Finding a diner in Las Vegas can be a real conundrum if you’re looking for a place that a) is not located in a casino or hotel; b) is not a national chain; c) does not have gaming or a bar; and d) is not decorated like some tired, old country cousins-ish tole-painting catastrophe.
Vegas is in need of some funky, eclectic and good diner-style joints. Luckily, the tide is rising with two establishments, Beach Cafe and Miami Beach Grill House. Both locally owned restaurants (the two are unrelated regardless of the similar “beach” monikers) go thematic on the decorations while keeping true to the homemade American diner experience.
Beach Cafe takes its name seriously. It’s decked out like a tropical surfing hot spot (as in surfboards and watery waves, not laptops and wireless wavelengths). Located in a Southwest strip mall, it’s bright and sunny inside with a cowabunga/tiki hut/Endless Summer vibe. Note that Beach Cafe does not do the camped-up Polynesian angle like Trader Vic’s or Kahunaville. Rather it’s a sand-and-surf-inspired place that serves up some very good breakfasts and lunches.
There is a definite California-meets-Santa Fe cuisine slant in the Beach Cafe menu. A great introduction, in taste and value, to the Beach Cafe breakfast board is the simple but savory sourdough egg sandwich ($5.75, with home fries) that is a significant meeting of scrambled eggs, thick bacon and pepper jack cheese.
A wide selection of egg-scramble plates range from the Greek Islands (spinach, tomatoes and feta) and the Beachcomber (grilled chicken, spinach, onions, mushrooms and cheddar) to the Sunset Beach (chicken apple sausage, tomato, onion and cheddar) and the Surf’s Up (avocado, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, bell peppers and cheddar jack cheese).
Most scrambles, with home fries, are $7.95.
Other breakfast staples such as eggs Benedict (traditional, veggie and smoked-salmon varieties), Belgian waffles, French toast and the combo that holds a breakfast menu together—biscuits and gravy—are available, too.
For lunch-goers, Beach Cafe offers a wide variety of sandwiches, burgers, wraps and salads. The house specialty, the grilled Monterey chicken sandwich ($8.25), gives a good picture of the restaurant’s approach to food. It’s a friendly collection of roast chicken, roasted green chilies, grilled onion, tomato and pepper jack bound up with jalapeño mayonnaise and fresh rustic bread. With a cup of the house soup, an uncommon corn chowder larded with kielbasa and chicken, this is perfect football-weather food.
Miami Beach Grill House drives straight for a retro ’30s-to-’60s nostalgia. It has reinvigorated one of the shiny metal-sided, art deco diner buildings that went defunct across the city in the last year. It’s filled with chrome, vintage movie posters, photos of James Dean and Elvis and functioning tabletop jukeboxes. If you’re looking to go wandering with Dion or find the Shangri-Las, this is the place to deposit your spare quarters.
Miami Beach Grill House echoes the time-tested American diner menu, and it does so mostly from scratch.
Of course, as it’s a diner, the breakfast trade here surges. Big omelets are customizable (with the favorite fillings—nothing overly gourmet or nouveau here) from a $5.99 baseline. Eggs Benedict and Florentine take the scrambled rather than poached route at $7.99. The place offers a handful of breakfast potato-style choices for each platter.
With its music, glimmer and neon, and a smiling happy face (a pancake-and-breakfast-meat visage; $3.99), Miami Beach Grill House is definitely a place kids will like.
There’s a wide, workman-like lunch menu befitting “The Leader of the Pack,” with large-sized burgers, venerable BLTs, tuna melts and old-school club sandwiches. Chef and tuna salad plates are substantial servings on the lighter side.
Unlike Beach Cafe, Miami Beach Grill House is open for dinner hours, and this is where it really shows its moxie. Amidst the chicken-fried steak and meat loaf offerings, the grilled ground sirloin plate stands out—a baseball-size beauty is flattened on the grill and doused with grilled onions and brown gravy (it’s not an overly salt-laden industrial slather, but made in-kitchen). The steamed veggies to the side are cut in-house. They’re not gleaming-but-processed shining florets of unnaturally green broccoli and improbably golden yellow squash slices that saw a deep-freeze chamber more recently than the field, but when you’re paying around $10.99 for homemade food, unevenly hued vegetable sides are not the focus.
Miami Beach Grill House’s spaghetti-and-meatball bowl ($8.99) provides surprising American diner bona fides. The marinara sauce shows the evidence of fresh tomatoes, and the meatballs themselves are meaty. In fact, they could use a little more bready filler, something not often said of chain diners’ supply chains. It’s a unique but important litmus test. If a diner doesn’t do the most basic (barely) Italian-American dish with care, how is it going to treat its down-home fried chicken?
Here it’s done well, as in properly.
Of course this retro diner has plenty of shakes, malts, root beer floats, cakes and other sweet desserts. Save room for pie and play some Buddy Holly on the jukebox.
Beach Cafe
7750 S. Jones Blvd. 898-5200. Open daily, 6 a.m.-4 p.m.
Miami Beach Grill House
1900 N. Buffalo Drive. 870-6424. Open daily, 7 a.m.-9 p.m.