The Mirage: New Vegas Old School ... and a Fountain for Your Ass
Written: Nov 27 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Comfortable furniture, great view, a special fountain for your dangly bits
Cons: Turn-down service does not come with happy ending.
The Bottom Line: This review contains no references to retards
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| Mr.Eyore's Full Review: The Mirage Hotel And Casino |
Normally I’m a downtown Vegas guy. I likes me some Binion’s poker and $79 Nugget rooms. I like the toothless down and outers, the retired anti-Semites and the plain folk in to see the bright lights. But my last trip was special. I was heading to Vegas to hang with Quitters: a tight group of old school eps folks who’d become my closest friends. And I knew that by the end of the weekend, I would be asking one of them to be my wife.
At first, we decided to get rooms at one of the lower end hotels on the strip - something close to the cheese but away from the energy traders and their weekends of low-end booze and high-end hookers ... something not Hard Rock or Palms. But things fell apart a little and it looked like we were all going to end up at different hotels. And when it began to look that way, the Chak pushed for some of us to stay at something a little more upscale.
A plain double occupancy, king-bed room at Bellagio runs $299 to $459 a night on weekends. A room at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay runs in the low $300s (apparently, no premium’s charged for the capital “THE”). I figured I’d look around and see if I couldn’t find something of equivalent quality with two bedrooms at around the same price, something that might also give us a living room for the group to hang out in. Among the places I checked out, that had a reputation for some level of quality, The Mirage seemed to offer the best deals. The two bedroom Penthouse Suite at the Mirage was available for $750 a night, which worked out to only $375 per room, or about what we would be paying each to stay at one of the newer hotels.
But unlike the newer hotels, the Penthouse Suite at the Mirage came with limo service, line-cutting privileges at the hotel’s restaurants and buffet, and, praise the lord, a bidet. ‘Cause, really, what beats a cool stream of water on your stinky ass? A competing hotel across the street offered a similar deal for about the same price, and that one came with a separate massage room off one of the bedrooms. But nobody at that hotel was willing to tell me if happy endings cost extra, so I went with the Mirage.
I could tell from the website that the suite was a full 1600 square feet, that it was likely to have a view, that there would be a stereo system and lots of teevees and fresh flowers and a Jacuzzi and a big ole wet bar. I could see from the website that the Mirage claimed to put nicer furniture in the Penthouse Suite than in the rest of the hotel, and that we could get butler service, and that it had electric curtains (a big plus for those who can’t figure out the complex manual method of curtain pulling). What I couldn’t figure out from their website, or from any other site on the internet, was whether or not the Penthouse Suite sucked.
And it very well might have. This is Vegas, after all. Home of the paper walls and stale cigarette smelling non-smoking rooms. Much in Vegas advertises itself as “class,” but the truth is, much of the city doesn’t much equate class with quality. If you take a look around, you’ll find that Vegas has more gilded turds than, well, than other places that might house guilded turds.
The Mirage is, after all, the flagship hotel of what was once the Steve Wynn hotel empire, and Steve Wynn is nothing if not the Donald Trump of Las Vegas, lousy combover and all. To Wynn, nothing says class like dolphin statues and ‘sploding volcanos. Nothing says entertainment (with jazz hands) like Bavarian kitten molesters Siegfried and Roy.
But the Mirage suite was nicer than I had allowed myself to hope for. The pictures on their website showed a distinctly old-world aesthetic of busy gaudiness and rococo furnishings, hand carved tables, cheesy statuary and faux-renaissance portraiture. But our room was nothing of the sort. Muted tones and clean lines prevailed. A large, beige leather sofa lined one bank of floor to ceiling windows, and comfortable padded chairs circled a nice oversized coffee table. The living room also had a nice, large marble dining table and a fine stereo system that chak was able to rig her iPod up to. Our room looked down on Caesars Palace’s new Coliseum, and out on a gorgeous desert and mountain vista. The full sized bar was topped with polished granite and had a sink and two refrigerators (one for our stuff and another filled with the usual hotel scams - 30 dollar peanuts and the like. Plus, they were kind enough to have plenty of electrical sockets for our blender and cell-phone rechargers and whatnot.
The bedrooms had wonderful, California king beds with great pillows and linens as nice as any I’ve had in any hotel. And televisions that rose out of a piece of furniture at the foot of the bed by some motorized contraption and a large, comfortable chaise by the window.
