Whoa, what's this? "Vegas Diary – Part 1?" Didn't I post "Vegas Diary – Part 1" on this blog a few weeks ago? Yes, as you confirmed if you just clicked that link. So what's the deal here?
Simple: This is Part 1 of a new Vegas Diary. After I was in San Jose and Santa Cruz, I Southwested it back to Las Vegas for a few more days of writing in a cheap room on the Strip, walking around a lot, keeping weird hours and, of course, running into hookers. Yes, I have a hooker story this time and it'll be in Part 3.
So I stayed in that town until all eyes focused on this year's Super Bowl and my plane home took off just before the kickoff. I thought I'd get a nearly-empty airport and flight but as it turned out, everything was as jammed as usual. It's just that everyone was watching the Super Bowl on every piece of technology on which someone could watch the Super Bowl.
I spent most of this trip alternately writing in the room and taking long walks. Friday evening, I had a wee bit of a scare: My iPhone stopped working as a phone. No one I called could hear me nor could anyone who called me hear me. I couldn't go two more days there without a working phone so I jumped on the Apple Store website and found an open Genius Bar appointment at the location they have in the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace.
I walked over there, they took me early and I walked out fifteen minutes later with my phone working properly. All it took was opening it up, cleaning out some dust where the microphone is and then doing a factory reset. Shoulda thought of the reset myself. I might have spared myself the long, long trek through that mall. I also might have spared myself a slice of real disappointing pizza.
On my way outta that endless corridor of merchants, I passed the Caesars Palace food court and spotted a stand for DiFara's Pizza. Do you know about DiFara's Pizza? If not, go up to five long-time New Yorkers and ask them where to get the best pizza in town. You might get five different answers, each from someone who'll tell you you'd be f'in' nuts to go anywhere else. But at least one of those answers if not all will be DiFara's Pizza — either of its two locations in Brooklyn.
In the Midwood store, a man hailed as a true artist of the pizza — Dom DeMarco — made every pizza himself by hand for decades. In the last few years, he's trained an assistant and also trained whoever runs the DiFara Pizza in Williamsburg. The standard is said to be as high as ever and five months ago, Dave "One bite, everybody knows the rules" Portnoy went there and gave it his highest rating. (Here's the video. Some of his remarks on the ethnicity of the neighborhood will not endear him to you.)
I have never been there. Why? Because from Times Square (where I usually stay) to the original DiFara's is over an hour on the subway, whereas it's 17 minutes to my fave N.Y, pizza place, John's of Bleecker Street. Mr. Portnoy gave DiFara Pizza a 9.4 and he gave John's a 9.3. Is the longer ride worth pizza that might (might, mind you!) be a tenth of a point better? I say no…but I've long been curious.
So I had to check: Did the DiFara's in Caesars have any connections to the one in Brooklyn? Yes. Signs proclaimed they were one and the same, promising the same recipe developed by Mr. DeMarco.
I wasn't expecting 9.4 pizza. All I wanted was better pizza than you usually find in a food court…and what I got there was not unlike Little Caesar's. Well, why shouldn't it be? I was in Caesars Palace. But I don't think that's what all those New Yorkers rave about. That was the only real disappointment of the trip.