Atlantic City, then and now

[Fat Guy]

Part I - Ribs on the beach

In 1981, when I was 12 years old, our dear family friend Marty came to America to die.

Marty, who had attended Bard College with my parents, was an original-vintage international man of mystery. He had an elegant beard and spoke in a deep, booming voice with an unidentifiable, vaguely European accent (he was in fact a Jew from Brooklyn). An unfiltered Gauloises cigarette could usually be found dangling from his mouth, which was probably why he had what would soon become terminal lung cancer. He lived in England, where he had a wife and son, but he came back to the States for medical care. Not that it helped.

During Marty's last months we were his surrogate family. To me he was like an eccentric great uncle, indeed for a time I was confused and thought he was an actual relative. My grandfather, Artie, who we saw rarely, also had a beard. There was a famous moment when I asked my parents, "Marty and Artie are two different people?"

My father had, the summer before, suffered a massive heart attack. He was pretty frail as a result. When Marty first arrived, he was more vigorous than my father. A few months later, they reversed positions.

During those months, my father and Marty hatched a plan (they were always hatching plans) to take me to Atlantic City. Gambling had been approved a few years earlier, the first wave of casino-hotels had opened and they felt it was important that I see Atlantic City while it still had the remnants of its original character, before the last of the grand old hotels got torn down and the face of the boardwalk changed forever.

We set out in my father's white 1961 Cadillac Fleetwood. Atlantic City is only a couple of hours from Manhattan under normal circumstances, but in the old Cadillac -- and with my father and Marty's penchant for meandering -- a trip of that distance took a couple of days, much of it spent speaking in heavy Russian accents. Upon arrival in Atlantic City, we headed for the newly opened Plaboy Hotel & Casino, the mission to acquaint me with Atlantic City's architectural history having been forgotten somewhere around Secaucus.

I was not allowed on the gaming floor on account of my tender age, so my father and Marty came up with the idea of hiring one of the Playboy Bunnies to "babysit" me in the video arcade while they hit the roulette tables. They would occasionally check in on me and supply me with more quarters. I was just old enough to appreciate the situation.

In the car on the way down, Marty started talking about ribs. This developed into a claim that his one wish in life was to eat ribs on the beach in Atlantic City. Having checked into our seedy motel after a day at the Playboy Hotel, we went in search of ribs. In general, one does not find good barbecue in beach-resort communities, so the ribs we procured were pretty bad. Nonetheless, Marty took the ribs to the beach at night and ate several. To this day, for no reason other than Marty's dedication to the ideal, for which as far as I can tell he had no reason, I identify ribs on the beach as a peak gastronomic experience.

That summer, while I was away at camp in Connecticut, my parents called to tell me that Marty was definitely going to die. Soon after camp ended, it happened. I remember being at the funeral, waiting for Marty's wife and son to arrive from England. (Jewish funerals are supposed to happen the day after death.) I'll never forget the arrival of Marty's beautiful, blond wife and young son. They were so pale and clearly devastated. When I saw them I burst into tears. To this day I regret that Marty had to spend his last months with us and not his real family. But I hope they take comfort in the knowledge that he was with people who loved him, and that he got to have ribs on the beach.

Part II - Beverly Hills Buffet

I returned to Atlantic City in the mid 1990s. My ex-girlfriend from high school (still one of my closest friends), Emily, would spend part of every summer with her family in nearby Ocean City. My then-girlfriend (now wife), Ellen, and I went out to visit and we all decided to drive over to Atlantic City for dinner and gambling. We resolved to visit a buffet.

On the way into town, we saw a billboard for Merv Griffin's Beverly Hills Buffet at Resorts International. Right away the wisecracks started: "If we go there, will we see Merv Griffin?" We so amused ourselves that we felt we had no choice but to visit Merv Griffin's Beverly Hills Buffet.

