For its 60th anniversary, Caesars Palace is taking a trip back to the Las Vegas of 1966.
The resort has introduced a dedicated anniversary station at Bacchanal featuring 14 dishes inspired by the flavors and dining traditions of Caesars Palace’s early years. Caesars says its broader 60th-anniversary dining celebration will remain available through December 31, while Bacchanal’s current OpenTable listing shows the special anniversary menu from September 7 through December 30.
And this is unmistakably Old Vegas food.
The anniversary lineup includes:
- ♛ Melon and Prosciutto Salad with ricotta, Champagne vinaigrette and basil
- ♛ Classic Spinach Salad with bacon vinaigrette, egg, onions and mushrooms
- ♛ Chicken Marsala
- ♛ Duck à l’Orange
- ♛ Oysters Rockefeller
- ♛ Prime Rib with Yorkshire pudding, au jus and creamy horseradish
- ♛ Cornish Game Hen with black truffle, garlic and smoked paprika
- ♛ Roman-Style Porchetta
- ♛ Clams Casino
- ♛ Braised Short Rib with creamy polenta
- ♛ Shrimp Piccata
- ♛ Smoked Salmon Rillette
- ♛ Tuna Niçoise Salad
- ♛ Shrimp Cocktail
It is the sort of menu where Shrimp Cocktail and Duck à l’Orange can once again occupy the same stage without a trace of irony.
But the nostalgia at Bacchanal goes considerably deeper than a collection of mid-century dishes.
When Caesars Palace opened on August 5, 1966, the original Bacchanal Room was part of the spectacle. It was not a buffet. It was an elaborate gourmet dining experience built around the resort’s Roman fantasy, with toga-clad attendants, theatrical wine service and meals designed to unfold over hours rather than minutes.
UNLV Libraries, which preserves historic Las Vegas menus and Caesars material, describes the Bacchanal as being in a class by itself among the Strip’s old gourmet rooms. Period guidebooks reportedly advised diners to allow at least three hours for the experience.
Even Caesars’ own promotional material from around the resort’s opening leaned unapologetically into the fantasy, advertising its grand dining salon and meals served by toga-clad, torch-bearing attendants.
That original Bacchanal survived until 2000.
Twelve years later, Caesars resurrected the name for something very different but philosophically familiar. The $17 million Bacchanal Buffet, which opened in 2012, occupied about 25,000 square feet, debuted with nine open kitchens and offered more than 500 items.
The old gourmet room had become a modern Las Vegas mega-buffet.
What connected them was excess.
Both versions of Bacchanal were designed around the idea that dinner at Caesars Palace should be more than merely getting something to eat. It should be abundance turned into theater.
That makes the current anniversary station unusually satisfying. Caesars is not simply decorating Bacchanal with borrowed 1960s nostalgia. The buffet carrying the Bacchanal name is serving food inspired by the era in which Bacchanal itself was born.
There are limits to how literally the history should be read. Caesars describes the dishes as nostalgic favorites inspired by the signature dishes and culinary traditions of its early years; it does not claim that all 14 are exact recreations of recipes served at the original Bacchanal Room.
That hardly diminishes the effect.
For a few months, one of Las Vegas’ great surviving buffet spectacles is letting diners move between the modern world of global stations and show kitchens and an older one populated by Clams Casino, Oysters Rockefeller, Cornish Game Hen and Shrimp Cocktail.
Sixty years after Caesars Palace opened, Old Vegas has found its way back to the buffet line.
And for the true buffet enthusiast, this might be the one place where the customer has the advantage over the house.
