Art(iface) in Las Vegas

Having said that Las Vegas was the starting point of our South West art trip. We stayed at the Cosmopolitan Hotel which features contemporary art throughout the hotel and conference venue. We seemed to spend a lot of time walking through the conference centre hallways getting from our room to the restaurants we wanted to eat at while avoiding the smoky casino floor, which was greatly improved by the art throughout.

Since we were avoiding the smoky casinos we were probably the only people visiting Las Vegas that didn’t take our chances at any of the casinos. The closest we got was selecting one of the Lucky Dip options on the Art-O-Mat’s in the Cosmopolitan. The Art-O-Mats are converted cigarette vending machines, which I think is a much better use for them.

About 10 miles outside of Las Vegas is the Ugo Rondinone sculpture Seven Magic Mountains. We drove from Las Vegas to see it but if you approached Las Vegas by road these highlighter coloured towers of gigantic rocks must create the illusion that you are seeing a distorted version of Lag Vegas’s bright lights.

The other reason we chose to stay at the Cosmopolitan was the restaurants in the hotel. While it was a little strange to be eating in what was effectively a surreal artificially lit food court we had some great food.

We started our gastronomic tour of the Cosmopolitan with dinner at Jaleo the night we arrived. We had all either flown from London or New Zealand that day so we were all pretty jet lagged. Jaleo is a Spanish tapas restaurant that had an extremely lively atmosphere to that definitely helped keep us awake and aware. As we weren't particularly good at making decisions when jet lagged (is that a fair excuse?) we took the easy option of having the Jose Experience tasting menu that gave us a fantastic range of dishes to try.

I was the only one of us that hadn’t yet managed to eat at one of David Chang’s restaurants so I was very keen to fit in a meal at Momofuku. We managed to fit in a lunch where we managed to order far too many dishes for the four of us but everything was really tasty and spicy.

For our breakfasts, we would head down to Eggslut that, unsurprisingly, has a menu focused on eggs. The Slut, which became our favourite very quickly, is an egg on top of potato purée, coddled in a glass jar and topped with salt and chives, served with slices of baguette to dunk into the scrumptious mixture.

Before we left Vegas to drive to the Grand Canyon we stocked up on provisions from Milk Bar. I have the first Milk Bar cookbook and had tried to make some of the cookies but I was really keen to try out the real thing, and we also had to celebrate Mum’s upcoming birthday. So we got a slice of the Crack Pie and the Birthday Cake to share before setting off in the car and then two of each of the non-GF cookies for us to taste and compare in the long hours driving on the straight, straight roads. They certainly kept the sugar levels up! The Compost Cookie and the Cornflake Marshmallow cookies were the best, for me.