THE GOLDEN TIKI ★★★
I went on Saturday.
I want to be clear about the decision, because the decision was a departure, and departures should be documented with the same precision as arrivals. For six days after I decoded the specials board cipher — for six days after I walked Spring Mountain Road reading the first letters of daily specials and assembling nightly messages from a distributed communication system hidden in the margins of a hundred and fifty restaurants — I did not act on the information. I had the message: GOLDEN TIKI SATURDAY NINE BELLS. I had the statistical analysis proving the cipher was real. I had a spreadsheet, five nights of data, and a professional instinct honed by a decade of data journalism that told me: the next step is verification. The next step is always verification. You do not publish a pattern. You verify a pattern, and then you publish the verification, and the verification is the story, not the pattern.
But I was not publishing. I was writing a restaurant guide. And the restaurant guide had reached a point where the next restaurant I needed to review was the Golden Tiki — a tiki bar on Spring Mountain Road that I had been planning to visit since my second week on the corridor, because it was the second tiki bar in the guide, the echo of Frankie's, and because two tiki bars on the same network is either a coincidence or a rhyme, and I was no longer in a position to tell the difference.
So I went. On Saturday. At nine. Not because the cipher told me to, but because I had a review to write and the timing was convenient. This is what I told myself. I am recording what I told myself because the gap between what I told myself and what I knew to be true is the gap this guide has been living in since Chapter 3, and the gap is no longer a crack — the gap is the territory, and the guide is mapping the territory, and the territory is the gap.
The Golden Tiki sits in a strip mall at 3939 Spring Mountain Road — the same strip mall ecosystem that houses Chengdu Taste a quarter mile to the east, the same strip mall grammar of shared parking lots and nondescript storefronts that defines the corridor. From the outside, it could be anything. A nail salon. An insurance office. A restaurant supply warehouse. The sign is visible but modest, and the entrance — a passage through faux lava rock, with a small waterfall running over stones in a channel to your left — transforms you from a person standing in a strip mall parking lot into a person entering a cave, and the transformation occurs in approximately four steps, which is fast enough to be disorienting and slow enough to be intentional, and the intention is the point: you are being told, by the architecture, that where you are going is not where you were.
Inside. Four thousand square feet of permanent night.
I have been in another tiki bar in this guide — Frankie's, on Charleston, the first five-star restaurant in this guide, the place where time was abolished and I lost a night I have not found. The Golden Tiki is not Frankie's. Frankie's is a chapel — austere in its excess, monastic in its commitment to the elimination of external reality. The Golden Tiki is a cathedral — spectacular, ornate, designed to overwhelm the senses rather than strip them. Where Frankie's removes the world, the Golden Tiki replaces it. Four themed zones unfold from the entrance: the main bar, backed by the Golden Tiki itself — a carved idol behind the bottles, lit from below, presiding over the spirits with the authority of a deity who takes drink orders. The Pirate's Lair, where the booths are dark and the ropes hang from the ceiling and the aesthetic is the specific aesthetic of a ship that has been at sea long enough to forget what land looks like. The Headhunter's Village, decorated with skull racks and cargo cult artifacts and a twenty-foot waterfall that produces a constant, ambient roar, the sound of water falling in a place where water should not be, which is, I now understand, the defining characteristic of Las Vegas — water in the desert, waterfalls in strip malls, rivers inside casinos, the relentless importation of the thing the landscape does not provide. And the Mermaid Cove, which features a small stage styled as a 1920s theater, framed by a giant conch shell, and which I am going to describe in more detail later in this review because the Mermaid Cove is where the thing happened, and the thing that happened is the reason this chapter exists, and the reason this chapter exists is the reason the guide exists, which I will explain, or which will explain itself, or which will resist explanation in a way that is, itself, the explanation.
The cocktails are serious. I want to establish this before the review becomes the other thing the review is going to become, because the cocktails deserve to be evaluated on their own terms, and their terms are excellent. The Mai Tai — the Trader Vic's original, or as close to it as any contemporary bar achieves — is built with a blend of rums (Dominican, Jamaican dark, Jamaican overproof) that produces a layered, complex sweetness undercut by fresh lime and orgeat, the almond syrup that is the Mai Tai's secret structural element, the thing that holds the rum's sweetness and the lime's acid in suspension and prevents the drink from collapsing into either cloying or sour. The Painkiller — the canonical tiki drink, the drink that the United States Navy used to prescribe for exactly the condition its name describes — is coconut cream and pineapple and orange and rum, and the Golden Tiki's version is precise, the proportions correct, the cream not too thick, the pineapple fresh rather than canned, the rum present but not dominant. These are drinks made by people who understand that a tiki cocktail is not a joke — that the umbrella and the ceramic mug and the elaborate garnish are not irony but liturgy, the ceremonial vessel through which the spirit (the liquid, the metaphysical; the pun is intended and the pun is the point) is delivered.