Atlantic City had changed, no doubt. What was once a decaying, seedy city had become a growing, seedy city. The legalization of gambling had helped Atlantic City somewhat, but it hadn't delivered on the promise of true revitalization. The crowd at Resorts International was pitiable: hordes of elderly and disabled people chain smoking and gambling away their pension, disability and welfare checks. After losing a pocket full of quarters in the slot machines, we proceeded to Merv Griffin's Beverly Hills Buffet.

It was actually a pretty good buffet. In the pecking order of Atlantic City casino-hotel buffets, it probably ranked high. We made several trips to the buffet, as a group and sometimes solo. Whenever anybody would get up from the table, it would be "Say hi to Merv." Much fun was had discussing questions of "What would Merv eat?" and "Do you think Merv would approve of this chicken?"

Towards the end of the meal, a hush fell over the dining room. We turned around and there, at the front of the restaurant, were Merv Griffin and Ava Gabor. He was wearing a tuxedo and she a golden gown. It was so unbelievable to us that we couldn't even summon the courage to go up and shake hands or get an autograph. We just sat there, dumbfounded.

Evretually, Merv and Ava left and we had dessert.

Part III - ACES

My third trip to Atlantic City is happening right now. As I type this, I'm on the new ACES train en route to Atlantic City from New York's Penn Station. (Though I won't likely post this until late tonight.) The ACES train, a project developed by a consortium of casinos, is a double-decker train that runs to and from Atlantic City on weekends. If you're an aficionado of rail travel, ACES is something you need to put on your to-do list.

The guy across the aisle from me just got a girl's phone number. My assessment of the interaction is that she gave him her real number.

The ostensible reason for my trip is to attend a press dinner at Fornelletto, the new Italian restaurant at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa with chef Stephen Kalt at the helm. And the dinner was an attraction for me, mainly because I'm a long-time admirer of Stephen Kalt's cooking from the days of Spartina in Tribeca. But I also wanted to ride the ACES train, and I wanted to get a present-day snapshot of Atlantic City. That I could do all this for free, courtesy of the Borgata's publicity team, was an added incentive. And when I learned that there is, at the Borgata, a branch of Fatburger, there was no question I'd accept the invitation.

I'll report on dinner, and beyond, in the morning.

[Fat Guy]

Atlantic City circa 2009, viewed from within the cocoon of the Borgata operation, bears little resemblance to what I saw in my 1981 and mid-‘90s snapshots. Ever since setting foot “on property” (as they say in the hospitality business), I’ve been going through a process of recalibrating my Atlantic City expectations. I suppose the marketing move of bringing a writer on property is having the desired effect on me, because no amount of written material would have convinced me that Atlantic City now has so much to offer.

The Borgata operation consists of two mega hotels. One is the Borgata, built five or six years ago as an attempt at the first true, grand, Vegas-style casino-hotel in Atlantic City on the level of something like Bellagio. The other, about a year old, is the Water Club. They call the Water Club their “boutique” hotel because it only has 800 rooms. My room is in the Water Club on the 25th floor and has a panoramic view of the Trump Marina and the water beyond. Square foot for square foot, it’s also about as nice a hotel room and hotel as I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some nice ones. I’ve seen bigger ones (my room is a standard room not a suite or anything like that) but not a nicer standard room anywhere. One doesn’t have to spend much time at the Water Club or be hoodwinked by marketing materials and comps to realize that it’s a world-class hotel property bearing no connection to Atlantic City’s seedy history or persistent reputation.

We started the evening in the bar area of Fornelletto, then moved into the dining room for dinner. We were a group of about 30 journalists at 5 or 6 tables. The restaurant was also operating as normal, with customers at the tables and bar. All our food was served family style, and while we didn’t taste 100% of the dishes on the menu we did taste 35 of them.

