 Eating
cheaply in Las Vegas
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Don't play
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Do play
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You get less comps by playing the better games because you lose less money, but that's to your advantage. Again, you don't want to lose more than necessary just to get a "free" meal. For example, for four hours of play:
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Est. Loss |
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Est. Comps earned |
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Net loss |
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Slots get you more comps for sure, but only because you're losing more. If you play craps instead you'll save $51/hr. on average. In fact, your savings from playing craps instead of slots could let you buy a couple of buffets and not even have to worry about comps.
For more on this topic check out my page on how to get casino comps.
Coupons abound in Las Vegas, especially 2-for-1 coupons. Unfortunately they change frequently so I can't give you a big list here, but I can give you some general tips.First, most casinos give you a coupon book when you sign up for a Player's Card. The Player's Card is free, so there's no reason not get it. Also, just by signing up for the card, you may get offers in the mail later for free or discounted rooms. Just look for the Player's Club desk in any casino to sign up.
Second, you can get the Pocketbook of Values coupon book from the Las Vegas Advisor. You'll have to pay $37 for it, but it's well worth it. It has a fistful of formidable coupons for dining, lodging, and entertainment.
Finally, there's the big Entertainment coupon book. It's aimed at locals, not tourists, so most of the offerings aren't near the Strip, but there's still enough to easily make it worth the cost. The cover price is $25 but it comes out around November each year and by February it can be had for $15 on their website, or at stores like Barnes & Noble. Here's a partial list of 2-for-1's coupons from that book, on or close to the Strip:
On the Strip
- Tamba Indian Cuisine (in the Hawaiian Marketplace across from the Monte Carlo)
- La Italian Kitchen (inside the Venetian)
- Great Wraps (in Fashion Show Mall)
- Nestle Toll House Café (2-for-1 smoothie; in the Miracle Mile Shops inside Planet Hollywood)
- Auntie Anne's Pretzels (in Fashion Show Mall, Planet Hollywood's Miracle Mile shops, and the airport)
Near the Strip
- Boston Pizza (They deliver to downtown and the Strip, but not to the Wynn; or dine in: 1507 Las Vegas Blvd S.; 1/2 mile North of Stratosphere)
- Rainbow's End Natural Foods (1100 E. Sahara; 1.5 miles E. of the Strip; grocery store with an attached sit-down café)
- India Palace (505 E. Twain [same as Sands Ave.]; 1 mile E. of Strip)
- Shalimar Indian (3900 Paradise; 1 mile East of the Strip)
- Gandhi India's Cuisine (4080 Paradise; 1 mile East of the Strip)
- Cottage Café (4647 Paradise; 1 mile E. of Strip; open until midnight; Ethiopian; Vegetarian Combo has about seven different items and is a lot of food!; coupon #C62)
There are several mall-type food courts on the Strip with budget-priced eats in these places:*The Cypress Street Marketplace is more of a cross between a cafeteria & a buffet than a food court: You choose your items from a variiety of different stations, and pay for each item you take at the end.
North Strip
- Riviera
- Fashion Show Mall
Mid-Strip
- Venetian
- Caesar's*
South Strip
- Monte Carlo
- New York, NY
The dinner buffet at the Plaza Hotel (downtown) is only nine bucks, and the breakfast buffet at The Palms is only six. About.com has a list of the cheapest buffets in Vegas.
CheapoVegas was one of the inspirations for Vegas Click, and they're still going strong. They have a pretty extensive list of all the casino restaurants and how much they cost.
The reason I'm listing this one towards the bottom of the list is that it's dated. It came out in 2003, and things change fast in Vegas. It was originally a book, but author Wendy Tucker posted the book's contents online to generate interest in a new edition she plans. Interestingly, Ms. Tucker and I enjoyed a free dinner together courtesy of a comp that I got, allowing both of us to live up to our reputations for being cheapskates.
I'm not going to list much here because things change so often, and because I'm only personally interested in vegetarian eats (and hence that's all I'll know about), but I'll keep this section here in case I run across anything extra special that I want to share. In the meantime, my favorite cheap eat is the peanut butter & jelly bagel at the Monte Carlo for $3.00 (in 2006). Yeah, not fine dining, but quite a steal for a snack on the Strip. Get two.
Put your hunter-gatherer skills to use! On the way to and from my room I frequently find leftover food trays in the hallways with items that are nearly completely unmolested. Last night I found some toast, hash browns, ketchup bottles, celery sticks (still completely encased in plastic wrap), 95% of a waffle, and a completely full, huge carafe of orange juice. Staff doesn't care at all -- while I was scoring the waffle, the woman who had come to take the cart away said, "Don't forget the syrup!" and handed me a couple small bottles that I'd overlooked. I'm not worried about germs because I would be willing to kiss most attractive random strangers I ran into, which is probably 10,000 times riskier than the careful selections I make from discarded room service trays. Plus, foraging is a kind of recycling! I hate seeing food go to waste. Which brings me to the next item...
I know this is out of the mainstream, and you certainly don't have to try it, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it for those bold enough to consider the idea. Restaurants and grocery stores throw away tons of perfectly good food every day. I'm not talking about scraps, or stuff that's touched other people's mouths, I'm talking about quality, unadulterated food that you wouldn't hesitate to eat if someone just handed it to you.Let's take produce as an example. If you're in a grocery store, and there's a pristine apple sitting next to one that's got a small nick in it, which are you going to buy? Obviously you're going to pass over the flawed apple, no matter how minor the flaw, if there's a perfect one available. And once customers have picked all the perfect ones then what remains starts to look weaker. If it looks too weak the store will get a reputation for selling crappy produce. So they throw away tons of "dent & scratch" produce so that their produce department looks better. This might be hard to believe, but the proof is in the dumpster. At times of my life I've gotten a significant amount of my food from store throw-aways.
Not all of it is near-perfect, of course. About 1/3 of it might be truly rotten, and maybe another 1/3 has bits that you'd want to cut off. But it's not unusual to get discarded produce where you just roll it over and over in your hand, wondering, "Why on earth would they throw this away?"
My next favorite example is bagels. Every day a bagel shop will throw away perhaps hundreds of day-old bagels. There's nothing wrong with them, they just want to have the very freshest stuff in the bins. I remember a two-day period in 2002 when I was pretty busy and I ate little besides bagels and organic plums.
But just because there's good food being thrown away, you still wouldn't eat anything that's been rolling around in trash, and neither would I. That's not what dumpster diving is all about. The best way, if you do this regularly, is to find out the store's schedule and then just wait by the dumpster for the worker to bring out the box or bag of free food. They usually don't mind giving it to you, they were just going to throw it away anyway. The bag of bagels will often be in a big, clean plastic grocery bag with nothing else in it, and the produce will often be in big banana boxes with no trash in it. If there is trash mixed in, asking the worker nicely to keep the food separate from the trash in the future often works, especially if you give the worker a tip for their trouble.
If you didn't intercept the food on the way to the dumpster, all is not lost. The bagel bag might be in the dumpster completely tied up and sealed, so that it never touched any trash. And the box of produce may be sitting right on top of everything else, never having touched any trash.
One reason to dumpster dive is not just to save money, it's to rescue food. It's really sad that we throw away so much good food when so many people are starving. Wasting food in this way seems kind of criminal to me. And dumpster diving is a way of recycling. In fact, there's a movement called Food Not Bombs that rescues good throw-away food and feeds the homeless with it.
Anyway, this might not be your cup of tea, but it's also not as crazy as it sounds. As I like to say, no bagel is so sweet as the one which is free.
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