I hadn't been out to Las Vegas in over three years before I had to go out earlier this year for a meeting/training session for my company a little over a month before the city was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I had gotten in during the afternoon, and after I got settled at my hotel - The Mirage - I decided to look for places to eat in the immediate area. Vegas changes so quickly that three or four restaurants that I had enjoyed a few years back were out of business or had been changed into something else. I found a barbecue place across the Las Vegas Strip from The Mirage in the LINQ Promenade called Virgil's Real BBQ. In all the years that I have been coming to Las Vegas for trade shows and meetings since the mid-1980's, I don't think I had ever eaten barbecue in Las Vegas. One doesn't think of barbecue when they're in Vegas, so it sort of intrigued me. I thought I'd walk over to Virgil's Real BBQ and give the place a try.
It turns out that Virgil's Real BBQ is under the same corporate umbrella as Carmine's of Las Vegas, a place that I also ate at during my recent trip to Vegas and had written about here. Virgil's got its start in New York City - also not really all that renown for their barbecue - after founder Artie Cutler was looking for other food concepts to explore after the success of his two New York City Carmine's restaurants. With the help of a Chinese friend, he started Ollie's Noodle Shop and Grille, an Asian-American restaurant. Artie had vision that a Southern-style barbecue restaurant would make it in the heart of New York City. He discussed the idea with his two investment partners in Carmine's and his partner in Ollie's. They all agreed that in order to have an authentic Southern barbecue restaurant, they needed to learn about those places. And what better way than to have a weeks-long road trip along backroads in the South.
A few weeks later, the four men took off in a car for barbecue places in the south. They traveled from the Carolinas across Tennessee to Memphis, then south to Texas, and then up to Missouri sampling barbecue along the way. (Man, I think that would be a fun trip!) You can almost imagine the looks of suspicion a Jewish guy, two Italian guys, and a Chinese guy would get when they would walk into a barbecue joint in the south. After weeks of checking out and trying all different types of barbecue - as well as learning the tricks of the trade from some of the more friendly barbecue joint owners - the group felt they had a consensus in what meat to offer at their restaurant. And, more importantly, how to make it.
Artie and his partners came back to New York City and found a spot in Times Square just a block away from their Carmine's location. With everything in place, Virgil's Real BBQ opened in 1994. Cutler said that he named it after the starter at his golf club, hoping that it would get him premium tee times in the future. (No word if that worked out for Culter, but I'm guessing it did.)
Unfortunately, Artie Cutler passed away unexpectedly in 1997. His wife, Alice, took over the Alicart Restaurant Group that Artie had formed to oversee his restaurants. However, it wasn't long before Alice realized that she needed to have someone younger and with more ambition come in to run the restaurant group. In 2008, Jeffrey Bank came on to become the CEO for the Alicart Restaurant Group and one of the first things he did was close or jettison some restaurants that were underperforming - including Ollie's. However, he saw big things for expansion of the Carmine's and Virgil's restaurants, but not in New York City due to some stifling rules and regulations restaurants faced in the city.
Seeing that there was a need for restaurants in gambling and entertainment hot spots, Bank opened Carmine's locations in Atlantic City, Las Vegas and at the Atlantis casino/resort in the Bahamas. He opened a second Virgil's Real BBQ in Atlantis in November of 2012, and the Las Vegas location opened in late 2016.
The Las Vegas Virgil's is one of many restaurants and bars up and down the LINQ Promenade, a walkway that connects the Las Vegas strip with the High Roller, the world's largest observation wheel. The High Roller stands 550 feet tall and it takes 30 minutes for it to make one complete revolution. The LINQ Promenade also has a zipline that goes from one end to the other - the FlyLINQ. It was sort of a cool evening in Las Vegas that night - it was windy and unseasonably cool when I flew in earlier in the day - and I didn't see many, if any, people using the FlyLINQ that evening. But the LINQ Promenade was buzzing enough with people wandering around between bars, restaurants and casinos when I was walking through seeking out Virgil's.
I found Virgil's toward the east end of the Promenade (see map - the Google map here shows that its closer to Las Vegas Boulevard, but it's a lot closer to the High Roller than to the Strip). To the left as you walk into the place, there's a main dining area with a stage at one end. Some instruments were set up and it appeared that a live band was going to be playing there later on. The acoustics of that room had to be atrocious as the dining room was loud to begin with with all the talking going on. There was outdoor seating in front of the place and there was an upstairs area with a balcony patio for outside dining. It was too cold for people to be eating outside that night.
The bar area was off to the right of the front door. The place seemed to have that corporate rustic look - like when a designer from New York envisions what a barbecue place in the south looks like. I took a seat at the bar where a younger couple - who had evidently been there for a LONG time - had just gotten up to leave. I had to dance out of my way of the staggering couple as I made my way toward the bar. After getting seated at the bar, a young lady by the name of Kelsee came over to greet me. She gave me a food menu and asked what I would like to drink. They had the Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing IPA on tap and I signed up for one of those.