The food, not to mention the overall operation, was excellent, but before talking about some highlights (don’t worry I won’t list every dish) I should say that perhaps the best thing about Fornelletto is that it brings Stephen Kalt back to the East Coast. Chef Kalt doesn’t have the name recognition of a lot of other similarly talented chefs of his generation, but he has long been a chef I’ve admired. I used to work in Tribeca and at that time he ran a Mediterranean restaurant down there called Spartina. He was one of the early restaurateurs to do business down there, not the first but he was early. He was one of the first in New York to do pizzas in a restaurant that were similar to the ones now being served at the upscale new-wave pizzerias that are getting so much media attention. Before Spartina, in the late ‘80s Stephen Kalt worked at Le Cirque in its golden age under Daniel Boulud. After Spartina, in around 2001, he all but disappeared. He later turned up at the Wynn is Las Vegas running a place called Corsa Cucina, though I wasn’t aware of it (I only know it because he told me last night).

Fornelletto opened earlier this month and is a serious operation. You leave the cacophony of the casino floor and walk down several flights of stone stairs (or there’s an elevator) into a dining room with vaulted ceilings. I try not to overuse the word “cavernous,” but it is not only cavernous but also cavern-like. The appointments are all very fine. You can tell they spent a ton of money building the place. This was even more evident later when I spent a little time in the kitchen chatting with the chef. I saw a familiar enamel decorative scheme behind the pass and asked, hey, are those Bonnet stoves? Indeed they were. If you’re buying Bonnet stoves, you’re not messing around. You’re expecting to do high quality and make a lot of money. Incidentally, also working in the kitchen as a sous chef was a guy named Danny Veltri, who had something to do with the Hell’s Kitchen show, but I’m culturally illiterate so I don’t know what. He seemed nice, though.

In many ways a restaurant operation like Fornelletto invites comparisons to Las Vegas, and the cross-pollination is evident. Many of the upper-level staff have done time in Las Vegas and at high-end international hotel properties elsewhere. So the service ethic is strong. But there’s also a level of staff you wouldn’t see in Las Vegas, people who are clearly from New Jersey. The waiter handling our table, Giuseppe, is Roman-born and speaks like a Little Italy waiter. Overall the whole casino-hotel staff is less blond and beautiful than what you’d expect in Vegas, but there’s a compensating factor of realness and grittiness that I find fundamentally more appealing.

We tried three pizzas, produced in a Wood Stone oven, all of which were highlights but the best of which was Margherita topped with soft-cooked eggs. These pies are competitive with what’s being peddeld at boutique pizzerias in New York City at the moment, and are better than the pies at Spartina were (and those pies were good). Some of the other best hors d’oeuvre items were the fritelle di bacala (fried cod fritters) with aioli and parsley puree, and several salume including a spot-on 21-month prosciutto.

The cheese products in use at Fornelletto are impressive, from the pizza cheeses to the burrata (served with Sicilian fig and olive tapenade) to the formaggi-course cheeses which are impeccably sourced and curated. The best pasta item was, I thought, the ravioli with artichoke, favas, arugula, aged Montasio cheese and poppy seeds. The filling had a surprising crispy-crunchy bite. A little butter didn’t hurt. Also a highlight: the whole salt-baked orate. Oh, and the Venetian calves liver.

The theme is Italian regional cuisine, and one of the Italian culinary regions represented is New Jersey, so there are three parmigiana dishes on the menu but upgraded with sauce made from San Marzano tomatoes and topped with high-quality fiore di latte. We tried the giant prawn parmigiana, which is surely the apotheosis of the parmigiana concept. A less fortunate expression of the local-regional-New-Jersey concept is the 9th Street Market salad. Okay that's Philadelphia but still, well below the restaurant's potential.

The best dessert was a peach crostata with a firm marzipan punch. Big luxury hotel operations should but often don't have good pastry programs, and good wine programs. Both programs at Borgata seem strong based on my limited encounter.

After dinner several of us went to mur.mur, which is one of the Borgata’s nightclubs and, judging from the crowd, very popular. I’m told Paris Hilton was there. Though I was old for the demographic, I at least knew all the music because apparently ‘80s music is in right now. Appropriately, I had a cosmo.

