How to Eat Your Way Through the Las Vegas Strip in Two Days
From affordable dim sum to blowout steak dinners, here are all the places to chow down on a whirlwind weekend
If you’re an acclaimed chef from pretty much anywhere in the world aspiring to build a brand or attain “celebrity chef” status, opening in Las Vegas is practically mandatory. Names like Robuchon, Ducasse, Flay, Ramsay, Andres, Vongerichten, Matsuhisa, Lagasse, and Collichio aren’t just found here, they’re ubiquitous—and most have multiple outlets. Vegas boasts a star-studded collection of James Beard winners and Michelin-starred legends, trumping even New York, LA, or Monaco. If you’re on an expense account, there’s no better place in the country for fine dining—bearing in mind that many outposts of famous eateries are more expensive than the originals. If you’re on a budget, Vegas still delivers, but that often requires straying off the beaten path.
Fortunately, there is a middle ground of reasonably priced stellar food, more than ever before. With a little insider knowledge, you can eat well without blowing your annual dining budget while still enjoying some over-the-top Vegas splurges.
Who I am: I’m Larry Olmsted, an award-winning travel and food writer who first visited Vegas in 1990 and has been back about 75 times since. I’ve written a couple hundred articles just on this city and have been an annual contributor to the Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas (yes, there are still print travel guidebooks!) for more than a decade. I also contributed to the Michelin Guide, have been a food speaker at TEDx and South by Southwest, and wrote a New York Times bestselling book (Real Food, Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It). Vegas is famous for more than just food, so I should tell you that I also set the Guinness World Record for the Longest Casino Poker Marathon session at 72 hours and two minutes in 2004 (it has since been broken).
Before you go
Check the calendar: Vegas doesn’t have “seasons,” it has huge conventions and special events like the fall F1 race, New Year’s, and Superbowl weekend. Hotels that cost $800 a night when the city is full can run just $109 on slow days, which happen every month. If you’re flexible, click around a hotel reservation calendar and you’ll quickly get the idea. (By the way, airfares tend to follow suit).
Getting around: Car rentals are cheap, but traffic is terrible and parking is expensive, so stick to cabs and rideshares. Most of The Strip—the stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard bookended by Resorts World (north) and Mandalay Bay (south)—is walkable, but it always takes longer than you think, requiring crisscrossing the street on bridges and being forced to walk through casinos. Once you arrive at a chosen hotel, reaching a restaurant inside can add another 10 minutes. Wear comfortable shoes and plan on twice what Google Maps says or take Uber or Lyft. The most useful public transport is The Deuce, a bargain 24/7 bus linking the Strip with Downtown, aka “Old Vegas.”
Need to know: In cities like Paris, a great tip to enjoy the finest restaurants is to hit the Michelin-starred spots for lunch: same food, lower price, easier booking. But in Vegas most fine dining restaurants are dinner only.
Where to Stay
The Venetian and Palazzo
These connected properties are two sides of one hotel—the largest in the nation, with a great mid-Strip location. They’re both all-suite properties, with more space for your money, and together they contain what is easily the best array of restaurants of any resort in town. The owners have pumped millions into new eateries, luring Jose Andres and his Bazaar Meat (August 2025), New York’s Korean cult-classic Cote (Fall 2025), Greek stunner esiatorio Milos, Hong Kong Peking duck legend Mott 32 and many more.
Resorts World
One of the newest mega-resorts in town made a huge splash with the best of the new generation gourmet food courts, Famous Foods Street Eats, and a hyper-curated can’t-miss fine dining collection that includes Brezza, the city’s best high-end Italian. But some dislike its location, the far north of the main Strip.
Signature at MGM Grand
If bang-for-your-buck matters, this is the Strip’s hidden gem of value and peace and quiet. It’s a residential building with nothing but large suites, all with whirlpool tubs, tucked behind the MGM Grand, America’s second largest hotel, where Signature guests can use all the amenities. There’s no casino and little other than an uncrowded pool, but everything else you could want is in the mothership next door. It’s also a great choice for families.
Two Food-Filled Days in Vegas
Day 1: Breakfast with DeNiro and Seinfeld, America’s best food tour, and a taste of old Italy
Morning
- They say you can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning, and if that’s your scene, the Bloody Mary at The Peppermill consistently ranks as the city’s best. But even if you stick to coffee, it’s the classic place to start your day: an iconic 24-hour diner with a massive menu that’s connected to a stuck-in-the-’70s tiki-inspired lounge. It famously has been the Hollywood choice for scenes from Show Girls, CSI Vegas, Cotton Club, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and most famously, Casino. Oh, and in 2025 it won the James Beard America’s Classics Award.
