Tag: Grand

A ‘Grand’ gesture: Downtown resort strives to deliver value back again to Vegas: Journey Weekly

Ginna

Paul Szydelko

Countering the perception that Las Vegas is shedding its image as a price desired destination, Downtown Grand is touting various prospects for visitors to get a excellent offer.

The 1,124-home property’s “Welcome Back again to the Downtown Offer” consists of totally free parking for hotel company, gaming prospects and dining clients a Nathan’s Famous sizzling pet and draft Pabst Blue Ribbon for $2 a PBR and a shot of Evan Williams bourbon for $3.50 and a a few-system lunch specific at the Triple George Grill for just $20.

In stark contrast to the Strip and even some other downtown properties, the on line casino delivers lower table minimums for blackjack, roulette and craps. You can find even a $25 get-in blackjack match at 3 p.m. each and every Thursday. Winners get a minimum of $250 for to start with location, $150 for next and $100 for third payouts raise dependent on the quantity of players.

Several elements were previously in spot but weren’t staying promoted, stated Andrew Economon, standard manager at the Downtown Grand, who famous the casino would not make a penny off the blackjack event.

“The lessen restrictions for enjoy on the casino flooring have been form of a significant deal, and no one was paying awareness to it,” Economon claimed. “So I began bundling all these items alongside one another. And I stated this is good we require to incorporate a pair a lot more issues to this to actually round it out.”

The sizzling puppy and beer unique is a throwback to a Strip property that when offered a half-pound, 99-cent warm doggy, Economon reported. Reduction leaders that were being once commonplace have become significantly exceptional in Las Vegas during the final 10 years — what he phone calls the “accountant period of the Strip,” when pricing units started to replicate finance section imperatives much more than the visitor experience.

“Anyone began squeezing every little thing and attempting to get the most out of it,” he said, noting the onset of parking service fees on the Strip in 2016. “Then we begun viewing how

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A Grand Miami Beach front Hotel, and Its Background, Could possibly Be Torn Down

Ginna

MIAMI Seaside — The child-faced Beatles invested 9 sunshine-kissed times in Miami Beach front in 1964, basking in the heat winter as countless numbers of youthful enthusiasts thronged to capture a glimpse of the 4 Liverpool lads making the most of a bit of flexibility on the ocean shore.

They stayed at the grand Deauville Seashore Vacation resort on Collins Avenue, and it was their are living “Ed Sullivan Show” broadcast to 70 million folks from the hotel’s Napoleon Ballroom — following their debut clearly show in New York — that assisted cement the Beatles’ remarkable level of popularity in the United States, and the Deauville’s standing as a South Florida cultural landmark.

In its heyday, the lodge hosted the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., President John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra. The Deauville was unmistakable, greeting site visitors with a dramatic porte-cochère fashioned of parabolic curves more than the driveway entrance, a aspect of its postwar-modernist architectural style. On the indication out entrance, a star dotted the letter “i” in its title. It looked like some thing out of “The Jetsons,” embodying the assure of the long term.

Currently, the Deauville is shuttered, enclosed by an unsightly chain-hyperlink fence and No Trespassing indicators. Soon, it is probable to be demolished, to the shock and disgust of preservationists, who panic the hotel’s sluggish demise will established a troubling precedent in their efforts to shield South Florida’s record.

“We’re conversing about conserving trinkets from the developing, which is pathetic,” Jack Finglass, the outgoing chairman of the Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board, said at a conference very last week. “This is an complete horror.”

Miami Beach owes its iconic status in no modest aspect to the preservation of its Art Deco district, regarded the earth about for the string of pastel-colored boutique lodges with names like the Colony and the Delano that line Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue in South Beach.

But it has not always been quick for preservationists to persuade people and nearby officials elsewhere in South Florida — a relatively youthful metropolitan space, as much as significant cities go, and

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My Kuzina offers some of the region’s best Greek food from a shipping container in Grand Prairie

Ginna

Not too many years ago, a fellow food writer joked to me that there were no good restaurants in Grand Prairie. How quickly things change.

Now the choices on offer are nearly overwhelming. Much of the Dallas area’s West African community is concentrated in the suburb. The new Asia Times Square food court bustles with energy. On Main Street in Grand Prairie’s historic downtown, Zavala’s Barbecue just made Texas Monthly’s vaunted list of the state’s top 50 barbecue joints.

Only two doors down from Zavala’s stands an unassuming newcomer: a shipping container in which Athens native Dimitrios Vagenas is cooking some of the region’s best Greek food.

His business, My Kuzina, is primarily a meal-prep and catering service with pickup and delivery options. But My Kuzina’s kitchen also has a service window overlooking the patio of FireHouse Gastro Park, so it was only a matter of time before somebody asked if they could stay for lunch. Now the window is open on weekdays at lunchtime and Saturdays at lunch and dinner.

Vagenas was born and raised in Athens and only arrived in the United States in 2014, to join his wife, Margarita Takou, who’d made the move a few years earlier to get her Ph.D.

“He was very interested in the kitchen, helping his mom and his grandmother cooking,” Takou says. “A lot of his talent, he took that talent from his mom and his grandmother.” (Vagenas is the executive chef and owner, but he shyly suggested we interview his wife instead because “she does the talking.”)

After a childhood cooking with family, he went professional as an adult, attending culinary school in Athens and working on the island of Paros. In Texas, he spent years in kitchens at Omni Hotels in Dallas and Irving before getting furloughed in March 2020.

As Vagenas spent the pandemic months at home, cooking for his growing family, the idea for a Greek meal prep business came into focus. Originally My Kuzina was meant to be a ghost kitchen, before the FireHouse location offered the potential for more.

The spinach and rice casserole at Greek food truck My Kuzina in Grand Prairie
The spinach and rice
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