Two of the guys from the PR firm, who had more endurance than the rest of the pack, later joined me in an exploration of the hotel’s 24-hour casual-dining options. This resulted in us eating some unexpectedly good cheesesteaks at the Metropolitan, the hotel’s generic-seeming general-purpose restaurant, at 3am.

[weinoo]

The food, not to mention the overall operation, was excellent, but before talking about some highlights (don’t worry I won’t list every dish) I should say that perhaps the best thing about Fornelletto is that it brings Stephen Kalt back to the East Coast. Chef Kalt doesn’t have the name recognition of a lot of other similarly talented chefs of his generation, but he has long been a chef I’ve admired. I used to work in Tribeca and at that time he ran a Mediterranean restaurant down there called Spartina. He was one of the early restaurateurs to do business down there, not the first but he was early. He was one of the first in New York to do pizzas in a restaurant that were similar to the ones now being served at the upscale new-wave pizzerias that are getting so much media attention. Before Spartina, in the late ‘80s Stephen Kalt worked at Le Cirque in its golden age under Daniel Boulud. After Spartina, in around 2001, he all but disappeared. He later turned up at the Wynn is Las Vegas running a place called Corsa Cucina, though I wasn’t aware of it (I only know it because he told me last night).

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Agreed that it's great that Stephen is back on the east coast. Spartina is the restaurant where I externed when I graduated from cooking school. I met Stephen early on, even before Spartina opened, and he was always gracious with his time and expertise.

Spartina was a really great restaurant, and it certainly took some chutzpah to open on that stretch of Greenwich when they did. I remember when the review came out in NY Mag, and it was entitled "The Lamb Shank Redemption," in homage to an amazing lamb shank dish that was on the menu. It was the first place I tasted chermoula, and Kalt's love of both Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines shone through. One of his favorite cookbook authors, as a matter of fact, was Coleman Andrews...I own all of Coleman's books now.

I do want to correct one point about the pizzas at Spartina - in my opinion, they were quite different from "the ones now being served at the upscale new-wave pizzerias that are getting so much media attention," because they were grilled and never saw the inside of an oven. His dough also had a touch of whole wheat flour in it, and a fair amount of olive oil incorporated into the dough as well. The inspiration for the pizzas came from, of course, Il Forno in Providence.

As to my fledgling cooking career, there was no way I could keep up with those guys on the line, and after six months or so I switched over to the catering side of the business...where, at a couple of outside events, I was able to do grilled pizzas!

[Fat Guy]

Your pizza taxonomy is correct and mine is imprecise. Spartina was doing an Il Forno-inspired "designer" grilled pizza. Fornelletto now, as well as the nouvelle-Neapolitan places around NYC, are doing something different. Still I see a common thread, sort of.

[Chris Amirault]

(That's Al Forno, guys.)

Can you say more about the soft-cooked egg pizza? How were the eggs prepared? Were they cooked atop the dough in the oven or cooked prior? Chicken eggs?

[Fat Guy]

In the East, we marvel at two things they take for granted on the West Coast: great, cheap Mexican food and great, cheap hamburgers. The most critically acclaimed New York City burger stands and Mexican places tend to be on par with any number of average roadside joints in California.

So I was eager to sample Fatburger at the Borgata, because I don't often get a chance to enjoy West Coast burger-stand burgers.

My hypothesis going in: Fatburger, based on distant memories, is as good as the best of New York City's upscale faux-burger-stand burgers.

My belief going out: hypothesis tested and confirmed.

The Borgata's Fatburger operation is in the "Cafeteria," which is a subterranean food court that offers, among several other things, Fatburger, a Tony Luke's outlet and a Ben & Jerry's. The niceness of the food-court seating area is incongruous: I've never seen a food court so clean, so plush, with so much natural stone and luxury-hotel fit and finish. I'm not one to complain about comfort, so I'll just say it's weird.

