During one of the days on my trip to the East Coast, I went together with my friends to American Dream, the second largest shopping mall in the United States.
Because of my abnormal sleep schedule, I wasn’t able to wake up in time to carpool together with them from Burlington County to Bergen County, so I drove over on my own after I was ready to start my day. My GPS directed me to the Pearl Lot, so I parked there and started making my way to where my friends were, taking some photographs along the way.
They were playing Angry Birds Mini Golf, so I joined them and helped them capture footage of their gameplay for a video.
After finishing all 18 holes, we headed back out into the mall.
Our next activity was the Nickelodeon Universe Theme Park. It had an eerie vibe to it, which was probably attributed to the fact that there were not very many people there and a lot of the rides were out of service. My friends also apparently had some issues with management because their filming permit for American Dream allegedly does not extend to the theme park due to it being a separate and independent entity from the mall.
After a fairly underwhelming theme park experience, we headed back out into the mall once again to walk to our next destination.
Apparently American Dream has the one and only physical Mr. Beast Burger location, and my friends wanted to make a video of them trying every item on the menu.
I ordered a Nashville hot chicken tender sandwich for myself. The lettuce was shriveled, the pickles lacked juice, and the bun resembled a bun you’d find on the clearance shelf at your local grocery store because it is about to expire at the end of the day. With that being said, the chicken itself was unexpectedly passable. I probably would’ve actually enjoyed this meal if it was just served as standalone chicken tenders instead.
There was one final thing my friends wanted to see before the end of the day, so we headed back out into the mall.
My friends are video game YouTubers, so they wanted to see the Minecraft installation and take a picture in front of this tall, angry-looking shrub.
After a long day of filming and exploration, we parted ways and I headed back to the Pearl Lot on the opposite side of the mall to return to my rental vehicle, again, taking more photographs of interesting things along the way.
American Dream was strange. Maybe it was because we were there during the daytime on a weekday, and maybe it’s because I’m just used to stores back at home on the Las Vegas Strip always being pretty busy all the time, but American Dream felt way too empty compared to its size.
I’m currently in the New Jersey suburbs east of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania traveling together with some friends. I’ve been to both Pennsylvania and New Jersey before, but Delaware, which is fairly nearby, was one of the handful of states that I still had not visited. Because of my proximity to being able to check off another state from my goal of eventually visiting all 50, I decided to split from my group for a day to drive down south and be a tourist in Wilmington.
While in Wilmington, I decided to visit the Nemours Estate, composed of a mansion, garage, and garden.
Being a resident of Las Vegas and having spent a majority of the past few months in either Pacific or Mountain Standard/Daylight Time, heading all the way over to New Jersey was a bit of a time zone jump. To make things worse, the day I decided to visit Delaware was my first full day in Eastern Daylight Time, so I hadn’t had an opportunity to adjust. On top of that, I have already been falling asleep pretty late while in Pacific Time, so my late-riser status was amplified even more. Needless to say, I had a fairly late start on my Delaware day.
After a one-hour drive from Burlington County in the New Jersey suburbs, I arrived at Nemours Estate at approximately 2:00 PM EDT. It was later than I had hoped, but I figured that was still enough time—I would have two and a half hours to explore the mansion and garage before they closed at 4:30 PM EDT, then an extra half hour to walk around the garden before it closed at 5:00 PM EDT.
Nemours Estate is wildly overstaffed. The mansion allegedly had 77 rooms, and I am fairly certain that at least 1 in 3 rooms had a staff member inside. This is great if you have a genuine interest in the backstory and lore of the mansion, but if you just got there at 2:00 PM and want to see everything before the premises close, you tend to be less excited to have an impromptu ten-minute guided tour in every third room. Either way, these staff members seemed genuinely passionate about sharing their knowledge of the history of the mansion with me and reciting a circularly-repeating version of the information that was already printed on the informational placards, so I decided to be nice and entertained their conversation.