I ordered a Mai Tai. I sat at the bar. It was 8:47 PM. Video poker machines were embedded in the bar top — a detail that exists only in Las Vegas, the marriage of drinking and gambling so complete that the bar itself is a casino, the act of setting down your drink an act of placing a bet, the two most ancient human negotiations with chance (what happens when I drink this, what happens when I wager this) fused into a single piece of furniture.
I drank my Mai Tai and I watched the room and I waited for nine bells.
At nine o'clock, several things happened.
The first: the animatronic skeleton behind the bar — a permanent fixture, a talking skull that delivers scripted lines at intervals I had not yet determined — activated. It said something I could not hear over the music. A few people at the bar laughed. The skull's jaw moved with the mechanical sincerity of a thing that has been programmed to simulate speech and is performing the simulation with total commitment, which is, if you think about it, not so different from what the rest of us are doing.
The second: a woman I recognized sat down two seats to my left.
The Retired Showgirl. From Frankie's — the woman who handed me the Principia Discordia at Frankie's Tiki Room. From the Italian American Club — the woman who appeared at a table near the stage, exchanging nods with the other diners in a room where everyone nodded and nobody waved. Here, now, at a tiki bar on Spring Mountain Road, on a Saturday, at nine, wearing a silk blouse the color of a sunset I had seen from the Top of the World restaurant on my first week in the city — the specific amber-gold of a Las Vegas dusk viewed from eight hundred and forty-four feet through tinted glass.
She did not look at me. She ordered a drink. The bartender knew what she wanted without being told, which meant she was a regular, which meant she was known, which meant this was her place in the way that Frankie's was her place and the Italian American Club was her place — she moved through the network's geography like a current through a river, present at each location, known at each location, connected to a hidden city she may have helped build.
The third thing that happened at nine o'clock: a door opened at the back of the Mermaid Cove — a door I had not noticed, because it was designed not to be noticed, set into the bamboo wall behind the conch-shell stage with the craft of a stage set, a door that was, when closed, part of the scenery, and when open, a passage to the private event space that the Golden Tiki calls the Island Oasis.
A man appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a guayabera.
I need to pause the narrative here and address the reader directly, because what I am about to describe is the reason this chapter carries a three-star rating, and the three-star rating requires an explanation that the review format can provide but that honesty demands I provide first.
I am a food critic. I rate restaurants. The rating system I use in this guide is a five-star scale based on four criteria: food quality, service, atmosphere, and value. I have applied this system consistently across twelve chapters and thirty-plus reviews. I have bent the system — at the Peppermill, at Frankie's, at the Italian American Club — and each time I bent it, I documented the bending, and the documentation was my defense against the accusation that the system was no longer functioning. The system was functioning. The system was being applied to situations it was not designed for, and the fact that it produced results in those situations — that a five-star rating for acoustic architecture or a four-star rating for temporal displacement could be meaningful and defensible — was evidence that the system was more flexible than I had believed, not that the system was broken.
What I am about to rate was not a restaurant. What I am about to rate was a dinner — a dinner served in a private event space at a tiki bar on Spring Mountain Road, attended by approximately forty-five people, featuring a menu I did not choose and could not have predicted and which consisted of food that I must evaluate with the same rigor I brought to the Numb-Taste Wonton at Chengdu Taste and the veal Marsala at the Italian American Club, because the rigor is the system and the system is the guide and the guide must hold, even here, especially here, in the place where the guide is being tested most severely.
The food was hot dogs.
I am going to give this dinner three stars. The atmosphere was extraordinary. The service was unprecedented. The food was hot dogs.
The Island Oasis is a private event space at the back of the Golden Tiki, accessible through the hidden door in the Mermaid Cove. Capacity: one hundred and forty-five, according to the venue's website, which I had not consulted before this evening because I had not known this space existed, because the space is not visible from the main bar, because the space is hidden behind a door that looks like a wall, because hiding things behind walls that look like other things is what this city does, and what this network does, and what this guide is learning to do.
The room was set up for dinner. Long tables — five of them, because the number is always five — arranged in a star pattern — the five tables forming five sides of a shape that I recognized, with a start that was half recognition and half dread, as a pentagon. They had built a pentagon out of tables. The Discordians had constructed the shape, the way Discordians construct everything — deliberately, playfully, with the knowledge that the construction was both meaningful and absurd. The interior was left open as a central space. Each table was set for nine — plates, napkins, forks, knives, water glasses — and the settings were mismatched, the plates from different sets, the glasses different sizes, the napkins different colors, the forks not matching the knives, and the mismatch was not poverty or negligence but policy. I could see, in the deliberate variety of the place settings, the same principle I had seen in the specials board cipher: information embedded in the ordinary, meaning hidden in the apparent disorder, a system disguised as its absence.
Forty-five place settings. Five tables. Nine per table. 4 + 5 = 9. 5 × 9 = 45. 4 + 5 = 9. I was counting in their system again, and I was no longer pretending that I was doing it involuntarily.