I ordered a medium Fatburger with all the standard toppings plus cheese, and also some skinny fries (my vague recollection from California is that I preferred the skinny fries to the Fat fries). The medium fatburger is about 5 ounces, which to me is around the ideal size for this kind of griddled, relatively thin-patty burger. I loved everything about it. The meat had a notable fresh taste, and was ground not too fine and packed not too tight. All the toppings and the bun were in harmony. It made me happy to eat it but upset to confirm that New York's burger-stand culture is so poor compared to California's.

The hotel has given us a ridiculously large food-and-beverage credit that works at all the food concessions, and I had spent less than $10 of it at Fatburger, so I decided also to try Tony Luke's. I had a cheesesteak with provologne and a roast-pork sandwich. I much preferred the roast pork. The cheesesteak seemed faithful to the Philly model but I actually preferred the higher-quality product we had at 3am at Metropolitan. Not that I'm particularly experienced with or well-suited to judging cheesesteaks.

They were smart to put the Ben & Jerry's concession right near the up escalator. It reminded me to have some mint chocolate chunk. I felt a little bad eating a quarter each of the cheesesteak, roast pork sandwich and ice-cream cup, but it was all free which gave it the feel of disposability. And it would not have been possible to finish all that stuff and still do dinner later, and there were no homeless people in evidence, so into the marble garbage pail it went.

[Fat Guy]

(That's Al Forno, guys.)

Can you say more about the soft-cooked egg pizza? How were the eggs prepared? Were they cooked atop the dough in the oven or cooked prior? Chicken eggs?

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Oh yes, I should add a link to Chris's wonderful Daily Gullet piece about Al Forno:

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=124246

The (chicken) eggs were just cracked on top of the pizza, probably when it was part-way done cooking. I imagine in order to set the eggs they lift the pizza up towards the dome of the oven for a few seconds. I think I saw them doing that while I was in the kitchen, but I didn't drill down for the information.

There was some incongruity between the menu they handed out to us and what they actually served us. The pizza advertised on the printed list of dishes was with guanciale, tomato sauce and eggs. But the one I tasted didn't seem to have any guanciale and had cheese on it. So I called it Margherita with soft-cooked eggs. It was unwieldy. I don't think anybody else at my table tried a piece. I had three.

[weinoo]

(That's Al Forno, guys.)

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Sorry about that, chief.

It made me happy to eat it but upset to confirm that New York's burger-stand culture is so poor compared to California's.

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Of course the burger stand culture derived from the car culture; a culture quite different from that in New York City, where our main modes of transport tend to be our feet or the MTA.

And it brings to mind a great line from Annie Hall, something to the effect that the only cultural advantage to living in LA is that you can make a right turn on a red light. Well, that and the burger stand.

[Fat Guy]

Some blurry cell-phone photos further to Fatburger and Tony Luke's:

[Fat Guy]

Taking a breather from eating, I decided to explore the boardwalk. That's how I became the last person to learn that the Borgata property is nowhere near the boardwalk. It's not terribly far as the crow flies but there are all sorts of highway ramps and such. So even if you wanted to devote the time it wouldn't really be walkable.

My boardwalk expedition canceled, I decided to check out the Water Club pool scene. They should make a TV show out of this. No, a piece of 24/7 programming kind of like Yule Log meets Mama's Boys. The crowd may not be as winsome as in an equivalent Las Vegas context. But in Jersey they know how to party.

Over at the Borgata casino (the Water Club doesn't have a casino) I put a quarter in a slot machine and won $30. It then took me at least half an hour to lose that $30. It was exhausting. Every time I'd be within reach of losing it all I'd win another $10 or $20. I had no idea what was going on either, because I never managed to internalize the rules of the slot machine. So some combination of symbols would come up and I wouldn't really know if it was good or not until the light flashed and the bell chimed.

[weinoo]

Over at the Borgata casino (the Water Club doesn't have a casino) I put a quarter in a slot machine and won $30. It then took me at least half an hour to lose that $30. It was exhausting. Every time I'd be within reach of losing it all I'd win another $10 or $20. I had no idea what was going on either, because I never managed to internalize the rules of the slot machine. So some combination of symbols would come up and I wouldn't really know if it was good or not until the light flashed and the bell chimed.

