Las Vegas has a variety of Italian restaurants on the Strip, mostly of the yupscale, celebrity chef genre where a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs will set you back at least $50. (Friends, real Italian meatballs are NOT made from ground Wagyu beef.) One of my classmates who spends winters outside the city organized a dinner after our Alumni Leadership Conference at an old-school Italian restaurant called Battista’s Hole in the Wall, a block from our hotel.
Walking into this joint is like going into your Nonna’s attic – if Nonna operated an Italian restaurant in Little Italy. Chianti bottles and other tchotchkes festoon the walls and hang from the ceiling, including a few taxidermied animal heads. My seat faced a stuffed boar head wearing a necktie. Autographed photos of (mostly departed) celebrities line walls above the booths. Battista’s even has a strolling accordionist. The menu is also posted on the walls. Unlike Vegas Strip “trattorias” where everything is à la carte, Battista’s meals include minestrone or salad, garlic bread, carafes of wine (red and white), and cappuccino.
I ordered fettuccine with mussels. Others had eggplant parmigiana and other (mostly red sauce) offerings. I got about eight good-sized mussels surrounding a pile of red-sauced pasta that had a spicy edge to it. The portions were ample. The wine was served in small stemless glasses, as if you were dining at Nonna’s house.
The conversations were lively. Our end of the table (four proudly opinionated women) discussed politics at length. Someone at the other end of the table made a disparaging comment about New Jersey, at which one of the native New Jerseyans took umbrage. The one toast of the evening was to the Garden State.
The tab for the evening was quite reasonable by Las Vegas standards. I’d go back there if I ever found myself back in town.
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