The room was lit by candles — real candles, not electric, not LED, not the simulated flames that the Strip uses to produce the experience of fire without the liability of fire. Real wax, real flame, real smoke. The smoke mixed with the residual incense of the bar's permanent atmosphere — the tiki bar's ambient scent of rum and coconut and something tropical and something burning — and the combined effect was of a room that existed outside the city, outside the strip mall, outside the parking lot where my car sat next to a delivery van and a Tesla, in a temporal and spatial zone that the Golden Tiki's four themed lounges had been preparing me for, the way an appetizer prepares the palate for the entrée, the way a foyer prepares the body for the room.
People were arriving. Through the hidden door, one and two at a time, they entered the Island Oasis and found their seats. I did not know how they knew which seats were theirs — there were no name cards, no assignments that I could see — but each person walked directly to a specific seat with the certainty of someone who has sat there before, many times, in a room they know the way you know your kitchen, by the body's memory rather than the mind's.
I recognized some of them. The Retired Showgirl took a seat at the table nearest the door. The man in the guayabera — whom I had first seen at Atomic Liquors in Chapter 6, had possibly seen again at the Italian American Club in Chapter 11, and who was now unmistakably here, present, the same man, the same shirt — sat at the table farthest from the door. A young woman I had seen working the counter at a Vietnamese bánh mì shop on the western end of the corridor sat at the center table. A bartender I recognized from a ramen restaurant sat across from her. Line cooks — I could identify them by their hands, by the burns on their forearms, by the particular posture of people who spend twelve hours standing at a station reaching for pans — took seats throughout the room.
And then the man in the guayabera stood up and said: "It's Friday."
Someone at the third table said: "It's Saturday."
The man in the guayabera said: "Every day is Friday. Every day has been Friday since 1958. The calendar is a Greyface document and we do not recognize its authority over our mealtimes."
The room laughed. Not the laugh of an audience — the laugh of a congregation, the shared exhalation of people who have heard this call-and-response before and whose laughter is not a reaction to novelty but a participation in ritual. A liturgy of the absurd, performed with the timing of a comedy routine and the sincerity of a prayer.
The man in the guayabera said: "All Hail Eris."
The room said: "All Hail Discordia."
And the hot dogs arrived.
I need to explain the hot dog.
In the Principia Discordia — the foundational text of the Discordian religion, which I have been carrying in my bag since Chapter 9 and which I have now read three times, each reading revealing a layer that the previous reading had missed, the way each visit to a great restaurant reveals a layer the previous visit missed — there is a passage that establishes the hot dog as the sacred food of Discordianism. The passage is, like everything in the Principia, simultaneously a joke and not a joke. It concerns the Original Snub — the mythological event that began the entire Discordian cosmology, in which the goddess Eris was not invited to a party held by the other gods, and in response, threw a golden apple inscribed with the word KALLISTI ("to the fairest") into the gathering, which caused a dispute among the goddesses that led, by a chain of events that the Principia traces with gleeful precision, to the Trojan War.
The hot dog is sacred because of what it is not. A hot dog is not a meal you serve at a party where you are trying to impress the gods. A hot dog is not elegant, is not sophisticated, is not the food of temples or banquets or Michelin-starred restaurants. A hot dog is the food of baseball games and highway rest stops and county fairs and children's birthday parties — the food of the profane, the ordinary, the everyday. The Discordians chose the hot dog as their sacrament because the Discordians worship a goddess who was excluded from the sophisticated party of the Olympians, and the hot dog is the food of the excluded — the food that no one would serve at the party, which makes it the perfect food for the people who were not invited.
The hot dog is also, and I want to acknowledge this with the professional seriousness it deserves, a food of genuine culinary interest that has been systematically underrated by exactly the kind of food criticism I have practiced for twenty years. A hot dog is a sausage — a forcemeat of pork, or beef, or both, seasoned and emulsified and stuffed into a casing and cooked — which means a hot dog is, in its fundamental technology, no different from the artisanal charcuterie that fine dining restaurants serve on $40 boards with cornichons and whole-grain mustard. The difference is not in the product. The difference is in the presentation, the context, the story that is told about the food, and the story that has been told about the hot dog is a story of cheapness and convenience and democratic availability, and this story is true, and this story is also a form of the Curse of Greyface — the reduction of a thing to its most optimized, most standardized, most efficient version, until the thing loses its identity and becomes merely its function.
The hot dogs that arrived at the ceremony dinner were not artisanal. They were not locally sourced or hand-stuffed or smoked over applewood. They were, as far as I could determine by visual and gustatory inspection, commercial all-beef franks — the kind you buy in a package of eight at a grocery store for four dollars and ninety-nine cents, the kind that a food critic would normally encounter only at a cookout to which the food critic has been dragged by family members who do not understand that the food critic cannot stop being a food critic even at a cookout, and the cookout is being evaluated, silently, with the involuntary precision of a person whose occupation has become their condition.
They were served in buns. The buns were soft white enriched-flour buns — the standard American hot dog bun, the bun that has been engineered to be the platonic ideal of softness, to provide no resistance to the teeth, to disappear in the mouth so that the hot dog can be experienced without the interference of bread, which is, if you think about it, a remarkable inversion of the sandwich principle, in which the bread is the structure and the filling is the content. In a hot dog, the bread is the absence of structure, and the content is everything.