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Funny how they do that, isn't it. Of course, slots are the biggest money makers for the casinos.

The thing about your photos that also points out the great difference with the burger stand as it might exist in California, is the total lack of windows. Or of being able to tell what time of day or night it is...another little tricky thing about those casinos .

[Fat Guy]

The plan was to go home this afternoon, but as the visit started to look more and more promising I arranged to stay an additional night. Tonight I'm having dinner at Seablue, which is the hotel's Michael Mina restaurant and the nicest restaurant on property, after which I hope to check out Mixx, which is the other nightclub besides mur.mur where we went last night. Tomorrow morning, if I can handle it, I'll try to swing by the brunch buffet before heading to the ACES train for the return home to NYC.

This afternoon I had a tour of the food-and-beverage operations with Nicolas Kurban, VP of Food and Beverage for Borgata. I met him last night at the dinner event and my radar immediately identified him as a hardcore F&B professional, so I asked if he would be willing to show me EVERYTHING. So this afternoon we had a whirlwind tour of all the restaurant operations and then some.

I'll give a short description of the places we looked at. We weren't eating -- a feat that would not have been humanly possible -- so there's only so much I can tell you. If you're interested in seeing menus or learning more about any given outlet, the Borgata website has a substantial dining section and I also have about a gigabyte of fact sheets, press releases and photos I'd be happy to share bits of if anybody cares. They gave me all this information, by the way, on the nicest USB drive I've ever seen. It's clad in leather and also has a lanyard so you can wear it around your neck. I never considered wearing a USB drive around my neck but this one is so nice I might wear it as a fashion accessory because, as you know, I'm very fashionable. Maybe I'll wear it to the nightclub tonight and start a trend.

The hotel has six significant upscale fine-dining outlets. We looked at these most carefully. We skipped Fornelletto, because I'd been there last night, but walked through the other five, looked at menus, peered into kitchens, etc. So those other five places are:

Wolfgang Puck American Grille. I'm pretty sure this is Wolfgang Puck's only East Coast venture, at least in the fine-dining category. I know he did the casual place in Hoboken or Jersey City a while ago. No idea what happened there. Up front at Wolfgang Puck American Grille is a tavern area dominated by a wood-burning pizza oven. The menu up front is pizza, burgers, etc., and I wanted to eat everything on it. In the back dining room, it's a more formal menu that is more of a commitment both stylistically and financially. That food didn't jump out at me as a big attraction, but maybe it's because I'm full. The back dining area is extremely nice, though, especially the chef's table right in front of the kitchen.

The Old Homestead, the famous New York City steakhouse, has a branch (perhaps the only one) at the Borgata. It's the same idea as the original -- meat and potatoes in a conservative environment -- but of course the Borgata version is a much nicer facility.

There's also another steakhouse, called Bobby Flay Steak. Nicolas told me that when they opened Bobby Flay Steak they figured it would pull some business away from Old Homestead, but it didn't. So far it seems the Borgata has not yet reached the limit of its clientele's appetite for steak. Bobby Flay Steak was designed by David Rockwell (all the nice restaurants on property were done by the big-name designers, such as Adam Tihany and Tony Chi). It's an 11,000-square foot space. Yes it's big. The theme is "regional steaks," each with a different rub, plus a significant seafood selection.

Izakaya is the Borgata's version of Buddakan. Not as massive or kitschy, but that's the idea. It has a sushi bar, a robata bar, lots of lounge and bar seating, plus normal tables. The layout is such that even though there are a couple of hundred seats all the individual seating areas are cozy.

Finally there's Seablue, which is a Michael Mina seafood restaurant with a Mediterranean theme. It certainly looks attractive. I'll report back after eating there tonight.

