There's a classic joke about WASPs that goes like this: How can you tell the WASPs at a Chinese restaurant? They are the ones not sharing the food.
It's even easier at the Diamond Chinese Restaurant in Sonny's Saloon, one of the true Vegas food landmarks practically no one knows about. Here, you can tell the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants—and anyone else who isn't Chinese, for that matter—by the over-fried egg rolls, mounds of oily fried rice and plates of sizzling chicken and beef on their tables.
The Chinese, meanwhile, will be happily feasting on steamed fish, fresh clams in black-bean sauce, spicy salt squid and Bizarro World fare from a Chinese-language blackboard; say, tofu hot pot with sliced pork in fish flavor.
I shouldn't say no one knows about this place. Sonny's is sort of an industry secret with strippers and others who frequent this corridor of Industrial Road. I actually heard about it from N9NE Steakhouse Chef Barry Dakake, whom I trust implicitly, and now I'm a regular. This might not be "the city's best Chinese restaurant," as Citysearch.com proclaims, but it's a damned good one.
Even if you don't like the food, you can't say the place isn't colorful. The saloon side is old Vegas personified, two horseshoe bars dominating a dimly-lit space stocked with Bud signs, video-poker machines and characters from the shallow end of the gene pool.
The restaurant side is boxy, basic, claustrophobic and stark. Once in a while, the roar of a passing train is heard. Just as in Midwestern Greek restaurants, you sometimes will also hear the roar of the waitress as she shouts an order back to the kitchen in English or Cantonese. And as in China itself, service is diffident—grudging, if you will.
You'll have to ask nice for chili sauce, chopsticks or even hot tea. I asked the waitress to translate a few specials, and she did so, but not before muttering I was ma-fan, or too much trouble, in her own language.
Who cares? The legendary waiter Edsel Ford Fong regularly abused his charges at a small San Francisco Chinatown noodle shop called Sam Wo in the '70s and '80s, to the point where people actually came to be insulted by him. I think of a place like this as dinner and a show, but with better food than most showrooms could ever dream about.
Start a meal here with the terrific spicy salt squid from the appetizer section; or a soup, like the irresistibly named salted egg, with mustard plant and sliced pork soup, a light and only mildly salty broth in which the individual components come through with clarity.
The Chinese delicacies of shark's-fin and bird's-nest soups are available, and when one customer, a young African-American man with two gorgeous women in tow, wanted the bird's-nest, the waitress told him he wouldn't like it. She probably used good judgment. Bird's-nest is a euphemistic title for the congealed saliva from a certain type of swallow found in Southeast Asia, and it doesn't float my boat, either.
Barbecued crispy duck is quite good, although it is, in fact, deep fried and served swimming in a pool of salty juice. Spicy salt also is put to good use as seasoning for the baked pork chop with spicy salt, one of my favorite dishes on the menu.
The only way a Cantonese chef worth his salt would cook a fresh fish is by steaming, so there are usually whole fish such as rock cod or sole that the kitchen will steam for market price, usually around $25 to $30 per fish, cheaper than in Chinatown. Clams in black bean sauce are fresh, too, and the sauce is delicious over white rice. There are old Vegas favorites like egg foo young and lemon chicken around, as well. I like both.
We threw our caution aside and tried two items from the blackboard, with mixed results. Tofu and sliced pork with fish flavor hot-pot is delicious, a bubbly cauldron of bean curd and meat in rich gravy, best when spooned onto piles of hot steamed rice.
The other special—which could be translated as creamy walnut shrimp—consisted of shrimp battered in cornstarch and tossed in warm mayonnaise, an unappetizing conceit, even though laced with candied walnuts studded in white sesame seeds. Eat the nuts. Leave the shrimp.
After more substantial fare, end a meal here as the Chinese do, with one of these excellent rice or noodle dishes. Beef chow fun with dark soy sauce is especially good, and so is the variant with black-bean sauce. (Black bean is good on anything, and chow fun, for the record, is a flat rice noodle, as opposed to chow mein, which is wheat-based.)
You haven't really done Chinese in Vegas until you've done it at Sonny's.