The condiments were arrayed on the tables in communal dishes: yellow mustard, ketchup, relish (sweet and dill), chopped white onion, sauerkraut, jalapeño slices, and — this detail arrested me — pickled daikon radish, which is not a traditional hot dog condiment in any American regional tradition I am aware of, but which is available at every Asian grocery store on Spring Mountain Road, and which suggested that the ceremony's catering had been supplemented by a trip to the corridor, by someone who had walked into a market and bought the thing the market sold and brought it to the ceremony and placed it on the table alongside the yellow mustard and the ketchup, and the juxtaposition of the daikon and the ketchup was Spring Mountain Road in miniature — the corridor where cultures do not blend so much as coexist, each maintaining its integrity while sharing a table.
Alongside the hot dogs: a Pu Pu Platter from the Golden Tiki's kitchen — coconut shrimp, wings, sweet potato fries, spring rolls — the standard bar food of a tiki bar that offers catering for private events. The Pu Pu Platter was adequate. The coconut shrimp were correctly fried — golden, the coating holding, the shrimp inside curled and tender, the coconut providing a sweetness that the cocktail sauce checked. The wings were sauced — a peachy pepper glaze that was better than it needed to be and worse than it could have been, the glaze too sweet, not enough heat, the wings themselves properly sized and properly cooked but coated in a sauce that was reaching for a flavor it did not quite achieve. The sweet potato fries were sweet potato fries. I have reviewed sweet potato fries at establishments charging sixty dollars a plate, and I have reviewed sweet potato fries at establishments charging six dollars a plate, and the difference between the two is the oil and the salt and the cut, and the Golden Tiki's sweet potato fries were fine — the oil was clean, the salt was present, the cut was uniform. Fine.
I am reviewing a religious ceremony. I want to acknowledge this. I want to sit inside the absurdity of what I am doing — sitting at a five-sided arrangement of tables in a private room behind a hidden door in a tiki bar on Spring Mountain Road, eating a hot dog and evaluating the condiment selection and the fry quality of a Pu Pu Platter while forty-four other people participate in a ritual that involves call-and-response invocations of a Greek goddess and a sacred text written in a bowling alley in 1958 — and I want to acknowledge that the absurdity is the point, and the point is the absurdity, and the review format is holding, and the fact that the review format is holding is the most remarkable discovery in this chapter.
Because the format works. The format works here the way it works everywhere: you enter a space, you sit down, you are served food, you eat the food, you evaluate the food, you evaluate the space, you evaluate the service, you describe the experience, and you assign a rating. The format does not require the space to be a restaurant. The format does not require the food to be good. The format requires only that food is served in a space to a person who is paying attention, and I am paying attention, and the food is being served, and the space is extraordinary, and the food is hot dogs, and the hot dogs are three stars.
Let me explain the three stars.
The atmosphere, which in my rating system carries twenty-five percent of the total score: five stars. Full marks. I am giving the atmosphere of this dinner five stars because the atmosphere is the most precisely calibrated environment I have experienced since the Italian American Club, and the calibration is achieving something I have never seen a dining atmosphere achieve, which is the simultaneous production of comedy and reverence in the same room at the same time, without either undermining the other.
The ceremony proceeded as follows. After the hot dogs were distributed — "served" is the wrong word; they were brought to the tables by people I had seen sitting at other tables, who rose, went to the kitchen, and returned carrying trays, so that the service was communal, the servers were the diners, the congregation served itself — the man in the guayabera, who appeared to function as a kind of officiant, though the word "officiant" implies an authority that Discordianism explicitly rejects, began a reading.
He read from the Principia Discordia. The passage was the one I had read at Dino's Lounge in Chapter 9 — the Starbuck's Pebbles section, about the Original Snub, about Eris and the golden apple and the party she was excluded from. He read it deadpan, with the timing of a man who has performed stand-up comedy or has spent time in front of audiences, and the room listened the way a room listens when the thing being said is known — not the attention of discovery but the attention of recognition, the way a congregation listens to a liturgy it has heard a hundred times and hears differently the hundred-and-first time because they are different the hundred-and-first time, because the liturgy has been working on them in the intervals between hearings, the way yeast works on dough.
He reached the passage about the hot dog. He read:
"A Discordian is required to eat a hot dog on a Friday. A Discordian must go off alone and partake joyously of a hot dog; this devotive ceremony to remonstrate against the popular paganisms of the day: of Catholic christendom — no meat on Fridays, of ## Judaism — no pork this or that, of Hindic peoples — no beef period, of Buddhists — no hot dog; and of Discordians who are not really combatting the spirit of the thing."
