The Strip is LIVE tonight w/ Charlie Palmer & Hal Sparks

We are live again tonight on this UStream channel, starting at 7:30 p.m. PT this time so we can play both interviews before Miles gets home for the proper portions of the show.

This week, we visit once more with Charlie Palmer, who used this program once upon a time to reveal a WORLD EXCLUSIVE about plans to build a Vegas hotel. Last week, it was announced he'll be inducted into the American Gaming Association's Hall of Fame, so we talked about that, why he never expanded beyond his two Vegas restaurants, what's next for him in New York now that his Grand Central Station eatery is closed and why the e-winebook idea he pioneered at Aureole hasn't really spread as far and wide as expected.

We also have an interview with the very funny comic and former "Talk Soup" and "Queer As Folk" star Hal Sparks, who talks about having his show interrupted by Motley Crue rocker Vince Neil's "assault" on ex-girlfriend and ex-TV reporter Alicia Jacobs at the Hilton in March. We'll play a Vince-related excerpt of the Hal Sparks chat during the main show, then issue the whole thing as a Strip Extra to keep the main episode from becoming too long.

So start by playing the Hal Sparks conversation at about 7:30 p.m., followed by the Charlie Palmer interview, followed by the proper show when Miles arrives from work to do the proper show parts.

Just a tip: As the weeks tick down, the live show gets weirder and weirder. Normally, I end up with about 1-3 minutes of outtakes, but it's been more like 10 over the past few weeks. Miles can't seem to help himself, and it's really funny stuff. So come on down for the live show while you can!

Or, of course, the podcast version will be out later this week. And soon I will pull together our final outtakes show, too. Sigh. A lot of "last" this and "final" thats going on around here. Yikes.

Finally, if you're unclear who Hal Sparks is, check out these excerpts of his 2010 Showtime special, "Charmageddon":

Puck Deploys iPad For Wine List

Well, it's about time.

It's been almost a decade since Charlie Palmer's Aureole at Mandalay Bay started using tablet PCs to make its gargantuan wine list more user-friendly and approachable, and a good seven years since I wrote about it in Newsweek. That was the brainchild of then-wine director Andrew Bradbury, and just two weeks ago I asked Palmer's publicist if they'd upgraded from HPs to iPads yet. She said that was coming soon.

Unfortunately, they snoozed too long. Today, Wolfgang Puck's folks announced they've got 10 iPads at CUT at Palazzo to help diners sort and learn about the 500+ selections of wine. From the press release:

The iPad displays the entire beverage list including wine selections, cocktails and spirits and is delivered to the table when guests arrive. CUT currently features 10 iPad tablets utilizing the wine application SmartCellar designed by the company Incentient. The SmartCellar system offers an interactive approach to displaying the wine list and allows sommeliers to modernize their approach to educating and arming their guests with the insight to help guide their selections and maximize enjoyment of their dining experience.

I actually had been plotting a Las Vegas Weekly column about Vegas technologies that bafflingly hadn't caught on elsewhere. Not sure if this scotches that idea or not -- there were others I had in mind, too -- but it's good to see progress any which way. Bradbury told me when he was still at Aureole that the tablets had spurred a noticeable increase in wine sales, so it seemed inevitable that others would follow sooner or later.

Back in the day, Bradbury and the Aureole crew had said that they could foresee their tablet programs in restaurants all over the world and planned to give diners user names and passwords. That way, you could go to another restaurant, get the tablet and see what you liked the last time. Bradbury also said there would be a way to email yourself or others your wine selections and even order that wine delivered to your home. I don't believe most of those innovations ever happened.

The Aureole version does have one unique aspect that can't really be replicated, the live-streaming webcam that shows the wine angels ascending and descending on winches inside the wine tower. Let's drink to that.

Top Secret Tourist Tip of the Year

So I'm working on this little story about all the weird stuff going on around Vegas for 9/9/09 and I start going through all the promotional emails I had received pertaining to said numerology. Most was junk.

When I came to this one, though, I was a bit in disbelief. Still am, actually.

We'd already featured Restaurant.Com as a Top Secret Tourist Tip of the Week earlier this year. It's a great site that sells restaurant gift certificates at discounts. That is, typically a $25 gift certificate costs $10. Already, that's a bargain.

But for a 99-hour span this week -- starting today, natch, and going through Sunday, Sept. 13 -- they're giving 90 percent off the price using the discount code NINETY. That is, a $50 gift certificate for AGO at the Hard Rock, normally costing $20, is now $2. Really.

The restaurants at Mandalay Bay are especially well-represented, including Aureole, Fleur de Lys, RM Seafood and Mix. But there are also some interesting off-Strip places locals love, like Rosemary's, Yolie's and Chicago Joe's.

This is kind of an amazing opportunity to enjoy serious discounts or buy some early Xmas gifts. There are some restrictions -- some restaurants require a certain dollar amount to be ordered -- but I just spent $9.80 on $240 worth of dining certificates. I picked up a few for some restaurants I go to occasionally -- Strings, Cafe Heidelburg, Tillerman and Hash House A Go Go -- and a couple I'd never tried but sounded interesting, like Streets of New York.

NY Post: LV Copies of NYC Eateries Suck. Sorta.

New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo concludes that many of the Vegas versions of vaunted NYC eateries are pale facsimilies. His central conclusion:

"For the past few years, puff pieces about the Vegas dining revolution have clogged the pages of food and travel magazines that are, coincidentally, even more clogged with Vegas advertising. ... But unless the name is McDonald's, restaurants aren't portable. Even if the food is the same at distant locations - a dubious proposition - the atmosphere isn't close, and neither is the dining experience."

Along the way he mocks the decor of the Vegas version of 111-year-old Rao's (at Caesars Palace to your left, NYC to your right), as I have gotten great heat for as well, questions whether Fiamma (MGM Grand), Tao (Venetian), Il Mulino (Caesars) and Le Cirque (Bellagio) measure up to their Manhattan forebears, both culinarily (is that a word?) and experientially. He praises Daniel Boulud Bistro at Wynn, Restaurant RM and Mandalay Bay, both worthy exceptions to his thesis.

So here's the thing: He's sort of right. And not exactly right. If you've been to the original in New York, you have a preconceived notion of what you'll find and you can put not just the food on trial but also NY versus Vegas sensibilities. That cuts both ways.

I'm a big fan of Charlie Palmer's Aureole at Mandalay Bay, for instance. It's a terrific dining experience and brilliantly Las Vegas. We ate at the New York version last time we were in town and found it to be, well, stodgy. The food was good, but the "experience" was Old School. NYC devotees may never have seen a Vegas wine angel ascend a glass tower (right) on a winch and pulley to fetch a patron's vino -- and never wish to. Rao's was the same way. The only people who will even know how cheesy and false the decor is there are those of us who have had the privilege of experiencing the utterly charming original. The food's lovely at both, but that's not the only criterion for judgment.

Cuozzo kind of acknowledges just this at the end of the piece when he notes that one of the reasons Daniel Boulud Bistro triumphs is because of the Lake of Dreams show at Wynn that goes off every so often.

"I was halfway through a plate of pungent artisanal cheese when a giant, full-voiced frog popped out of a rainbow-lit waterfall and channeled Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World." Try ordering that on East 65th Street!"

Well put.