The entire world may come to Vegas, but unless you happen to be invited to a Vegas magazine party, have a friend in the NBA staying at the Palms, or show up at the latest hot poker tournament, celebrity sightings are random.
It's different in Hollywood, especially at 2 a.m., if you are willing to get in line at Pink's, LA's most famous hot-dog stand. One evening, I ran into Cameron Diaz on an elevator in the El Royale Apartments, and a few hours later, saw her lining up for a dog. Jay Leno has been known to pull up on his motorcycle. Hell, I even saw Orson Welles waiting for a hot dog once upon a time.
In LA, a city not exactly known for its regional cuisine, Pink's is a treasured institution, a way of life. A man named Paul Pink borrowed $50 and started the business with a pushcart back in the Depression, and just after the war, moved to the present location on La Brea and Melrose avenues. They've been doing a landslide business ever since.
Now you can eat the famous Pink's 10-inch stretch, all-beef Hoffy dog, or one of the spicy Polish dogs in various incarnations in the Zanzibar Café in the Aladdin. I suspect this new development has some tie-in with the fact that Planet Hollywood is taking over ownership of the place.
The Zanzibar Café was already one of the most eclectic eateries in town, boasting a huge menu of dishes from all over the planet, everything from pad Thai to Louisiana crab cakes and flat-iron steak, from opulent breakfasts to sumptuous desserts.
The sign above the entrance trumpets "The Year Of The Dog" and the Pink's logo. And now you can eat, say, a gut bomb like the Huell Howser—a two-hot-dog sandwich that includes chili, cheese and onions—24/7, which makes the Pepcid AC folks happy indeed.
Zanzibar Café is one of those large, sprawling casino cafeteria spaces such as ones that house buffets or major coffee shops. Walls are painted with big desert murals depicting village life in the Arab world—camels, minarets, lots of sand—and booths are commodious enough, I guess.
The two pages of Pink's are in the dead middle of Zanzibar's encyclopedic, spiral-notebook format menu. A pale pink color makes them hard to miss, but also hard to read. One page is taken up with a short history of the business, while the other is essentially a list of the two hot dogs offered here, in their various forms.
This amounts to what is, essentially, a short list of what is available at the LA stand, minus the turkey dog, red onions and a few other tricks played by the original. There are, of course, the items that really count: the 10-inch Hoffy, the homemade chili, the sauerkraut and the gooey melted cheese, but a few items are missing, too.
Heinz yellow mustard on all the tables is a poor substitute for the brown deli mustard I like to eat with a Pink's hot dog. And the pastrami on pastrami burrito, a cardiologist's nightmare that I will describe shortly, lacks that certain je ne sais quoi.
But by and large, the sandwiches taste exactly as they do in Hollywood, with one key component missing. Spicy Polish, for example, is simply a world-class sausage, and has a real bite. Have it with grilled onions and it becomes the Harry Potter dog, though I do not know why.
And the 10-incher is available in various forms, but the quintessential way to eat it is as the chili cheese dog, where you get a nice ladle full of Pink's mild, meaty, delicious chili; a gooey cheese that even your mother doesn't want you to eat; and the dog.
I sacrificed my body to science and ordered, at 10 a.m., the pastrami burrito: a flour tortilla wrapped around two hot dogs, Swiss cheese, grilled pastrami, chili and onions. Hey, it's like G. Gordon Liddy famously said, "Whatever doesn't kill me, makes me stronger."
With the sausages, you get average fries, unevenly cooked frozen potatoes that don't make much of an impression, or for 95 cents extra, the café's vastly superior onion rings, a much better choice. It's all pretty good, but as I intimated before, minus a key element.
That is simply the camaraderie and atmosphere of standing at an LA hot-dog stand, with the weirdos, painted Valley girls, industry wannabees and zoot-suiters. Like it or not, the scene is as big a part of the Pink's experience as what is between the buns, and that is just something that cannot be reproduced.
I didn't see a single celebrity, either.