The room ate their hot dogs. I ate my hot dog. The hot dog was — I am going to evaluate it with the same criteria I apply to every dish in this guide — the hot dog was a commercial all-beef frank in a soft white bun, reheated to an internal temperature that I estimated at 160°F, which is correct, with a casing that provided a satisfying snap when bitten, the snap being the most important textural element of a hot dog and the element most frequently lost in steaming (these had been grilled, or at least griddle-heated, which preserved the casing's integrity). The beef was salty, sweet in the way that commercial franks are sweet (a background sweetness from the cure, from the corn syrup that is used in the emulsion, from the dextrose that is part of the commercial sausage-making process), and the flavor was — I want to use the right word — the flavor was honest. The hot dog tasted like a hot dog. It did not taste like a deconstructed hot dog, or an elevated hot dog, or a hot dog that was trying to be something other than a hot dog. It tasted like the food of baseball games and highway rest stops and cookouts and children's birthday parties. It tasted like the food of the profane. It tasted sacred.
I put yellow mustard on my second one. The mustard was French's. The mustard was correct.
The ceremony continued. I am going to describe it as service, because in my rating system, service includes everything that the staff does between the moment you are seated and the moment you leave, and the ceremony was, functionally, service — the structured sequence of events that accompanied the food, that provided the context in which the food was consumed, that created the conditions under which the dining experience occurred.
After the reading from the Principia, the man in the guayabera invited anyone who wished to speak to stand and share "a report from the field." This phrase — "a report from the field" — was delivered with the inflection of a phrase that has been used many times, in many ceremonies, by many people, and whose meaning has been shaped by repetition into something more specific than the words themselves convey. A report from the field. A report from the restaurants, from the corridor, from the kitchens and the bars and the dining rooms where the network operates.
A woman stood. She was in her sixties — the Retired Showgirl, though I did not know this was what the network called her, did not learn it until later — and she spoke for approximately three minutes about a Vietnamese sandwich shop on the western end of the corridor where she ran a reading group on Tuesday afternoons. The reading group read the Principia Discordia. They had been reading it for eleven years. They had read it, she said, forty-seven times, and each time through revealed something the previous reading had missed, and she had begun to suspect that the book was not a fixed text but a living document that rewrote itself between readings, because the words on the page were the same words every time and the meanings were different every time, and this was either a miracle or a function of the readers changing between readings, and she had decided, after forty-seven passes, that the distinction did not matter.
The room murmured. Not applause — murmur. The murmur of assent, of recognition, of people hearing something they already knew confirmed by someone they trusted. The murmur of a congregation.
A young man stood. He was a line cook — I could see the burns on his hands, the particular burns of a wok station, the spatter pattern of oil that has been heated to the smoke point and flicked by the motion of a chef who is moving protein through a wok at a speed that does not permit caution. He spoke about the specials boards. He spoke about them casually, the way a person speaks about a thing they have been doing for so long that the doing has become unremarkable — the way a baker speaks about sourdough, the way a bartender speaks about ice. He said the boards had been running for "a while," which I interpreted as deliberately vague. He said the coordination was "pretty simple" — a group chat, he said, a normal group chat on a normal phone, where the day's words were distributed each morning and each kitchen translated the words into specials that made sense for their cuisine, and the translation was the creative act, the thing he took pride in, the challenge of rendering the letter F into a dish name that began with F and was also something the kitchen wanted to cook today. "Five-Spice is easy," he said. "F, I, V, E — that's four dishes, and Five-Spice covers the F. Fried covers the F too. Fermented. Fish. F's easy. Q is the problem. Nobody has a dish that starts with Q." The room laughed.
He was the Line Cook Cryptographer. I knew this with the certainty of a data journalist who has been building a case for a week and has just had the case's central figure stand up at a dinner table and describe the methodology in plain English, unprompted, casually, to a room of people who already knew, while eating a hot dog.
I ate my third hot dog. I had put pickled daikon on this one. The daikon was good — sharp, vinegary, the specific crunch of a radish that has been pickled for the right amount of time, the cell walls still intact, the acid having penetrated the flesh without destroying its texture. The daikon on the hot dog was better than the hot dog deserved, or the hot dog was better than the daikon expected, or the combination — the all-beef frank, the soft white bun, the pickled daikon radish from an Asian grocery store on Spring Mountain Road — was a thing that should not have worked and did work, the way a Discordian ceremony in a tiki bar should not have worked and did work, the way this entire guide should not have worked and has worked, the way the city should not have worked and works.
More reports from the field. A woman who worked at a nail salon next to a Korean barbecue restaurant described how the barbecue's reservation system had been buried in search results for three weeks — "The GREYHOUND thing," she said, using the word I had coined in Chapter 5 as though it were common vocabulary, as though the network had adopted my term, which meant someone in this room had read Chapter 5, which meant my guide — my unpublished, incomplete, in-progress guide — was circulating within the network before it was finished, which meant the guide was not only documenting the network but had become part of the network's own communication system, which was —
She was not finished. After describing the GREYHOUND situation — the buried search results, the suppressed reservation pages — she described what she had been doing about it, and what she had been doing about it was not what I expected. She had been placing golden apples in the corridor. Actual apples, bought at the Asian grocery store on Spring Mountain, spray-painted gold with craft paint, left on windowsills and parking bollards and the ledges of strip mall storefronts along the road. Small golden apples, appearing and disappearing, found by people who did not know what they meant and by people who did. The reference — Eris's golden apple, the apple of discord, the apple inscribed KALLISTI that started the Trojan War in the Principia's mythology — was visible only to the people who had read the book. To everyone else, they were peculiar fruit. "I like it when people pick them up," she said. "They always look confused. Confusion is good. Confusion is the opposite of optimization." She said this as though it were self-evident, as though the act of leaving spray-painted fruit on a strip mall windowsill were the most natural thing in the world, and in this room, on this night, it was.