The mansion has three floors (let alone the off-site garage), and by the time that I had finally finished working my way through the ground floor and talking with everyone, it was past 3:30 PM. I still had the upper floor, basement, and garage to get through, so for the remaining two floors, I aggressively went out of my way to avoid eye contact with any staff members so that I could see everything and take all the photographs I wanted without getting stunlocked in discussion. It got so bad that I was planning on just pretending that I didn’t know how to speak English, but I decided against it because I felt like I would just be easily exposed by the fact that I was standing in front of and reading all the plaques.
Strangely, starting from about 4:00 PM, the staff members started thanking me for visiting, as if they were implying that it was time for me to leave. I disregarded their confusing actions because I knew that I still had until 4:30 PM as per the hours posted on their website and at the ticketing office, so I resumed my tour, and at 4:15 PM, I left the mansion and started walking towards the garage.
The instant I stepped into the garage, an old man briskly walked towards me saying that he is closing soon. I replied “ok,” checked my watch to confirm that it was not past 4:30 PM, then started looking at the vintage cars. When he realized that I was not leaving, he started anxiously following me around, saying that he is closing the garage and repeatedly announcing that I had to exit the building. When I clarified with him that the garage closes at 4:30 PM, he proudly bellowed “that’s right!” I checked the time again, but for the sake of not causing this old man to have a ruptured aneurysm, I chose to peacefully leave at 4:24 PM.
I was taking a refreshingly brisk walk around the garden, but at 4:48 PM, a security guard began approaching me. He said that it was time for me to wrap up and start heading back to the gate. When I mentioned that I still had the northwestern corner of the garden to get through and let him know that I was going to take a look at that first before leaving, he said that he had to respectfully stop me from doing that because he had been tasked with clearing out the grounds. I started walking towards the exit and was off-property by 4:52 PM.
The portions of the Nemours Estate I was actually able to see were fine, but I think I would have had a much more pleasant experience if I wasn’t constantly interrupted by staff members or asked to leave early. If their closing time represents a time at which all the staff members have finished clearing and securing the premises, then they should publish their closing times as 4:15 PM for the buildings and 4:45 PM for the garden, not 4:30 PM and 5:00 PM. The security guard was calm and professional when asking me to leave, but the guy overseeing the garage definitely needs to settle down if he doesn’t want to die of a sudden stroke from yelling angrily at a customer.
Here are some photographs I took in and around the mansion, garage, and garden:
I usually don’t go to restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip because of the relatively higher prices as a result of the “tourist mark-up,” but I decided to make an exception to check out Stubborn Seed at Resorts World Las Vegas on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada.
I opted to get the chef’s tasting menu at US$135.00 per person. I went this past Saturday, and it seems like they hadn’t swapped over to the spring rotation yet, as my menu was labeled as still being a winter menu. Each menu was custom-printed and wax sealed, and the inside had a special note welcoming my party by name.
I opted for the elevated experience for an additional US$40.00, which came with three additional appetizers.
The first was a Kaluga caviar macaron with champagne citrus crema and dill, topped with edible gold leaf.
The macaron was delicious, but I think combining it with the caviar was a bit of a waste of caviar. The macaron had a strong and sweet flavor that you’d expect from a high-quality macaron, but that flavor completely overwhelmed any semblance of caviar. I think I personally would’ve probably appreciated this more if this was separated into a standalone caviar bump to start, and a standalone macaron for dessert.
Next was a wagyu beef tartare canneloni with papaya kimchi and cured egg yolk.
This was a flavor combination that I’ve never had before. The portion size was very small, so it was sort of just gone before I had enough time to chew for a while and really take in and process the full flavor profile, but from what I did get of it, I liked it.
The third and final elevated experience appetizer was a Hudson Valley foie gras tart with fuji apple gelee, pine nut, and feuillentine.