The bathrooms were astoundingly luxurious. They were about the size of a large hotel room unto themselves, with dual sinks and separate walk-in closets and separate hot tub and steam-shower and, best of all, a separate john (and bidet!) all the way down a hallway in the bathroom. Plus about a dozen pretty nice soaps and creams and salts and lotions and mouth wash and the like.
All in all, the place was just nice. You could comfortably have a dozen people in the room all day without feeling in the least bit cramped, and I would be shocked to learn that the room hadn’t had a party of twenty-five or thirty at least once. The place was so big that the evening turn-down service (which appears to have included fresh Hawaiian orchids and nice chocolates on each bed and some sort of straightening up that I didn’t really follow) seemed to take about a half-hour.
I did have a few small complaints, though. Chak informed us when we arrived that she had been awakened from her nap by the couple next door, the female half of which was screaming in some sort of Marilyn Monroe voice: “Oh yeah, I love it when you fuck me!” in way the chak found, frankly, unconvincing. The second refrigerator was not set to “On” when we checked in, which was a tad annoying, since it delayed the unpacking of food and the chilling of beer. The hotel fails to provide free bottled water in the room, and charged some absurd amount for the small bottles in the mini-fridge (and in Vegas, with the punped in air and hot dry climate, you really need to hydrate). And the vending machine at the far end of the enormously long hallway charged 3 bucks per can of soda.
All of that is, I guess, nit-picking. It was a great room and it was worth the price. I’m not certain the same can be said of the rest of the hotel.
the casino
The Mirage Casino doesn’t real ‘em in like it used to. It’s just not a premier hotel any more, in terms of attracting players. They don’t host any of the premier shows and they don’t have any of the hot clubs or ultra lounges. That being the case, it’s a tad irksome that the Mirage still sets its table limits as though they can get away with having nothing for the little guys. None of their hold ‘em tables were lower than 4-8, and their lowest table limits for black-jack on Friday and Saturday night were $25, with only a few $10 tables thrown in during the day. At least half of their slots and video poker are now dollar or above. And it’s not like the tables were all that crowded. Hell, even the Hard Rock, which is wall to wall bodies on a Friday night, has a few $5.00 black jack tables. We ended up playing some low limit slots with J.No and Amy, then Jojo and I played a few hours of 1-5 stud in their not terribly comfortable poker room.
On the plus side, the Mirage waitresses were mighty quick with the drinks, and didn’t seem to mind serving up the freebies to J.No while she sat bored for an hour with the same nickel credit in an un-pulled slot machine.
restaurants
Our first night there, Jojo, Chak and I ate at the resident Italian restaurant, Onda, which I found to be loud, overpriced and inefficient. The food was fine, if unspectacular. I think all three of us ordered some kind of chicken dish and had a glass of wine each, no appetizers, and it ran about $150.
Saturday, the laydeez had lunch at the California Pizza Kitchen, which they all said was just fine. I was actually happy to see that the hotel had a CPK, which, as far as chain joints go, I think is pretty good. I frequently stay at the Golden Nugget downtown when I’m in Vegas, and I often find that during a weekend of buffets and Vegas meat, a simple CPK salad or soup is kind of refreshing.
On our second night, we ate at the Mirage buffet, which was better than I expected, based on reviews I’d seen on line, and fairly reasonable at $22.00. I tried the King Crab legs and large shrimp, both of which were perfectly fine - not dry or overcooked. I had a small taste of almost all the meats they had to offer, from a nice, moist turkey, to the delicious bacon wrapped pork loin with port wine reduction, to the grilled tri-tip with some kind of spicy-oily-herby Argentinian sauce that I always forget the name of. The vegatable offerings were fine, if unremarkable. The sushi looked pathetic. The Chinese dumpling and whatnot looked pretty good, and the prime rib, if you like that sort of thing, looked perfectly as edible at prime rib is likely to look.
Sunday morning, we ate at the Carnegie Deli. Vile, nasty place. It was cramped and loud, and Chak and I each ordered only a bowl of chicken soup, which was truly inedible. It was as if someone had microwaved a small glass of water with 35 chicken bullion cubes. Then added a gallon and a half of salt. They were nice enough not to make us pay for it though. On the up side, Jayno tried rye bread for the first time, and she didn’t much complain about it.
In conclusion, the Mirage kind of sucks in many ways, which is probably why it is possible to get a truly awesome room there for a very good price.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Mr.Eyore
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I come for the pervasive sense of elitist self-importance and semi-witty expressions of faux camaraderie
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