The Eiffel Tower—it looks real!—from our hotel room. | |
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A Room with an Eiffel Tower View
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By Patricia Tennison
www.ParisCafeWriting.com
March 2023
I love my life. There’s really very little that I would change. Old problems have been resolved, new adventures fill the few remaining slots. But speaking of slots …
I’d never been to Las Vegas. (At least, not until this month.)
“YOU’VE never been to Vegas?”
No. I go to Paris for almost half the year. I go to Colorado to see the grandkids. I do pretty well on those Facebook lists where you check off where you’ve traveled. Just never made it to Vegas.
I have no problem with gambling for fun. I fly back home to Connecticut a couple times a year to meet up with one of my sisters at Foxwoods Casino, with the third largest casino in the country. We get a room and don’t see sunlight for two days. “Lobster dinner if we get ahead!” at the slots, slice of pizza if we are behind. We’ve eaten a lot of pizza, we’ve had a lot of fun.
Advice about a trip to Las Vegas flowed in from friends. Stay three nights. See a show. Eat well. Stay on “the strip,” the 4-mile-long Las Vegas Boulevard, maybe at the Bellagio hotel with its beautiful water display or stay at the Paris Vegas hotel across the street.
Stay at the Paris hotel? Now, why would I do that?
My friends persisted: It’s perfectly located, at the center of “the strip.” It has some of the best restaurants in Vegas. From its restaurants, you can see the Bellagio water display. A room at the Paris Vegas hotel costs much less than at the Bellagio. And a Google search claimed that the casino in the Paris hotel has some of the luckiest/loosest slot machines in Vegas.
Decided.
My husband, Joe Prendergast, and I would stay at the Paris Vegas hotel. But if we were going to play this game, to put on invisible berets at this imitation Paris site, then I wanted to upgrade for a few extra bucks to get what we don’t have from our own apartment in Paris, France—I wanted a view of the Eiffel Tower.
Done.
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From Chicago, the 4-hour flight west to Vegas was much easier than an 8-hour overnight flight east to France. And as we filed out of the plane at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS), we got the Vegas salute: slot machines! Right in front of us! Purple, pink, and yellow neon streamed from the Wheel of Fortune and Buffalo Diamond games. (Only at Fashion Week in Paris, France, would you see such garish colors.) Gamblers sat immobilized except for the right palm ready to hit “Bet Repeat.”
The whole scene within the airport worked like a lagniappe for me, a free first course, a little taste of what was to come, and I smiled.
We arrived at the Paris Vegas hotel and checked our view of the half-sized replica of the Eiffel Tower. (See the top photo.) Fun.
In the elevator back down, a fellow American guest spoke to us. (Right there, that’s very un-French. Even neighbors often don’t talk to each other in the elevators in Paris, France.) He suggested that for the best food at the best price within Paris hotel, we should eat at “Moan-AH-me-GABBY.” Sounded to me like maybe Indian cuisine, which would be great, and he led us …
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… to Moan-nah-ME-ga-BEE. Aha! The French language is tricky, and frankly, the restaurant signage at Mon Ami Gabi doesn’t help the pronunciation. We already knew this restaurant. It’s part of a very good Chicago-based Lettuce Entertain You chain that has a spot almost across the street from us in Chicago. Good French food at a fair price. We were off to a good start.
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The next morning we explored our new Paris. Yes, the inside of the hotel had the overall look of a super-clean Disney facade, but they got many of the replica details right: caned cafe chairs, smallish tables, old street lamps, cobblestone-like streets, buildings of low height.
The blue sky with cumulus clouds confused me. At first, I thought we were really outside in Nevada. Embarrassing. When I wiped that out of my morning mind, I blamed the confusion on the color. Paris, France, rarely has such bright blue skies. It is, after all, known as the gray city. (The hotel painters in Paris Vegas did add some gray around the edges of the bright blue ceiling. An afterthought correction, I’m guessing.)
The streets in our Marais neighborhood in Paris, France, are not as wide and certainly not as clean as in Vegas. No cigarette butts, no dog poop in Vegas. Although there were many restaurants in Paris Vegas, there were no clothing boutiques, no flower shops, and none of the ubiquitous pharmacies.
But we’re in Vegas! Get with it. We adjusted our invisible berets and continued our walk outside.
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Outside under the (aha!) bright blue Nevada sky, the Eiffel Tower looked … ridiculous. Wonderfully ridiculous. As did the replica of a hot-air balloon, also part of the Paris Vegas hotel.
We dutifully walked “the strip,” passed a man with a broad Texas hat, another with a Salvador Dali mustache, passed whiffs of marijuana, passed various sales opportunities.
One man offered a ticket:
“Have a drink. Get married. They often go together.”
Another offered only a paper cup:
“If. You. PutMoneyInTheCup.
“I. Will. ShutTheF^*%Up.”
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Then there were the girls, in various stages of dress and un-dress. Not even in Pigalle, outside the Moulin Rouge in Paris, France, do you get such a view.
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We caught up with some missing links to Paris, France, inside the Bellagio. Here were tonier shops for Chanel, Hermes, and Louis Vuitton.
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Also in the Bellagio is a most un-French event: an all-you-can-eat buffet. (The word buffet is French, but I rarely run into a French one in Paris, France. Buffets for Asian cuisine, yes, but not French.)
Friends had recommended the no-reservations, $50 brunch buffet at the Bellagio and it was a full-blown American treat: individual servings of baked bone marrow, sitting in a warm polenta (photo above); oysters Rockefeller; mac ’n' cheese; a chef carving slabs of prime rib; a mound of boiled, cold shrimp; and rows of desserts.
The quality of the food varied, but the big comfortable chairs spaced out in broad seatings was so wonderfully American. All of my French friends—well, almost all—should go there.
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For more authentic French dining, we made reservations at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant in the Paris Vegas hotel. I have a fond spot for chef Jean Joho, who heads up the Eiffel. When he first came to the U.S. years ago to open the much lauded but now-closed Everest Room in Chicago, I interviewed him for the Chicago Tribune’s food section. He didn’t yet speak much English so I interviewed him in French.
Joho wasn’t at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant that night in Vegas, so I don’t know if his French accent lingers, but his outstanding French cuisine does. The escargot appetizer—tender snails under individual donut-shaped puff pastry (photo above)—now surpasses that of my favorite spots in Paris, France.
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And from the Eiffel Tower Restaurant in the Paris Vegas hotel, you get the best view of the dancing fountain at the Bellagio hotel across the street.
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So would I do this again? Fly to Vegas and stay at the flashing blue-white-and-red Paris Vegas hotel? Absolutely. I just wouldn’t again buy the $88 discount flight on Spirit Airlines—that, dear friends, is another story. | |
Photos by Joseph Prendergast and Patricia Tennison. We forget who took which ones. | | | | |