I mentioned earlier the subterranean "Cafeteria." This has seven outlets: the aforementioned Fatburger, Tony Luke's and Ben & Jerry's, plus a salad operation called Lettuce Head, a Panda Express (yuck), something called Villa Pizza (did not look terribly promising), and Hibachi San (ditto). So there's some weakness there, but the first three on the list more than justify the cafeteria's existence.

We took a look at the buffet, which is crazy elaborate, with everything from carving stations to sushi to a raw bar. It must be either a loss leader or break-even operation. It's certainly on par with the nicer buffets in Las Vegas.

The Metropolitan, where I had a cheesesteak last night at 3am, is the hotel's general-menu restaurant, a cross between a fancy diner and a brasserie. I've seen this phenomenon in a couple of other casinos too: the generic-seeming restaurant turns out to be a fairly serious operation. If I had infinite time and resources, I'd revisit the Metropolitan and try to get to know it better.

There's a sandwich-type operation called Bread & Butter, which has long hours and looks like it feeds a lot of gamblers who don't want to take a lot of time out. The food I saw going by looked quite tasty, though.

N.O.W. (Noodles of the World) is an Asian-themed noodle bar. It has 34 seats but Nicolas told me it can do 1,200 covers on a busy day because it runs from noon until very late (tonight it will be open until 5am) and turnover is fairly rapid. It's situated near the Asian-themed gaming area, which contains lots of games I've never seen or heard of.

Roma is operated out of the Fornelletto kitchen and is their quick-service operation, serving just the pizza-type stuff. Stephen Kalt's Fornelletto chef's coat has a Roma patch on the sleeve, I noticed last night. Today I learned why.

I also got to check out the VIP dining room. I'm not sure what it's called. It's down an escalator and you need a "black card" to get in. I think a black card means you gamble enough that the hotel gives you everything for free. So down in the VIP room all food and drink is free. There's a microcosm of the hotel's main buffet -- most of the nicest stuff -- and a bar, and lots of space to lounge and recharge before going back onto the gaming floor.

Over in the Water Club the room-service and banquet dining was designed by Geoffrey Zakarian.

There are also countless bars, banquet facilities and other things throughout the hotel, including a big Starbuck's. In all I think the count is something like 25 distinct operations.

[Fat Guy]

Seablue offered several of the elements of a great meal. The service was friendly, professional and engaging. The wines chosen by sommelier Christine Barr (who is a superstar sommelier in the making; note the date I said so) were paired intelligently with the food. Unfortunately the dishes with which the interesting wines were paired were mostly uninteresting. It's actually hard for me to believe that a chef as talented as Michael Mina signed off on a memu containing such an unfortunately high ratio of clunkers.

Seablue is a high-end luxury restaurant and yet the first part of the menu is devoted to the shopping-mall-food-court concept of "design-your-own" salads. You get a pencil and a checklist and choose ten items, then someone in the kitchen puts those ingredients in a bowl, tosses with dressing and plates it up. The process of selecting those ingredients is tedious. I thought that was Michael Mina's job. There are also some dishes that are quite generic, like a trio of raw items I referred to as "trio of menu trends served in three depressions."

Some of the food, to the restaurant's credit, was quite good, such as the miso-marinated Chilean sea bass with scallop tortellini, braised endive and shiitake consomme. But there weren't enough highlights to turn the meal around for me.

Off to hit some clubs and grab a redemptive snack somewhere else.

[Fat Guy]

Having little personal experience with nightclubs I'm not exactly the one to judge but I can't see why, between the two choices at Borgata, anybody would choose Mixx over mur.mur, where the club is better looking, the people are better looking (leaving me out of the equation for the moment), the music is better and it's played on a better sound system. If you ever find yourself clubbing at Borgata you may wish to remember that the least cool person you know recommended that you choose mur.mur over Mixx.

After my three minutes of clubbing I decided to have a noodle nightcap at N.O.W., which if you can find it in the casino is a great little spot. I tried some well-made pork dumplings and an equally well-made roast-pork noodle soup. The menu offers noodle soups and stir-fried noodle dishes from all over Asia, which is not necessarily a promising concept, but everything I saw go out (the kitchen is in full view behind the bar where I was sitting) looked properly prepared and appetizing.