- One thing the tourist area of Vegas lacks on the culinary front is a great farmer’s market, but there is Eataly, packed with delicious food kiosks and an array of irresistible ingredients for in-room snacking, including cheeses, wine, and charcuterie. Unlike many spots here, it has ultra-easy access from the Strip, in front of the Park MGM resort. Grab some things to store in your mini fridge for later.
Afternoon
- Local food tours are a great way to find your culinary footing in any major city, but Lip Smacking Foodie Tours in Vegas is at another level and has won so many awards—deservedly—it boggles the mind. The evening tours have so much food they preclude dinner, so I like the midday offerings, which include a pop-culture Celebrity Chef stroll (trying dishes by Gordon Ramsay, Buddy Valastro, Guy Fieri, and Dominique Ansel); a Boozy Brunch tour, named Best Brunch in Vegas by Las Vegas Review-Journal; and an Afternoon Culinary Adventure, with tastings of three or four signature dishes at each of four rotating, topnotch stops.
- If you have a midday sweet tooth, stroll the outdoor, pedestrianized LINQ Promenade to Gordon Ramsay Fish & Chips, the chef’s most casual eatery. All his venues feature a signature take on British classic sticky toffee pudding, and here it’s a decadent milkshake.
Evening
- In 1968, Wally’s was a beloved neighborhood wine and liquor store in Los Angeles. Gourmet foods including cheese, charcuterie, and a butcher shop were added, and by 2013 full-service dining joined the retail mix. When a Vegas Wally’s opened in the new Resorts World in 2021, it captured this colorful history with a great restaurant set inside a retail wine shop. With more than 100 wines available by the glass and many more by the bottle, along with delicious small plates and a super relaxed vibe, there is no better place to savor a pre-dinner vino. But another selling point is the location, just steps away from Brezza…
- “Authentic Italian” is usually a misnomer, but if you want the real deal—handmade pastas and wood-fire grilled meats that taste like what you’d get in the top eateries of Italy—there may be no better place than Brezza. Chef-owner Nicole Brisson trained in some of the most acclaimed kitchens in Italy before pursuing a high-profile career back home, and when she went solo, she did it by carefully sourcing the finest ingredients from the old country and treating them right. Brisson is also a leading pioneer of ultra-dry aged steak—one of a handful of chefs stretching the standard 28 to 30 days to 100 to 130.
- You can get a shave or trim at Barbershop Cuts & Cocktails in the Cosmopolitan, but the real reason to visit lies behind the “janitor’s door”: a large Prohibition-inspired lounge with tufted leather couches and crystal chandeliers. There are handcrafted cocktails, an impressive whisky list, and an amazing slate of live music every night.
Day 2: Affordable dim sum, a supermarket mystery, and a steakhouse dinner
Morning
- A Starbucks with a ginormous line is a common sight here, and one great Las Vegas irony is that it’s much easier to get a cocktail than a cup of coffee—even at seven in the morning. That’s why the recent opening of Brioche by Guy Savoy just inside the Paris resort has been such a big deal. It’s open 24/7 for the earliest risers, fresh brews La Colombe beans, and offers classic pastries from Savoy, one of the triumvirate of three-Michelin-starred chefs who came to Vegas from France early on (with Joel Robuchon and Alain Ducasse). There’s a Brioche in sister-resort Caesars Palace, but unless you’re staying there, Paris is easier to access.
- Bottomless boozy brunches and all-you-can-eat buffets are popular but can weigh down the rest of your day. To keep things light and fresh, head to the Palms resort and Tim Ho Wan for dim sum—but make a reservation, as it’s wildly popular with locals. The Hong Kong original opened in 2009 and a year later famously became the world’s cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant. Dim sum is all they do and they do it incredibly well. The most famous dishes are sticky rice in lotus leaf and baked barbecue pork buns, but the Palms adds “only in Vegas” excesses like shrimp toast with black truffle and foie gras sauce or steamed Wagyu beef bundle with green apple. Stick with the classics and you’ll eat well while saving some cash for dinner.
Afternoon
- Meow Wolf is a world-renowned immersive art collaborative from Santa Fe that builds one-of-a-kind interactive worlds. Each is unique, and in Las Vegas it’s Omega Mart, a twisted supermarket whose shelves are filled with crazily labeled novelty products. It’s so detailed that some visitors buy tickets, go in, look around and leave, without realizing the store is the tip of the iceberg. Behind a speakeasy-style door in frozen foods lies a secret bunker complex with a sci-fi mystery that visitors solve (or not) through clues and puzzles. It’s crazy, hard to describe, and like nothing else. The supermarket is fake but there’s a very real bar—if you can find it.
