Paris Poker Nut - Food For Thought
After thirty years of playing poker in Paris, this is one Jewish New Yorker who has concluded that nothing – but nothing - can top a breakfast of lox, bagels, cream cheese with chives and a couple of slices of Swiss. Croissants, brioches and baguettes just don’t make it compared to NYC deli fare. Not that Parisian breakfasts aren’t magnifique. Believe me, they are far better than what I’ve been snacking on since arriving a month ago in Las Vegas. So yesterday I decided to seek out a gourmet shop selling Nova Scotia, or perhaps even smoked salmon from Scotland, Denmark or Norway. What I found instead was pure schmutz.
Come on: don’t try to tell me that a good percentage of Las Vegas tourists and residents aren’t landsmen. You hear as many nasal accents and dese-dem-n-doses on Fremont Street as you do in Brooklyn. So what gives? Why isn’t a decent slice of lox or Nova available in delicatessens and supermarkets in this desert version of The Promised Land? I swear, after making a dozen phone calls and visiting half as many food emporiums, all I came across was an inedible package of some pink-colored dreck I wouldn’t feed to my neighbor’s cat.
‘Oh, I get it,’ I said, finally catching on. ‘They must sell the good stuff at casino delis on The Strip.’
Both Caesar’s and the MGM Grand offer offshoots of the NYC Stage Deli, and the Mirage houses a Western likeness of Broadway’s famed Carnegie Delicatessen. True to the home site, Carnegie even serves a Woody Allen Sandwich, a combined corned beef- pastrami monster weighing in at about 2 1/2 lbs for which a jaw the size of a hippopotamus is required if you hope to bite into it. The meat alone makes a platter sufficient to feed a family of eight. Nor was I going to overlook a country cousin of the New Yawkers. A Los Angeles deli named Canters occupies enough space to feed a score of minions inside the Treasure Island hotel/casino. Mais oui, I was on the right track at last.
“Azzoyzick shti!” my Russian/Polish/ grandfather would remark. “So that’s what you say!” True, each of those delis does serve a lox or Nova platter, but not individual take-out slices sold by the pound. Well excuse me! I was not about to allow a goyishe employee fix me a bagel when I knew I could do a better job myself. Anyway, at $17 or $18, I might just as well have purchased a lacquered duck in the city’s burgeoning Chinatown.
A schmuck is a schmuck is a schmuck, wouldn’t you say, Gertrude Stein? What I mean is: as a professional poker player I should know better than to shoot dice or play blackjack. But that’s just what I did at the TI when the waitress at Canter’s refused to cut me off a few slices of lox. In thirty-five minutes I lost the equivalent of more smoked salmon than Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side sells on a Sunday morning. Oy vay is mir! From now on I’m sticking to Texas Hold ‘Em.
From ParisPokerNut