I ate another hot dog. I did not think about the implications. I put sauerkraut on it. The sauerkraut was from a jar. The sauerkraut was fine.
A younger man stood — not the Line Cook Cryptographer, a different young man, with the restless energy of someone who had been drinking Mai Tais for two hours and wanted to contribute. He described a project he had been running: creating fake Yelp accounts to leave one-star reviews on Strip restaurants he considered complicit in the optimization system. Dozens of reviews, he said. Fabricated complaints about food poisoning, rude service, overcharging. He was grinning as he described it. The room was not grinning.
The Retired Showgirl — I was beginning to understand her role in this room, which was not leader, because Discordianism does not have leaders, but something closer to the person whose judgment the room trusted without admitting it needed anyone's judgment — looked at the young man with an expression I recognized from decades of watching people in restaurants: the expression of a person who has seen enthusiasm curdle into something else and knows the difference. "That's not chaos, honey," she said. "That's just being an asshole."
The room laughed. Not the uncomfortable laugh of a group witnessing a reprimand — the warm, releasing laugh of people hearing something they already knew articulated by someone they trusted. The young man sat down. He was not angry. He looked, if anything, relieved — the specific relief of a person who needed to hear that the thing they were doing was wrong because the doing had felt wrong and the hearing confirmed the feeling. Chaos without kindness is cruelty. Cruelty is the Curse of Greyface wearing a funny hat. The hat does not make it chaos.
A man who identified himself as a hotel concierge — "I work at one of the big ones on the Strip, I won't say which, you can probably guess" — described his practice of directing hotel guests to independent restaurants on Spring Mountain Road instead of the Strip restaurants that the hotel's recommendation algorithm (a GREYHOUND-adjacent system, he said, using "GREYHOUND" again, my word, my taxonomy, circulating back to me through the mouths of people I had not met) was designed to promote. He had been doing this for twenty years, he said. He had a list — a paper list, handwritten, kept in his jacket pocket, updated monthly — of restaurants he personally recommended. "They give us a script," he said. "The script says Nobu, Carbone, Hell's Kitchen, the steak places. I read the script when someone's watching. When they're not watching, I tell people where to actually eat." The room murmured.
The Concierge. Another character in the network's taxonomy, another node in the system — an information broker operating inside the corporate layer, redirecting the flow of customers away from GREYHOUND's preferred destinations and toward the corridor, one tourist at a time, one handwritten recommendation at a time, for twenty years. The man worked at a casino. The man was working inside the machine — inside the corporate layer, the territory of the algorithm, the place where GREYHOUND's recommendation scripts originated. A Discordian operative inside the Greyface machine, redirecting tourists one handwritten list at a time. The irony was so precise it felt architectural.
And then the thought arrived — not gradually, not building over paragraphs, but all at once, the way a specials board resolves to a word when you read vertically instead of horizontally. The Concierge had a handwritten list of restaurants that operated outside the algorithm. He updated it monthly. He distributed it person to person. He had been doing this for twenty years, and the doing was his practice — his sacred act, his personal liturgy, performed one tourist at a time.
I had a handwritten list of restaurants that operated outside the algorithm. I updated it with every review. I was building it, writing it, distributing it — person to person, reader to reader. The list was called The Vegas Dining Companion. It was the document you are reading. I had been constructing it since January, and I had not seen what it was, because I was inside it, the way you cannot see the shape of a room when you are standing in the room, the way a fish cannot describe water.
The guide was the practice. I had been performing my own liturgy since Chapter 1 — arrive, observe, taste, write, rate, recommend — and the liturgy's purpose had always been the same purpose the Concierge's handwritten list served: to direct people toward the sacred and away from the optimized, using my own voice, in my own words, informed by my own experience. I was the Concierge. I had always been the Concierge. The guide was my list in my jacket pocket. The guide was my scripture, revised with every meal, a personal Principia written in the language of stars and specials and the careful description of a bowl of Khao Soi that tasted like a hundred years.
I put the hot dog down. I wrote in my notebook: The guide is the practice. I did not write more. The thought was too large for this room and this night and this hot dog. I let it sit in the notebook, unfinished, the way all the important thoughts in this guide have sat — unfinished, radiating, waiting for the chapter that will complete them. I picked up the hot dog. I ate it. The mustard was still correct. The guide was still the guide. But the guide was also, I now suspected, the reason I was in this city, and the reason was not journalism, and the reason was not food criticism, and the reason was something I was not yet ready to name, and the not-naming was the distance I still had to travel.
