I'm sitting at the counter in the diner inside the Golden Gate, devouring a wonderful cheeseburger. This is my last meal in the Bay City Diner, but I don’t know it yet. This old, reliable, downtown greasy spoon will become something else, something slightly different and even better.
But let’s focus on this cheeseburger. For months I've been riding a trend, eating and writing about fancy, 12 to 20-dollar gourmet burgers at restaurants on the Strip opened by famous French chefs, burgers with handcrafted, imported ingredients and a custom formulated blend of ground cow, but this thing is making me forget them all. It's a third-pound of chuck off the flat-top, dropped on a butter-toasted bun with extra crispy bacon, sauteed mushrooms and way too much melted Swiss, shredded iceberg, two big tomato slices, four nice dill pickle chips and a full disc of yellow onion. It was cooked by a very tall, very thin, very bald black man who's wearing an impossibly white coat, working hard without breaking a sweat, encased in a shiny, silver, grease-spattered kitchen a few feet in front of me. For a minute, he’s staring out at me through the big open kitchen window. His eyes seem to be asking what I think of this burger. I think it’s great. His nametag reads JOE and he's wearing gold hoop earrings and gold-framed glasses. How is his coat so white? He's teasing the waitresses, occasionally gyrating a little and singing "Freaky In The Club" by R. Kelly. That’s extra funny because that’s not the song playing over the tinny speakers in the diner. It’s “On My Own.” The waitress is ignoring his performance, instead trying to find out who's singing the piped-in song. It's Patti Labelle. High above the counter, mirrored display cases show you which pies and cakes are available today. The old man to my right has a handkerchief tied around his neck and is ordering a ham steak and eggs over easy with a side of sausage and orange juice, but he doesn’t want his juice until the food comes. The guy to my left is ignoring his cheese-covered omelet and calling in NBA point spreads to someone over the phone. This burger is gone. It was delicious, an exemplary, American cheeseburger.
The Golden Gate is the oldest hotel-casino in the state of Nevada. Also, it is older than the Golden Gate Bridge, which is interesting because it’s probably the only Vegas casino that’s been around longer than whatever it’s themed after. (Of course, the casino wasn’t always called the Golden Gate.) Perhaps it’s more interesting that in 1905, the hotel’s prime downtown location at Main and Fremont streets was the site of the land auction that began the Las Vegas town site. There were guests at what was then called Hotel Nevada that May, before there was a building, staying in a tent structure. Downtown Las Vegas was happening before it was downtown Las Vegas. When the mission-style building opened in 1906, people insisted on staying at the hotel before the interiors were completed. Casino action started in the spring of 1907 with roulette, craps and blackjack. The first telephone in Vegas was installed here, too. In the early 1930s, the joint changed its name. For around 20 years it was dubbed, quite ridiculously, Sal Sagev, or Las Vegas spelled backwards. The beginnings of its San Francisco-themed makeover took hold when a group of Italian-Americans from the Bay Area took over in 1955.
The boss of the Golden Gate today, a friendly guy named Mark Brandenburg, is a Las Vegas lawyer who ditched his practice to join the family business. His stepfather was one of those San Francisco guys, and around 1990, Brandenburg and his brother Craig started buying out those other owners. Since then, they’ve added a few hotel rooms and efficiently updated the property, turning it into something of an old-school boutique hotel on the old-schooliest street in Vegas. In 1996, for better or for worse, the classic downtown drag was forever altered when the Fremont Street Experience canopy was finished. This 1,500-foot ceiling of cheesy flashing lights brought some good to the five blocks of Fremont where the Gate, Plaza, Binion’s, Golden Nugget and other casinos reside (it’s much cleaner now and suitable for outdoor concerts and events) but it also transformed a nice chunk of our history into a nostalgic pedestrian mall. Visit and make your own judgments.
Sitting in his small, plain office upstairs from the casino, Brandenburg gives me a quick history of his family and his casino. Mom was from West Virginia. She stopped in Vegas on the way back from California and never made it home. It was the weather. She got a job as a cocktail waitress at the Gate and met Italo Ghelfi, the leader of that group of San Francisco guys, the one who ran the casino for 40 years. There’s a picture frame set on a shelf in this office, a photo of Ghelfi, and the guy looks mean. He’s kinda bald and he’s wearing dark glasses, like a clichéd character from that Vegas era. But Brandenburg assures me that’s not the case; he was another friendly guy, and quite the gaming pioneer. Ghelfi didn’t just keep the casino going. His innovations and ideas established a reputation on Fremont Street that Brandenburg and his co-owners are still taking advantage of today. Not every casino is so open and proud of its history. Most are caught up in making things new again, and again, and the Gate – which is a nice, clean place to gamble and party – is quick to remind you of a bygone era. It doesn’t want to change too much, and I don’t want it to. I didn’t want the Bay City Diner to change, but it did.
