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| - Let's make the difference between strip restaurants and off-strip restaurants clear.
Strip restaurants have a captive audience who usually don't leave the casino.
Strip restaurants revenue-share with the casino in exchange for valuable foot-traffic real estate.
Because of this, they can and need to charge high prices for food and beverages.
Off-strip restaurants do not have a captive audience. Either they attract locals, or they attract tourists who can travel away from the casinos.
Off-strip restaurants need to work harder to attract a clientele than strip restaurants do.
Because of this, they must offer something that strip restaurants do not.
The thing that works the best is the equation of:
Food and beverage as-good-as strip restaurants + a meaningfully lower price = business.
That gives us some extraordinary off-strip restaurants like The Barrymore, Vintner Grill and Lotus of Siam, plus scores of restaurants in Chinatown, to mention a few.
I'm sad to say that this "Vegas restaurant business 101" strategy has been entirely lost on 35 Steaks.
Their prices are as high, and in some cases, higher than strip steakhouses, and the quality of meat is lower. The menu even makes it clear that some of their beef selections are "choice" and not "prime"; in other words, meat any of us can buy at a good butcher shop, not the best cuts reserved mostly for high-end restaurant buyers.
I had the "Rossini" which is a nice piece of center rib-eye with some foie gras on top. I ordered it medium-rare bu it came out medium-well. Usually when a kitchen gets a steak wrong, it's a matter of one level; medium-rare to medium for example. Two levels off is simply shameful for a "high-end" steakhouse.
The Hard Rock has enough trouble attracting people away from the strip, what with their casino being about the size of a video arcade, and an oddly claustrophobic layout.
What would possess them to open a restaurant that has little or no chance of attracting diners away from the dozens of other choices that are better and in many cases less expensive?
Ya got me.
Which is more than I can say for 35 Steaks + Martinis.
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