The pailleté feuilletine was unexpectedly bitter. On paper, I think it’s reasonable to add feuilletine to foie gras for the textural variety, as well as to prepare it on the more bitter side to balance out the smooth fattiness of foie gras. But, in practice, I think the way that this particular tart was executed wasn’t the best. As a disclaimer, I’m not really the biggest foie gras enthusiast, so it might just be a matter of inexperience on my end, but I’d say this was one of my least-preferred dishes from the dinner.
With the additional appetizers from the elevated experience over, we received the first regular appetizer from the base tasting menu, Kalamata olive ciabatta with whipped feta, Kalamata dust, and pickled baby radish.
The pieces of bread were comically small, and we each only got one piece, but the little amount of bread I was able to eat was good. I’m not the biggest fan of cheese, but I didn’t sense as strong of a moldy flavor from this whipped feta like I usually do from most cheeses.
Next was uni panna cotta with yuzu gelee and orange kombu granita.
The flavor of the sea urchin was pretty mild here, and the citrus flavor basically fully masked the sea urchin. Sushi is my favorite food, and sea urchin is my favorite kind of sushi, so it’s probably unsurprising that I love it when the sea urchin flavor is intense. With that context in mind, my personal preference may have affected how I perceived the flavor profile balance of this dish; for someone who doesn’t obsess as much over sea urchin as I do, this uni panna cotta might actually be a good balance with the uni being just an accent.
After taking away our bowls, the waiter and his assistant brought out this flower and said that the next dish would be a multi-sensory experience. He poured what I assume is liquid nitrogen into the vase, saying that it would catalyze the emission of a scent. I took a good sniff, and even with my highly sensitive sense of smell, I didn’t notice any special aromas.
The dish that accompanied the scent was sake- and citrus-cured Japanese yellowtail with chili ferment, crispy tapioca, compressed Asian pear, and passion fruit buttermilk emulsion.
This was a bit too tangy and tart for my preference. I like high-fat cuts of fish, and I think all the citrus in the sauce and layered in between the yellowtail pierced too sharply through the desirable umami of the fish.
Our next dish was winter truffle ricotta gnudi with maitake mushroom, pine nuts, buttery greens, and winter black truffle.
As you can see from the photograph, this was completely buried in a thick layer of foam, so I couldn’t actually see what I was eating. I started working on whatever I could catch with my fork, and it ended up just being really bitter vegetables. Eventually, after making it over half way through the dish, I accidentally stabbed through my first piece of gnudi, all of which had apparently been arranged alongside the edge of the dish, but I couldn’t tell because of the foam.
After mixing the vegetables with the gnudi, it was far more palatable, and I would even go as far as to say that it was a good dish. But, with this comically horrific presentation, you may also end up eating only bitter vegetables for a while, then get confused during the middle of your meal as to whether you suddenly turned into a cow eating slop out of its trough.
After that miniature adventure, we reached the intermezzo of the tasting menu and received sour apple sorbet with fennel granita and rosemary gel.
This was a sweet, refreshing, delicious dessert. In the middle of our meal.
I guess the gnudi was technically our first entrée, but because of how wrong that dish went, my brain interpreted this next dish as the real first entrée: pan-roasted barramundi with baby leeks, fennel, and shiitake sofrito galangal green curry.
The fish skin was a bit tough and difficult to cut up and chew, but otherwise, the rest of the dish was amazing. The flesh of the fish was extremely tender and had a “melt in your mouth” texture. The curry had an intricate and storied taste that had a lot of deep and complex elements to its flavor profile, yet it was not overwhelming. This was my favorite dish of the dinner.
Our final entrée was Westholme Australian wagyu striploin with brown butter soubise, desert moon mushrooms, Marcona almond fermented soybean, crispy miso cabbage, and natural chicken jus.
