, Carolina barbecue sandwiches, steak frites, sesame tofu, weinerschnitzel and Kentucky hot brown. The operation was so successful that Grand Lux Cafe LLC went on to open locations in nine more states, twelve restaurants altogether, including our very own version at Park Meadows.

Back on the floor, I put aside my scribbling and tried to focus on the food. The "Double Stuffed Potato Spring Rolls" had started with a good idea: They managed to hit that wide bull's-eye of crispy outside/soft inside comfort food, essentially mashed potatoes spiked with green onions wrapped inside a spring roll wrapper and then deep-fried like an Asian pierogi. But this guilty pleasure was then covered in melted cheddar cheese, topped with bacon bits, sprinkled with more green onion, sided by a giant blob of sour cream and served in a portion so large that Laura and I hardly made a dent before pushing back from the table, stuffed and ready for a nap.

The mini-kobe dogs were decent — if eleven dollars' worth of cocktail franks and toothless chili is your kind of thing. And it seemed to be exactly the thing for many diners, because as the plate was being marched toward us from the quote/unquote exhibition kitchen in the back (walled off from the main floor by a service trench and sealed behind panes of clear glass like the bulletproof stuff that convenience-store cashiers hide behind in dodgy neighborhoods), Laura saw at least three tables flagging down their own harried servers to ask what it was and if they could add one to their order. The flautas, though, were horrific — whole flour tortillas stuffed with (I think) leftover chicken salad, chopped poblano chiles and bitter cilantro and fried, with the resulting mess drizzled with sour cream and avocado sauce that tasted like green kindergarten paste and served over a bed of corn and black beans. There were at least a half-dozen flautas on the plate — and this was an appetizer. We were just getting started.

The menu at Grand Lux runs to over a hundred plates — an imposing, schizophrenic clusterfuck of bad ideas. I'd ordered the Indochine shrimp and chicken because it looked like the goofiest of all the international inclusions, "a fusion dish of Chinese and Indian flavors." And while the menu description had promised onions, sweet ginger, curry, plum wine, cream, dried cherries, apricots, shrimp, chicken and Asian spices, it didn't prepare me for the end product, which tasted like terrifyingly spongy chicken dipped in caramel. With cherries on top.

Laura had gone simpler, ordering lemon chicken piccata. But the kitchen crew forgot the lemon. They forgot the capers. And even if they hadn't forgotten to add the two flavors that more or less define a piccata, it still would've sucked. Sadly, there was enough of it on the plate to serve six, easy: six people who had no idea what an actual piccata was supposed to taste like, had never eaten anything resembling proper Italian food. On our way out of Park Meadows, Laura and I shoved our to-go boxes in the nearest garbage can.