The ceremony lasted approximately two and a half hours. In that time, the following was consumed:
Hot dogs: approximately one hundred and thirty-five, across the room. I extrapolated this from my table's consumption (approximately twenty-three, among nine people) and the number of empty trays I counted at the end of the evening. Approximately three hot dogs per person, which is, I note, a respectable quantity but not an excessive one — the hot dog is designed for plurality, for the casual accumulation of units, for the second and third in a way that a steak or a bowl of pho is not designed for the second and third. The hot dog is iterative food. Each one is a variation on the same theme, differentiated by the condiments chosen, by the specific combination of mustard and relish and onion and sauerkraut and pickled daikon that the diner assembles, so that no two hot dogs in the room were identical and all of them were the same.
Pu Pu Platter items: twelve platters distributed across the five tables, each containing the coconut shrimp, wings, sweet potato fries, and spring rolls described above. The platters were consumed unevenly — the spring rolls went first, the sweet potato fries went last, which told me something about the room's preferences that was consistent with the demographic I was observing: restaurant industry workers, line cooks, bartenders, servers, people who eat fried food professionally and who, at a social gathering, reached first for the thing that felt most different from their workday, which was the spring roll, the item that most closely resembled actual cooking rather than deep-frying.
Drinks: the Golden Tiki's full cocktail menu was available throughout the ceremony, and the drinks continued to be excellent. I had two additional Mai Tais and a Painkiller. The Painkiller was the better drink for the room — its creamy sweetness worked as a palate cleanser between hot dogs, the way a glass of milk works between bites of something spicy, the coconut cream coating the tongue and resetting it for the next hot dog, the next condiment combination, the next iteration of the theme.
Dole Whip: served toward the end of the evening as dessert — the Golden Tiki's signature item, a soft-serve pineapple confection that is, in the tiki bar world, what the Dan Dan Noodle is in the Sichuan world: the canonical dish, the thing the institution is known for, the item that regulars evaluate as a benchmark. The Dole Whip was good. Cold, bright, the pineapple flavor clean and sharp, the texture neither too icy nor too creamy — the specific midpoint that soft-serve achieves when the machine is calibrated correctly and the mix ratio is right. Several people had theirs with a dark rum float, which is the adult modification of the Dole Whip, and which I tried, and which elevated the dessert from pleasant to interesting — the rum's caramel depth against the pineapple's acid, the warmth of the alcohol against the cold of the ice cream, the contradiction producing, as contradictions in food always do, a new thing that neither component could produce alone.
The final act of the ceremony was this.
The man in the guayabera stood. The room, which had been conversational — small groups at each table talking, laughing, eating, the noise level of any dinner party — went quiet. Not silent — quiet, the particular quiet of a room that has chosen to listen, which is different from a room that has been told to listen, which is different from a room that is afraid to speak. This room chose.
He said: "Every man, woman, and child on this Earth is a Pope."
The room said: "Every Pope is a chef."
He said: "Every chef is a liar."
The room said: "Every lie is a menu."
He said: "Every menu is a prayer."
The room said: "Every prayer is a meal."
He said: "Eat well. Tip your servers. Read the specials."
The room said: "Hail Eris. All Hail Discordia."
And the ceremony was over. There was no closing prayer, no benediction, no recessional. The lights — which had been candlelight for two and a half hours, which had been real fire in a room behind a hidden door in a tiki bar in a strip mall — the lights came up, and the candles were blown out, and the room was just a room again, an event space, the Island Oasis, available for corporate events, birthday parties, private parties, weddings, receptions, and more, as the website said, and the people who had been a congregation were just people again, standing, stretching, carrying plates to a bus tub that someone had placed by the door, cleaning up after themselves with the practiced efficiency of restaurant workers who have cleared a thousand tables and for whom the clearing of a table is not a chore but a reflex, the muscle memory of hospitality, the body's knowledge of how to make a space ready for the next people, whoever the next people will be.
I left through the hidden door. I walked through the Mermaid Cove, where the conch-shell stage was empty, and through the Headhunter's Village, where the twenty-foot waterfall was still falling, and through the Pirate's Lair, where the booths were occupied by people who had no idea what was happening in the room behind the wall, and I emerged into the main bar, where the animatronic skeleton was delivering another line I could not hear, and I walked through the lava rock entrance and into the parking lot and into the June night, which was ninety-three degrees and dry and lit by the strip mall signs and the Spring Mountain traffic lights and the distant glow of the Strip to the east, and I sat in my car and I wrote the following in my notebook:
Three stars. The atmosphere was five. The service was five. The food was a hot dog. The hot dog was honest and the bun was soft and the mustard was correct and the pickled daikon was the best thing on the table and the Dole Whip was good and the Pu Pu Platter was adequate and the cocktails were excellent and the ceremony was the most moving dining experience I have had in this city, more moving than the Peppermill's time displacement, more moving than Frankie's temporal abolition, more moving than the Italian American Club's acoustic architecture, because this was the first time in twenty years of professional eating that I sat at a table with people who believed that the act of eating together was sacred, and who performed the sacrament with hot dogs, and who did not see a contradiction, because there was no contradiction, because the sacred food of Discordianism is the profane food of America, and the profanity is the sacrament, and the hot dog is the prayer.