Although this was a perfectly acceptable piece of steak, it was comparatively underwhelming considering the level of quality I was expecting from a restaurant like this. This striploin also demonstrated how meaningless the “wagyu” label has become at this point without a rating indicated after it; this had little to no marbling, and it didn’t taste any different than an average steak you’d get from an average butcher.
I think what made the steak taste even cheaper was the large amount of sauce served alongside it that closely resembled steak sauce. I often say that the only purpose steak sauce serves on steak is to cover up an underwhelming steak, because a great steak will shine on its own. The bed of sauce reminded me of what a more sophisticated version of steak sauce from the grocery store would probably be like.
To conclude our tasting menu experience, we received our real dessert, winter citrus pavlova with olive oil cake, yuzu pastry cream, and caramelized pistachios.
There was a lot going on at once here, with a bunch of different textures and multiple variants of flavors, but overall, I liked it. It wasn’t too overwhelmingly sweet, which allowed me to recognize and appreciate the contributions of the individual components of the dish.
And finally, along with our check, we each received a piece of mandarin pate de fruit.
So you may be wondering, why in the world do I have a photograph of this cheeseburger?
I usually only ever go to chef’s tasting menu or omakase experience restaurants with foodie friends who like to eat pretty much anything and everything. That’s the magic of leaving it up to the chef—you never know what you’re going to get. That’s the fun of it, and you get to listen to the chef’s story as told with the food.
Well, just like how I made an exception to my “avoid restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip” rule, I also made an exception to my “don’t go to tasting menu restaurants with picky eaters” rule. I regret doing that, because the friend who I went with… doesn’t eat fish or seafood. I ended up eating his portion of any dish that had fish or seafood in it, i.e., the Kaluga caviar macaron, uni panna cotta, cured Japanese yellowtail, and pan-roasted barramundi.
That’s quite a large portion of the meal, so to make up for it, he ordered JJ’s Guilty Pleasure Burger, a double wagyu onion smash burger with smoked beef bacon, American cheese, crispy onions, and beefy crave sauce with a side of herb bravas. I sampled a small portion of it, but I found it to be a fairly unremarkable burger, so I didn’t have more than a fraction of a bite as to not tarnish the flavor flow of the tasting menu.
Here are some photographs I took around the interior of the restaurant.
So, the final verdict? At US$175.00 per person before taxes and gratuity for the full elevated and enhanced tasting menu (without a wine pairing), I think it was underwhelming overall, but probably still fine compared to other Strip restaurants.
My perception of it might be biased because I ate so much extra food from my friend’s portion, but if it hadn’t been for that, the total amount of food given throughout the dinner felt a bit small. I personally thought the dishes were sort of a hit-or-miss, and if I were ever to go back, I would just order à la carte, start with a round of oysters, get a full portion of the barramundi, and close with a dessert to build my own meal at a much lower pricepoint.
Today is the first day of astronomical spring, so I decided to do another photo dump of miscellaneous pictures I took last season that didn’t warrant having their own dedicated blog posts. (Yes, I know I usually go off meteorological seasons, but it was just more convenient this time to go off astronomical seasons because I was busier than usual at the beginning of this month.)
I don’t actually remember which restaurants these first two photos are from because they were so long ago, but here is a random bowl of noodles and a random chirashi bowl I had.
For dinner one day, I met up with a friend who lives in the southeastern Las Vegas Valley and checked out Noodle Master, which I was told was a relatively new restaurant. Pictured below was our appetizer, spicy pork wontons in chili oil sauce, topped with green onions and served with a side of wonton sauce.
From where we were sitting, we got a decent view of the kitchen where we were able to watch them make noodles. For my main entrée, I ordered hand-pulled wide dandan noodles with minced pork, cucumber, crushed peanuts, spicy soy sauce, and Sichuan pepper, but I forgot to take a picture of it.
Earlier this month, there were some severe fires in Southern California. I have friends who live in the at-risk areas, so I headed over to Los Angeles County to help out with disaster prevention and recovery where I could.