But wait, we’ve moved past something very important. The Gate’s casino is just fine. It feels like downtown, it’s kinda dark and whisky-friendly, and there’s a nice long bar resting beside the main stretch of table games. Some new bells and whistles have been added in the last year, including go-go dancers on busy nights and a frozen beverage bar in front of the main entrance on Fremont Street. As a hotel, I have no interest in the Gate because the accommodations don’t converge with my primary hotel principle, which states: If I can afford it, I don’t want to stay there. But I’ll allow some secondhand description from my kid brother: It’s tiny. I heard some of the rooms are the original rooms from when it was built, and I think that’s the room I got. It’s so small that the TV is on the side of the bed because it wouldn’t fit anywhere else. It’s so small the bathroom door won’t open all the way because it hits the toilet. I was terrified to walk in and out of my room because I kept thinking there’d be creepy twin sisters at the end of the halls. You get the picture.
Casino, hotel, diner … these are not the things the Golden Gate is known for. For most, it always has been ground zero for the shrimp cocktail. This is another Ghelfi innovation, obviously, coming from the Bay. It began in 1959 and it hasn’t stopped. As long as I can remember, the price was 99 cents, but today it’s $1.99. That gets you a tall, cool parfait glass, “the tulip,” overflowing with chilled, firm, large shrimp, doused in spicy cocktail sauce and served with a lemon wedge and as many Saltines as you need. There’s no lettuce. Who needs lettuce? I’ve brought a handful of people through here, some out-of-towners and some just out of touch with downtown, and everyone thinks the shrimp cocktail is a joke. But they try one, just for kicks, and they’ve all admitted: This thing is pretty good. The shrimp bar is at the south end of the casino, in the back, right down the stairs from Brandenburg’s office. He told me they’ve been going through about a ton of shrimp a week for a long, long time. I asked him how many times a day he asks his assistant to run down and grab him one. “I go down and get my own.” Yes. I would, too, many times a day. In the pantheon of Vegas novelties (and they are harder to acquire or experience than they used to be) the shrimp cocktail is one I refuse to go without. In any steakhouse, you can get a good one, but here, it is tradition. That’s what makes it taste so good.
But everything changes. Like the diner, the shrimp bar was the target of a subtle upgrade recently. There always was more than shrimp on the menu; hot dogs, deli sandwiches, surprisingly tasty, spicy vegetable soup and standard slices of pie were among the popular items. Now, the pie is way, way better. This is because of Du-par’s. Here’s the crazy connection that brought a famed L.A. coffee shop to historic downtown Vegas: Du-par’s owner Biff Naylor built the original kitchen in the Golden Gate diner. That’s because his dad, Tiny Naylor, was a former partner in the casino. The Naylors are a legendary California restaurant family, in case you haven’t heard, starting when Tiny opened up his waffle shops in 1926. They bought the 70-year-old Du-par’s chain in 2004 and kept things the same, particularly the restaurant’s famous, buttery pancakes and fresh-from-scratch pies. And so when Brandenburg went hunting for improvement, it was natural to transform my beloved Bay City Diner into Du-par’s Restaurant & Bakery. And I can’t complain, because the place looks exactly the same: the long, dark wood counter I call home, windows peering out to Main Street, red leather booths, the dining room in the back. The cuisine is mostly the same, classic breakfast, lunch and dinner at the diner. But now, everything is a little bit … better.
There’s no sign of JOE back in the kitchen, but many of the servers are still here. The cooks’ coats are still immaculately white, and now they’ve accessorized with a red handkerchief knotted around the neck. Those mirrored cases up above are now densely populated with pies, all kinds of pies, and they look and taste so much better than the Bay City Diner’s dessert offerings. On the counter, there are more cases, big round glass ones, holding gigantic, shining doughnuts. It’s difficult to get past the baked goods, to not order a sweet almond bear claw or mountainous muffin. But if you do move beyond breakfast – and know that those buttercrisp-edged pancakes live up to every ounce of their reputation – you’ll find some stellar throwback food, hearty all-American stuff like yellow split pea soup, meatloaf with mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy and tuna melts. But I needed the cheeseburger to be great in order to properly put things to rest, so after I tried all that stuff, and a few different flavors of pie, I went back for more. I sat at the counter. I considered the patty melt, a beautiful thing on grilled rye bread with just the right amount of caramelized onions, but I decided to stay pure. Bacon and Swiss burger, still all chuck, still with a pile of fries. It came out quick, and it wasn’t the same burger. It was probably better. The bun was great, fresh and soft. The bacon was smokier. The meat quality was several steps up, and not over-seasoned. Everything was right. I killed it with speed, and I left feeling satisfied and guilt-free. Change must be good, because I still have never left the Golden Gate after lunch feeling anything other than happy to be in Las Vegas.
