Best of the Las Vegas Valley 2005
OK, so maybe Las Vegas is in critical need of a cultural overhaul. This week's CityLife cover story is a reader-polled Best of the Las Vegas Valley compilation. I've been looking forward to this issue since I first heard about it soon after I moved here in September. Boy, am I disappointed.
Let's start at the bottom, shall we? I almost drove into a telephone pole when I was told the winner for Best Italian Restaurant: The Olive Garden. At least the editors weren't happy about it either:
OK, we were willing to let you slide on P.F. Chang's, but the freaking Olive Garden?! Are you kidding us? Yeah, we know, when you're there you're family, and you love those darn breadsticks. But in a town with more than its share of authentic Italian chefs slaving away in restaurant kitchens, if the best Italian food you can find is at the Olive Garden, you really ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Get off your asses and do some exploring, will you, or you won't be allowed to play this game again next year.
Culture that I don't cotton to is one thing, but no local culture at all is something I can't tolerate. By choosing a restaurant or a coffee shop (Best Coffee House: Starbucks) that can be found in virtually any city, you might as well be saying that Vegas has nothing to offer outside of the Strip -- and I know this isn't true. In fact, Vegas has all sorts of creative establishments that could've been highlighted here, but either its citizens are too lazy to go find them or the people who frequent them didn't bother to send in their selections to CityLife. To be fair, they did pick the best Mexican restaurant I've been to so far (Lindo Michoacan) and there are other selections that intrigue me.
I think CityLife shoulders a little of the blame here. How come they didn't offer the "CityLife Pick" for each category? It would've added an alternative viewpoint to the mix, something that was sorely lacking in the article. And of course I'm to blame a little myself for not participating in the voting. But as a new resident, I think it's excusable for me to wait until next year, when I promise I'll send in an entry.
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On the plus side, your best-of list from an alt weekly was at least organized in a useful manner, even if the content didn't hold up. What I would give for "best mexican", "best indian", "best burger" categories in the la weekly's mag. Instead, we get "best memory I had of a particular car wash in Pasadena that doesn't exist any more." Seriously. Most obtuse issue ever. And it was like 300 freaking pages.
I believe the philly weekly did the right thing (back when i lived there)- a readers' poll and a critics' pick (the latter had more lengthy articles) together. Organized logically. Indexed. Now that's useful. don't remember what the phoenix did.
Jon stole my thunder, except that he failed to use the word "pretentious." Link.
And good for the editors for that paragraph. I hope they were serious about not letting readers vote next year if their picks still suck. Alt-weeklies should not be about promoting large corporations. We have TV news for that. :P
To be fair, this doesn't mean that anywhere near a plurality of voters prefer Olive Garden-type food to authentic Italian food. The market for chain restaurants is far more consolidated than for good restaurants, so the votes for better places are probably split across 10 different restaurants, while few if any other Italian chains drew votes from Olive Garden. Don't you think?
True, but the same would apply to Boston, and I'm pretty sure the selections there were more interesting.
[...] Last year, I expressed dismay at the results of local alt-weekly City Life’s Best of the Valley 2006 choices, submitted by local readers. If you recall, Vegas readers chose unique establishments such as The Olive Garden for Best Italian and P.F. Chang’s for Best Chinese. I promised that I would submit a 2006 entry, and I plan to mail it in tomorrow. It’s only fair that I publish my own Food & Drink choices, so here they are. Let me know where I’ve gone wrong: [...]
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