This photograph was taken at almost 11 PM on the night the Eaton Fire started. The smoke was so thick and had already covered such a wide area that it illuminated the night sky and made the moon look like a glowing orb of fire.
The severity of the fires was amplified due to severe winds. The winds also caused direct damage on top of spreading the fire; they toppled a lot of trees, many of which fell into roadways and blocked the flow of traffic.
While in the Southern California area, I met up with one of my friends for dinner. She ordered cheese katsu curry thinking that it would literally just be a chunk of cheese with breading, presumably envisioning a fancier mozzarella stick dish. Well, it ended up being pork dunked in a layer of cheese, which was then covered in panko bread crumbs and fried.
She’s particular about meats and did not like this pork, so she musical-chairsed the dish over to me. I don’t like cheese, but I also don’t like wasting food, so I ate it anyway. … I guess that is one way to make me to eat cheese.
My company Tempo used to have team houses in Southern California back when we still competed in esports, but since entirely realigning the company towards game development, we’ve gone fully remote and no longer have any team houses or offices. That’s made it rare for us to ever see each other in person, so when an opportunity does arise, I usually show up.
Our CEO was in Los Angeles County for some unrelated business, so while he was there, we had a small gathering at the Sea Level Restaurant and Lounge at the Shade Hotel Redondo Beach. I don’t quite remember what we ordered, but just based on the photos, it seems like I got the catch of the day, and the other person whose meal I photographed got some kind of salmon dish.
After dinner, we went for a walk together around the marina, which gave me nostalgia from when we had our Redondo Beach and Long Beach team houses a handful of years ago.
This is the Holy Apple. No further context will be provided.
I finally got an opportunity to watch the Fountains of Bellagio’s choreographed water show from the western point of view. Now all I need to do is go for a swim and watch the show from under the water jets, and then I will have seen the show from every possible angle and perspective.
For dinner one day, I dined at the Yellowtail Japanese Restaurant & Lounge at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino. Pictured below are our dishes of edamame with sweet chili, cucumber salad with sesame and ume amazu, rock shrimp with Korean chili aïoli, and what I believe is a matcha cheesecake (but I don’t remember for sure).
One day, I was driving southbound on South Las Vegas Boulevard when I ran into an insane amount of congestion that was backed up to around Resorts World Las Vegas. After making it closer to the intersection of Fashion Show Drive and skimming through some local Las Vegas news websites on my phone in standstill, bumper-to-bumper traffic, I found out that there was a group of protestors who were planning on marching north on the Strip, turning left onto Fashion Show Drive, and concluding their demonstration in front of Trump International Hotel Las Vegas.
Well, I guess the Trump Hotel got tipped off about this and they (reasonably) didn’t want their business operations disrupted and didn’t want to have a bunch of non-clientele trespassers on their private property, so it seems like they somehow convinced the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to shut down all westbound travel on the entirety of Fashion Show Drive, both foot traffic and vehicular traffic, starting from South Las Vegas Boulevard.
The protestors comically did not know what to do anymore, so I guess they sort of just … stood there. Overflowing onto the street. Which then prompted the police to also have to close a few lanes of travel on South Las Vegas Boulevard to make sure the protestors didn’t get hit by cars while they tried to rally them back onto the sidewalk.
What a clown fiesta.
Back when Tempo was still in esports and we had a professional H1Z1 team, we were forced to work with the Rio Hotel & Casino as the temporary competitor housing provider for the league. Back then, the Rio was still owned by Caesars Entertainment. My experience with the Rio was so catastrophically bad that it sort of just ruined all Caesars properties for me, so I generally avoid anything Caesars-related.
With that being said, I usually don’t let my grudges interfere with my friends’ wishes. One of my friends was in town for a conference, and Mon Ami Gabi at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino was in a convenient location for dinner, so I decided to finally give a Caesars property’s restaurant a chance.