Three stars because a food critic gives three stars when the atmosphere is extraordinary and the food is a hot dog. The food was a hot dog. I cannot give a hot dog four stars. I cannot give a hot dog four stars even if the hot dog was consumed in a room where five tables formed a five-sided shape lit by real candles behind a hidden door in a tiki bar on Spring Mountain Road while forty-five people performed a liturgy that included the sentence "Every menu is a prayer." I cannot give a hot dog four stars because the rating system is the system and the system is the guide and the guide must hold.
But: three stars is the highest rating I have given to a meal I could have made at home for less than five dollars. Three stars is, in the context of this guide, a remarkable achievement for a hot dog. Three stars means: the hot dog was not the point, but the hot dog was necessary, and the necessity of the hot dog — the deliberate choice of the most ordinary, most profane, most democratic, most available food in America as the sacrament of a religion that worships chaos — is, itself, a form of excellence. Three stars means I cannot separate the food from the context, and I cannot rate the context without rating the food, and the food was a hot dog, and the context was a church.
Three stars. The review holds. The system holds. The hot dog holds.
Practical Information
Getting there: 3939 Spring Mountain Road. In a strip mall, like everything on this road. Park in the lot if you can — parking is difficult on weekends, because the corridor is full and the Golden Tiki is a destination bar that draws locals and off-shift workers from across the valley. The entrance is through a lava rock passage with a waterfall. When you emerge on the other side, you are no longer where you were.
What to drink: The Mai Tai. The Painkiller. The Dole Whip with a dark rum float. The cocktail program is serious — serious enough to earn mention in national bar lists, serious enough to stand alongside Frankie's as one of the two essential tiki experiences in the city. The skulls at Frankie's measure potency. The Golden Tiki measures something else — craft, maybe, or ambition. Frankie's is the bar you go to when you want to disappear. The Golden Tiki is the bar you go to when you want to arrive.
What to eat: The Pu Pu Platter is adequate. The coconut shrimp is the best item. The wings need more heat. The sweet potato fries are fine. The hot dogs are not on the regular menu.
What to know: There is a private event space called the Island Oasis, behind a door in the Mermaid Cove that is designed to look like a wall. The space accommodates one hundred and forty-five people. It is available for corporate events, birthday parties, private parties, weddings, receptions, and more. It is also available, on certain evenings, by invitation, for other purposes. The invitations are not printed. The invitations are not emailed. The invitations are written in the first letters of daily specials on whiteboards in the kitchens of restaurants on a four-and-a-half-mile corridor, and they are read by the people who know to read vertically, and they are erased every morning and rewritten every night, and the erasure is part of the ritual, because the ritual requires impermanence, because impermanence is what makes the sacred sacred — not that it lasts forever but that it exists at all, right now, tonight, in this room, with these people, eating this food, which is a hot dog, which is a prayer, which is three stars.
One last thing: I am no longer pretending.
The Golden Tiki 3939 Spring Mountain Rd ★★★
A tiki bar on Spring Mountain Road that is also, on certain nights, a temple. The cocktails are excellent — among the best tiki drinks in the city, crafted with the seriousness that the form demands and the joy that the form permits. The atmosphere is a cathedral of kitsch: lava rock, waterfalls, animatronic skeletons, shrunken heads, four themed zones, a hidden door to a fifth zone that is not on the website and not on the map and is the most important room I have entered in this guide.
Three stars. The three stars reflect the food, which was served at a private event and which consisted of hot dogs (all-beef, grilled, snapping casing, honest) and a Pu Pu Platter (adequate) and Dole Whip (good) and pickled daikon radish (excellent, and a metaphor). The atmosphere, rated independently, would be five stars — the highest rating I have given, shared only with Frankie's Tiki Room and the Italian American Club, both of which are five-star restaurants in this guide, both of which are places where the thing the room is doing is more important than the thing the kitchen is cooking, and the thing the room is doing is creating the conditions under which eating becomes something other than consumption.
Three stars. Because I am a food critic. Because the system is the system. Because the hot dog was a hot dog.
But: this was the night I stopped pretending that the guide was only a guide. This was the night the format achieved what I had not known the format could achieve — the rating of a sacred meal, the application of professional food criticism to a religious ceremony, the discovery that the review format does not break when applied to the unreviable, that the five-star scale does not collapse when one of its axes is infinity and the other is a hot dog.
The format held. The hot dog held. I am holding, barely, and the barely is the interesting part, and the interesting part is the part that is still a restaurant guide, and the restaurant guide is the most Discordian thing I have ever written, and I did not write it on purpose, and the not-on-purpose is the purpose.
Reviewed June 22.
The hot dogs are not on the menu. The menu is not the menu. The specials board is the menu, and the menu is a prayer, and the prayer is a hot dog, and the hot dog is three stars, and the three stars are the most honest three stars in this guide, and the guide is the operation, and the operation is the guide.
Hail Eris. All Hail Discordia. Tip your servers. Read the specials.