Restaurants and the rodeo

I've been meaning for some time to write about  a real restaurant find, the Second Street Grille in the Fremont downtown. This small art deco style room serves some very imaginative variations of steakhouse fare, including Mongolian rack of lamb, Thai Cioppino (all right, not usually served in a steakhouse) and Paniola rib-eye steak, with a southwestern-influenced sauce. The service is excellent and there's rarely a wait to get in. The staff says very few locals ever eat there, which is a shame.

The Rio was the only casino I know of that had two completely separate buffets -- the Carnival World Buffet and the Village Seafood Buffet. Until a couple of weeks ago, they were at opposite ends of the very large casino. Now the seafood buffet has been moved to the Carnival World location. The new setup works like this: There are separate entrances for each buffet. The new seafood buffet contains only seafood items. If you pay for the seafood buffet, you also get access to entire Carnival World buffet. You can also, for less, buy access to only the Carnival World, which does include some seafood, including crab legs at dinner. This makes sense to me because it avoids the duplication of offering non-seafood items at both buffets and gives seafood customers a much wider choice of other items. The spouse and I sprung for the seafood buffet recently and were a bit disappointed. Many of the seafood items had been left out too long. Now is a good time to try the Carnival World Buffet; you can get in free by earning 50 tier credits ($500 coin-in) and swiping your player card at a special promotional kiosk outside the buffet. The ticket is good for a couple of days.

The National Finals Rodeo is in town, and South Point has been full people who may be cowboys or may be just Walgreens managers from Laramie and accountants from Boise dressed up like cowboys. One sign the rodeo is in town is the sign in front of Don Vito's, the casino's Italian restaurant, which states that it will be serving the Silverado Steakhouse menu while the cowboys are in town, due to the high demand for steak during the rodeo.