The Boardwalk Hotel in Las Vegas will close on January 9, 2006 with a demolition date to be announced shortly. Once it's down, they'll start building Project City Center, a $5 billion hotel/condo complex on the land. The Boardwalk is that garish blight covered with circus imagery situated on The Strip between New York, New York and Monte Carlo. Who'll miss it? Fans of cheap lodging, connoisseurs of clown decor and especially those of you who love a really rotten, inedible all-you-can-eat spread. The last time I was there, the Surf Buffet had two unique distinctions. It was the only buffet in Vegas that was open 24 hours. And it was the only buffet in Vegas where people would pay, go in, look at the offerings in the steam tables and say, "Uh, let's go to Denny's."
The one time I was there, it was with a bunch of friends who'd just finished performing in a show at another hotel. It was late and no one was ready to go to bed, individually or collectively. Various places to go were nominated and discarded until someone made a joking comment about the Surf Buffet and I didn't laugh. Suddenly, it was, "What? You don't know about the Surf Buffet? Hey, we've gotta take Mark to the Surf Buffet." There was a sudden, giggling concurrence and I guess I should have been worried, especially as they made it clear to me that this was not about eating.
I saw why when we got there. I think it was something like six bucks and that included one "steak" that could have been used as carbon paper. They were nominally cleaning the place and someone had taken down the little cards on the sneeze-guard that identified what was in each serving station which made for quite a game show: "What do you think that is? Goulash or cheese?" One of my companions sampled a dish and we all asked her what it was. "I have no idea" was the reply. I asked, "Animal, vegetable or mineral?" and she couldn't even answer that. We finally cornered one of the employees who was in charge of keeping the trays full and demanded to know what was in that one. He told us, "Creamed chicken with dumplings" but there were definitely no dumplings and I'm still not sure about the cream or the chicken. For all I know, after we left they could have moved that dish to the Dessert section and declared it Peach Cobbler or some kind of mousse.
How…bad…was the Surf Buffet? Let me put it this way: If they'd brought out a huge can of Franco-American Spaghetti-Os with Sliced Franks and dumped the contents (cold) into a serving dish, there would have been a run on it. Diners would have trampled their own children to get to something that vaguely resembled food. We nibbled, sampled, mocked the cuisine unmercifully and I think we might have then gone to a real restaurant had not our Surf Buffeting killed all appetites. To be fair, I had some carrot sticks that weren't bad, and the Sierra Mist almost had the proper ratio of syrup to CO2.
I have since heard that the Surf Buffet has been improved…which, of course, removes its entire raison d'être. I mean, if you're going to go someplace to eat in Vegas, you only have around eight thousand better options. The whole point of the spread at the Boardwalk was to heckle your meal. The "open all night" distinction has also lost its punch since the Riviera introduced a late night buffet…
…so I say, drop the place. Tear it down…the whole building. And make sure you get that bogus slot machine out front where every pull's a winner and every winner gets a cheapjack key ring if he walks past every slot machine in the place to go in and claim it. I'm all for preserving the great, historical sites but the Boardwalk is to Vegas what a cold sore is to Cindy Crawford's upper lip. As I've said in earlier items, it's sad to see the cheaper places in town go out of business but cheap, in and of itself, doesn't do it. Not when it gets you a place that looks like a bad Red Skelton painting and a buffet where the tastiest item is the Sweet 'n' Lo.