- Midday snacks used to be a big void in the Vegas food scene, but the past few years saw the rise of the gourmet food court here, bringing together fast-service outposts of famed spots from around the globe. These are perfect for a full lunch or quick bite, and the biggest is Famous Foods Street Eats at Resorts World, inspired by Singapore hawker markets. Sixteen stalls surround a central bar with common seating, so any size party can mix and match. There are first-in-the-U.S. outposts of Michelin Plate and Bib Gourmand-recognized Asian vendors (Geylang Claypot Rice, Ah Chun Shandong Dumplings), plus American specialties like slow smoked meats from Blood Brothers Texas BBQ and James Beard-winning chef Marcus Samuelsson’s fried chicken at Streetbird.
Evening
- Head to the Bellagio and stake out a “lakeside” patio table at one of the hotel’s restaurants for a pre-dinner sunset cocktail while watching the free musical fountain show, which happens every 15 to 30 minutes in the afternoons and evenings, depending on the day. Best bets are Julian Serrano’s Lago or Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, Vegas’ original celebrity chef restaurant clone, the one that started it all.
- A red-meat lover could eat at a different world-class steakhouse here every night for weeks, flitting from local classics to upscale chains to numerous celebrity chef offerings. Choosing the “best steakhouse” in Vegas is impossible and causes impassioned arguments, but many critics go with Cut by Wolfgang Puck in the Venetian, and it’s hard to disagree. Puck had me with the tableside old fashioned trolley, but for steak fans he covers all the high-end bases, from 35-day dry-aged prime Nebraska ribeye to celebratory tomahawks to domestic, Australian, and Japanese wagyu. There’s also plenty of showpiece seafood, chicken, pork, and lamb, plus a big array of the Pacific Rim-inspired starters Puck is known for: crudo, sushi, sashimi, and tartare. Throw in a vast slate of upscaled takes on classic steakhouse sides, a 500-odd bottle wine list, in-house barrel-aged cocktails, and even a Kobe beef fat-infused old fashioned, and you have a big night out.
- Whiskey is a perfect post-steakhouse digestive, so head to the aptly named Whiskey Down in the MGM Grand. As the biggest operator of hotels, casinos, bars, and restaurants in Vegas, MGM Resorts has the buying power to operate a very extensive private cask program, with one-of-a-kind expressions available no place else. Whiskey Down has many of these, and once they’re gone, they’re gone, but some notable recent offerings have included exclusive MGM-only bottlings of bourbons from Old Weller and Nevada’s own Smoke Wagon. Whiskey Down also serves tasting flights (discounted on Whiskey Wednesdays), features live music almost every night, and stays open until 1 or 2 a.m.
If you have three days
All the above, but add…
- Ubiquitous in most cities today, structured cooking classes are not big in Vegas, but Wynn Resorts offers intimate, high-quality culinary experiences as part of their Connoisseur Series. There are usually two to three on offer each month, from mixology to desserts to sushi making.
- The best place for a whiskey tasting in Vegas? Your hotel room. Boasting one of the planet’s largest collections with more than 4,000 labels, Whisky Attic shuttered its brick-and-mortar location in the pandemic and now does house calls. You choose a custom tasting such as Scotch or bourbon, select a price point (from around $150 per person), and an expert instructor comes to you with background info, history, tasting instructions, and a range of bottles.
- For star chef-level comfort food—and one of the city’s best food bargains—head to BBQ Mexicana in Mandalay Bay, a to-go counter in the back hallway near Shark Reef Aquarium. It’s a spin-off of nearby famed Border Grill, from James Beard and Julia Child award-winning chef-owners Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken. The signature smoked brisket burnt-end burrito, made with natural antibiotic and hormone-free meat, is stunning. BBQ Mexicana is so popular with locals that there are outposts in T-Mobile Arena (NHL Golden Knights), Allegiant Stadium (NFL Raiders), and the minor league Las Vegas Ballpark.
If you have four days, plus
All of the above, but add…
- From spring to fall, the city’s AAA baseball team, the Aviators, play in a fairly new open-air stadium that has won fan votes as the nation’s top minor league park. Tickets are cheap, with fireworks and themed games, and best of all, the food is local and great. This includes BBQ Mexicana (above), Italian favorites from nearby Frankie’s Uptown, great burgers, dogs, sausages, and Nevada craft beers.
- Las Vegas is famous for its abundance of steakhouses, buffets, and boozy brunches, but one overlooked culinary niche in which it excels is oyster bars. A beloved local favorite is the Palace Station Oyster Bar, an island setup with counter eating in the middle of the Palace Station casino, open 24/7. If you crave shucked-in-front-of-you oysters at 3 a.m., this is the place, but everything is made to order in plain sight, including cioppino, jambalaya, and the signature seafood pan roasts.
- Locals famously eschew the Strip, and if you want to eat like them, head to the city’s booming Chinatown, which is now far more than just Chinese food. Choices are endless (from Thai street food to tacos to soup dumplings), and one way to get a handle quickly is on Lip Smacking Foodie Tours’ Chinatown tour.