During our recent meetings out in Las Vegas, we had a couple hours to do lunch wherever we wanted. Our meetings were at the Mirage and I wanted to go across the Strip to the Venetian and have a burger at a place that I liked called I 🖤 Burgers. (Click here to see the Road Tips entry on I 🖤 Burgers.) However, when I got over there, I found that that place was closed. (Restaurants change so much in Vegas.) However, another place at the Venetian that I remembered from a few years ago - PrimeBurger - was still there. I made my way up the Venetian's Grand Canal Shoppes and stopped in at PrimeBurger.
PrimeBurger is under the umbrella of the Fifth Avenue Restaurant Group, a corporation that runs a number of franchise-style restaurants in food courts at Las Vegas area hotels and shopping complexes. Fifth Avenue's owner Frank Bonanno grew up in New Jersey and got his love for food and cooking by growing up in a large Italian-American family. After getting a culinary degree from the Culinary Institute of America and working in a handful of restaurants, Frank signed up for the armed services during the height of the Vietnam War in the late 60's.
After serving a 3-year stint in the U.S. Army rising to the rank of lieutenant, Frank ended up in California and got a job with food purveyor ARA Services (now Aramark). After three or four years there, he found his way back to Fairfield, New Jersey - about 25 miles to the west of New York City - where he partnered with two other friends to deliver food to school districts in the area. The partners contracted with schools to make the food, deliver it, and take care of any things on the backside. It turned out that they would work as much as 90 hours a week during the school year, but Frank and his partners liked what they were doing.
In 1976, Frank and his partners started a new business called Fairfield Foods and opened up a number of cookie shops at shopping malls up and down the east coast to the Midwest. The partners didn't even think about franchising the restaurants and they ran each one as a company-owned location. After growing to 75 locations by 1984, Fairfield Foods sold out to Randy and Debbi Fields, the owners of the rapidly growing Mrs. Fields Cookies chain that was similar in concept to their cookie store locations.
A year before selling out, the partners decided to look into doing something else "just for fun." They had studied the market place for an ice cream franchise and determined that Häagen Dazs was the best one out there. The group opened their first Häagen Dazs franchise in 1983. In 1989, the group opened their first Nathan's Famous hot dog franchise in Florida where Frank had moved to a couple years earlier.
Pictured right - Frank Bonanno. Photo courtesy Franchising.com.
Frank and his wife Betty used to travel to Las Vegas for vacations and it was during his 1993 trip to Sin City that Frank saw an opportunity to put in one of his franchises in the newly opened MGM Grand. He met with MGM officials and worked out an agreement to put a restaurant in the food court at the MGM Grand. One food court restaurant became two, two became four, and it wasn't long before Frank had restaurants in many of the hotel/casino food courts up and down the Strip in Las Vegas - restaurants such as Bonnano's New York Pizzeria, Häagen Dazs, Original Chicken Tender, and New York Pretzel.
By 2002, Frank had bought out his two partners and named his new corporation the Fifth Avenue Restaurant Group. Bonanno opened his first Johnny Rockets in 2007, then opened his first full service restaurant - Trattoria Reggiano - at the Venetian in 2009. By 2010, Bonnano's Fifth Avenue Restaurant Group was running all the restaurants in the food courts at many of the Strip hotels/casinos.
In 2014, Bonanno was looking to get into the gourmet burger business and he closed down one of his Häagen Dazs locations in the Grand Canal Shoppes at the Venetian and turned it into PrimeBurger. He named it after one of his favorite restaurants when he was growing up - the longtime and famous New York City burger joint Prime Burger which was right across 5th Avenue from St. Patrick's Cathedral. Prime Burger had closed in 2012 after a 74-year run. PrimeBurger in Las Vegas opened in early 2015.