We started with some melted brie with apricot jam, brown butter walnuts, and mint with a side of croutons. This was basically a gigantic chunk of heavy, greasy cheese that tasted like I was dumping a bottle of coagulated cooking oil into my mouth. At least the walnuts were decent, I guess.
Next was onion soup au gratin, baked with gruyère cheese. … I will let the photograph speak for itself.
Yes, this is exactly how it came out from the kitchen.
My friend was craving a burger, so we got le cheeseburger & frites with tomme de savoie cheese, pickles, and diced onion. The burger patty was dry and flavorless.
Needless to say, based on this particular dinner, I cannot recommend Mon Ami Gabi.
I, Adam Parkzer, am always ready for a picture, at all times, no matter what.
Always.
One day, I was driving southbound on South Las Vegas Boulevard (not too far away from the photo near Fashion Show Drive above) when, again, there was an insane amount of congestion. I eventually approached the intersection of Mystère Dreams Avenue where I discovered that there seemed to be… an obstruction in the road.
Now, driving long vehicles is not easy. I drive a pickup truck and even that can sometimes get tricky in tight areas, so driving an entire bus is obviously going to be very difficult, especially in a place like the Las Vegas Strip where there’s a lot going on. In order to not swipe things with the tail end of the bus, you have to make very wide turns, i.e., you have to drive “outwards” first, and then actually make the turn afterwards.
Well, apparently this bus took the most inopportune time to break down: right as the bus driver reached the peak of the “outward” portion of the wide turn. This bus broke down in a way that blocked three out of the four travel lanes on South Las Vegas Boulevard.
Have I mentioned anything about clown fiestas yet?
I usually go get a haircut about once every two months. Two months is a long time, and a lot can happen in two months. Well, apparently, at some point in the last two months, something happened that prompted the hair salon I go to to post a new, interesting sign below their Clark County business license.
… I would like to personally meet and shake the hand of the person who walked into this building, saw several people sitting in salon chairs and styling stations getting their hair done, and genuinely thought they had stumbled across a medical facility.
It’s common for people to smoke indoors in Las Vegas casinos while gambling, and that is also one of the things that I find most annoying about Las Vegas casinos.
I somehow missed this when it happened, but apparently, Park MGM Las Vegas decided to convert to a non-smoking property back in late 2020. To show my appreciation, I decided to go for a walk around the Park MGM one day and stopped by La Pizzeria alla Romana in La Cucina del Mercato at Eataly for a quick lunch.
The pizza was … underwhelming.
And finally, here is a random photo of shishito peppers.
I’ve known that this art gallery existed for a while now, but this was my first time going. As a Las Vegas resident, I got a locals discount and purchased an admission ticket for US$15.00 (the non-discounted ticket price is US$19.00).
The gallery was a lot smaller than I expected, and it took me less than an hour to see everything, even with reading every plaque. It was a very calming and peaceful experience, though, which I found very pleasant—there were not many other patrons in the museum, and the room was humidity-controlled, which felt refreshing relative to the dry Las Vegas air.
Until summer of this year, the collection on display is called “American Duet: Jazz & Abstract Art.” Some artists are apparently able to see colors in music, and the gallery showcased some pieces of abstract art that were inspired by and sourced from jazz music.
One thing that I noticed from these exhibits that I liked is how three-dimensional the art was. Other art museums tend to have a lot of prints or paintings on flat canvas, but this collection at the Bellagio had a lot of pieces with enough depth and layers that I was able to manipulate the angle at which I viewed the piece, combined with different light trajectories, to see a lot more from the art than what you’d be able to gather from just a head-on view of a print.
Here are some photographs I took throughout the gallery:
Last week, a new seasonal installation went live at the Bellagio Conservatory & Botanical Gardens inside MGM Resorts’ Bellagio Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada. I was there last month to enjoy their “Lunar New Year 2025: Year of the Snake” display; I headed back over again to check out their new spring arrangement called “The Birds and the B’s.”