With that, the trip is winding down. But if I have the strength to visit the brunch buffet in the morning before taking the ACES train home, I'll report back.

[Fat Guy]

You can judge a buffet by its bacon. At least in the case of a breakfast or brunch buffet the bacon is always the first thing I check.

First there's the quality of the raw materials. Are the slices nice and thick or paper-thin? Is it smoky, salty and sweet, with those attributes in balance, or is everything out-of-whack, perhaps also with some chemical overtones? Then there 's how they cook it. Are the pieces crisp and separate, or mostly flaccid and clumped together such that you have to excavate the pile in order to uncover one acceptable piece?

The Borgata Buffet has very good bacon, and everything flows from that. The woman manning the omelet station at Sunday brunch is a real pro, effortlessly juggling 4-6 complex egg orders at a time. There's a guy making very good small-diameter Belgian waffles. There's just about every traditional breakfast item you can think of -- eggs Benedict, corned beef hash, pancakes, muffins, biscuits, you name it -- and as you proceed along the arc of the center buffet island you get into lunch food: carving stations, fish, pizza, fried chicken . . .

Wait a second. Over there they have fried chicken and over there they have waffles. I know what I'm having for brunch. With bacon. And an omelette. And a biscuit. And some fruit (the fruit selection, actually, could be better).

It was a very fine last meal at the Borgata.

[Fat Guy]

This was the view from my room at the Water Club.

[weinoo]

N.O.W. (Noodles of the World) is an Asian-themed noodle bar. It has 34 seats but Nicolas told me it can do 1,200 covers on a busy day because it runs from noon until very late (tonight it will be open until 5am) and turnover is fairly rapid. It's situated near the Asian-themed gaming area, which contains lots of games I've never seen or heard of.

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These types of noodle operations are quite popular at a number of casinos. They added one (very early on) at the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut - I find they usually do a quite serviceable job and more importantly, are able to get the gamblers in and out quite quickly.

[Fat Guy]

The next logical step is to do something branded, like an Ippudo franchise (or a Momofuku).

[weinoo]

The next logical step is to do something branded, like an Ippudo franchise (or a Momofuku).

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There have definitely been rumors floated about Chang in Vegas; seemingly scuttled due to the downturn in the economy, which of course hit Vegas especially hard.

From a NY Times article a couple of weeks ago:

On the Strip, near Circus Circus, is the yawning emptiness of the $4.8 billion, 87-acre Echelon project, halted last August along with its 12 to 15 new restaurants, including those of chefs such as David Chang of Momofuku Ko in Manhattan.

Seems not to have affected the weekend crowds at the Borgata, however!

[jsmeeker]

Food and beverage operations at large casino resorts can be pretty facinating. I'm not at all familiar with what's going on in Atlantic City, but I've been going to Las Vegas pretty regularly for the past several years. I've have dined around in all types of places out there. I've had very minimal "behind the scenes" experiences there in person, but have seen various things on TV and have read a bit of things here on eGullet forums. But one thing I do get to see out in Las Vegas is where people choose to dine when given so many choices. It's pretty interesting to say the least.

Though in keeping with the Atlantic City topic, does Atlantic City have the concept of "locals" casinos the way they do in Las Vegas? I've noticed some differences in dining between the locals places in Las Vegas compared to the big resorts on the strip.

[Fat Guy]

Atlantic City and Las Vegas are really different, in a lot of ways, and I'm not an expert on the whole situation so if somebody else knows more please chime in. What I can say is that I get the following impression: you know how there's downtown Vegas with all the unglamorous, older casinos? Until recently, all of Atlantic City was like that. The Borgata and a couple of newer properties, however, are like the hotels on the Vegas strip.

[weinoo]

And of course Vegas has hundreds of off-strip restaurants where the locals dine. Atlantic City has nothing like that culture.