During the last three or four years that I attended the Consumer Electronics Show, our company would show products in rooms at the Venetian. I was sort of familiar with the food court at the Venetian, so I just followed the pathway through the casino and back toward the elevators that went up to the rooms. Just before the elevator entrance are a couple of long escalators that take you up to the food court area. After some maneuvering, I was able to find my way right to PrimeBurger. (see map)
PrimeBurger is not a very big space - it's just a bit over 1000 square feet. It featured a small bar, a handful of booths and some tables interspersed in the middle of the small dining area. A hostess greeted me as I walked up to the stand in front of the restaurant. She asked me if I wanted to sit at the bar. Now, "the bar" featured only a couple seats, maybe three. But there was a flat screen television on the wall behind the bar that was tuned to CNN or something like that. I thought about it for a moment, then said, "Sure! I'll sit at the bar."
One of the young ladies who was working behind the bar what also double as a kitchen area greeted me as I sat down. Her name was Isabella and I was given a food menu to look over. I ordered up a Ballast Point Sculpin IPA that they had on the beer menu. PrimeBurger also has a number of eclectic alcoholic milkshakes to choose from, too.
Of course, burgers are the main feature on the menu. There are 10 burgers that PrimeBurger offers including the "Big Scorcher" topped with pepper jack cheese, fried jalapeño slices, onion straws and a sriracha mayo; the "Hawaii Five-Ohhhh" burger had pineapple (naturally), onion relish, Swiss cheese, coleslaw and a teriyaki mayo on it; the "Frenchie" had Swiss and Gruyére cheese, frisee lettuce, grilled onions, an onion relish, Dijon mayo and topped with a fried egg; and the "Oink, Squeal and Moo" had a PrimeBurger patty topped with pulled pork, bacon, cheddar cheese, onion straws and finished with mayo and a barbecue sauce. All burgers came with a choice of a brioche bun, a pretzel bun or a gluten-free bun.
PrimeBurger also had a handful of non-burgers such as a grilled chicken sandwich, a grilled Mahi-Mahi sandwich, a pulled pork sandwich with onion straws and barbecue sauce, and a couple of vegan offerings including a Beyond Burger. After 4 p.m. PrimeBurger also offered a filet mignon entree and a New York strip entree. A number of salads - both as entrees or as sides - were available. And appetizers such as Buffalo wings, a tower of panko-bread crumb-encrusted onion rings, and bacon-cheese fries were also on the menu.
I ended up getting the "Fungus Humongous" burger - a PrimeBurger patty topped with a grilled portobello mushroom, Swiss cheese, grilled onions and mayo. I got it with the toasted brioche bun. I asked my server/bartender if the chef could leave off the grilled onions and add bacon to the burger. She said that would be no problem. (I like the taste of grilled onions, but I don't like what grilled onions do to me in their aftermath of eating them.) But it was a problem, the chef didn't leave off the grilled onions. Oh well. At least the bacon made it on the burger.
The burger was thick and juicy with a slab of Swiss cheese melted over the top. The bacon was quality bacon - none of that thin and cheap cut bacon that you can get at many restaurants. And the portobello mushroom was sliced thick, marinated and lightly grilled. The brioche bun was spongy, lightly toasted and held together very well with all the juiciness of the burger. It was an outstanding burger.
One thing that I did not get at PrimeBurger were their hand-cut crafter French fries. Isabella was really pushing them hard, even saying, "They're very good. Some people come in here just for the fries." They're fried in peanut oil and I'm sure they're good, but all I needed was the burger that day.
While PrimeBurger isn't cheap, it's still a quality burger. Along with a couple beers and a tip, it was nearly a $40 lunch. (There's no such thing as cheap beer at any of the casino/hotels along the strip any longer.) I thoroughly enjoyed the "Fungus Humongous" burger topped with a portobello mushroom, Swiss cheese with very good quality bacon added to the burger. I've had a lot of very good burgers over the years in my travels to Las Vegas, and the one I had at PrimeBurger was not disappointing in the least. Just expect to pay a premium for one.
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