When Artie Cutler and his partners took their little barbecue trip through the south, they adopted many of the items they had tried and put them on the menu at Virgil's. There was Carolina-style pulled pork, Memphis-style baby-back ribs, Texas-style brisket, and Southern-style smoked pulled chicken on the menu for the main barbecue items. They also had sandwiches made from the barbecued meats, burgers, and Louisiana-style Po' Boy sandwiches. Virgil's also offered entrees such as crispy Kansas City-style fried chicken (they probably got their inspiration from Stroud's), Maryland-style crab cakes, Georgia-style chicken fried steak, and grilled Gulf Coast shrimp. And if you didn't care for food from south of the Mason-Dixon line, then there was a 20 ounce T-Bone steak available on the menu, as well.
As I usually do at a barbecue joint that I'm not all that familiar with, I go with the combination platter. But this time, I decided to just go with the brisket platter. (They had a combo platter called the "Pig Out" that featured brisket, ribs, smoked chicken, and pulled pork. That would have been a little too much for me.) For my sides, I had a choice of a number of items - fries, collard greens with ham hock, mashed potatoes with gravy, cheddar cheese grits, and rice with sliced pecans were some of the choices. I ended up ordering the baked beans and the pickled beets for my two sides.
The brisket came sliced and placed on slice of white bread. A bit of barbecue sauce was ladled on top of the meat. I asked Kelsee if there was any other kind of barbecue sauce and she came over with three different styles - the regular sauce that was already on the brisket was sort of sweet with a hint of a smoky taste. They had a hot sauce that was similar to the regular only with a bit of a kick. But they had a habanero mango sauce that I was a little apprehensive about at first. Some habanero-infused sauces I've had in the past are almost too spicy and they really mask the taste of the meats. But this was a nice balance between the hot spicy kick and the cooling of the mango that was added. Actually, I thought the habanero mango sauce was - by far - the best of the three.
The brisket was just all right. It was a little chewy and didn't seem to have that much of a smoky taste to the meat. There wasn't much of a smoke ring around the outer part of the brisket and the bark on the outside was pretty pedestrian. It certainly wasn't the best brisket I've had.
The pickled beets were very good, however. I never really liked pickled beets much while I was growing up, but my wife turned me onto her grandmother's canned pickled beets about 25 years ago. While she was still alive, she would give us jar upon jar of pickled beets in the fall months. Her grandmother's pickled beets are my gold standard when it comes to pickled beets. Now, I don't think that a little old lady is back in the kitchen at Virgil's canning pickled beets, but wherever they get theirs from, they're damned good.
The baked beans were sort of "meh!" I poured copious amounts of the habanero mango sauce in with the beans to give them a little bit more flavor. It helped, but not by much.
Now, take a good look at the platter in the picture above. There were - maybe - 10 or 11 thick cut slices of smoked brisket. It was probably a half-pound of meat or maybe a little more. This platter cost $29.95. $29.95!!! When I got the bill, I about gasped! This platter of barbecued brisket with two sides was nowhere worth the price of what I got compared to other barbecue places I've enjoyed in my years of traveling. I almost had to laugh when I got the bill - with 2 pints of the Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing IPA at $9.75 each, the total on the bill before tax and tip was $49.45! I was completely incredulous. I remember a time in Las Vegas where you could get a steak with a baked potato and a salad for $7.99 at one of any casino up and down the strip. The price of my meal at Virgil's was basically six of those old time Las Vegas meals.
Well, there's a part two to this story. The next evening, we all had to go out to an EDM (electronic dance music) recording studio on the southwest side of Las Vegas that our company has turned into a showcase for our pro studio monitors. We had food that was going to be catered in and when the truck showed up, I about crapped - it was from Virgil's Real BBQ! I just started to laugh and shake my head. One of my colleagues looked at me and asked what was so funny. "I had barbecue from this place last night," I said. He asked me if it was good and I said, "Well, it was OK, but it was REALLY expensive."
They had brisket (naturally) and pulled chicken to choose from. I had the brisket - again. But this time, it was actually better than the brisket I had the previous evening. It was actually more moist and had a good smoky taste to it. The studio was not set up very well for a large group of people - maybe 40 of us in total - to be eating barbecue. It was just a somewhat surreal experience for me that I was having Virgil's Real BBQ two nights in a row.
The Las Vegas edition of Virgil's Real BBQ was just average, at best, in my book. At least, compared to some of the great barbecue places I've eaten at in the Midwest and down in Memphis. And it was expensive - almost obscenely expensive - for what I got. The brisket I had on my visit was just OK (although the catered brisket I had from Virgil's the subsequent evening was much better), but the pickled beets I had for my side were the highlight of the meal. They rivaled in taste my wife's late-grandmother's pickled beets that I enjoyed over 20 years ago. There's not a lot of barbecue to choose from in Vegas and Virgil's will do if you need a BBQ fix while you're in Sin City. Just don't forget to bring your wallet.