Peter Luger Steak House Las Vegas Is Basically A High-Roller Suite For Meat
The quintessential New York meatery’s Sin City outpost has new menu offerings and more than $1 million worth of steaks.
Peter Luger Steak House is doubling down on carnivorous delicacies at a new location in Las Vegas—the venerable Brooklyn meat mecca’s first U.S. restaurant outside New York.
Aside from dishing out Luger classics like butter-basted sliced porterhouse and “extra thick”-cut bacon, the 8,700-square-foot Caesars Las Vegas eatery boasts a hidden dry-aging room that’s filled with “well over a million dollars worth of meat,” says Daniel Turtel, Vice President of Peter Luger Steakhouse.
That high-rolling figure encompasses more than 3,000 USDA prime cuts being aged at any given time, including rib steak, strip loin, sirloin, and lamb loin. Lugers—which also operates restaurants in Great Neck, N.Y. and Tokyo in addition to the Williamsburg, Brooklyn flagship launched in 1887—is employing cutting-edge measures to deal with the dry desert weather of its Sin City outpost.
The restaurant’s subterranean steak locker is overseen by a dedicated six-person-team that monitors humidity, moisture and air flow with the help of the latest meat-measuring apps.
“In Brooklyn, you’re basically doing everything we can all year to take all the humidity out of the room,” Turtel says. “In Vegas, it’s exactly the opposite. You’ve got this desert around you and you’re faced with the problem of, ‘How do we humidify this room a little bit?’
“If it’s totally dry, you don’t give bacteria or mold or fungus the environment that they need to live and thrive. We’re super careful about temperature, humidity and air flow. They’re all things we’re monitoring very closely.”
Designed by Jeffrey Beers International, the Vegas steakhouse channels the Brooklyn original with exposed brick, wood paneling and beams, oak floors and tabletops, and big bronze chandeliers. The casino-adjacent space—which formerly housed Rao’s, another off-shoot of a legendary New York power dining spot—has an airy, triple-height ceiling and an octagonal main room.
The overall aesthetic is more refined than Brooklyn’s Bavarian beer hall vibe. It’s also significantly larger, seating more than 300 guests across the main dining room, bar, and assorted private nooks with sliding doors.
Food-wise, Peter Luger Las Vegas has added several new menu items, most notably a chilled shellfish tower stacked with Maine lobster, King Crab, jumbo shrimp and oysters. A dover sole entree and a loaded baked potato are also making their debuts here.
At a private tasting before the grand opening earlier this month, Luger’s signature porterhouse and lunch-only burgers (made with prime chuck roast and dry-aged trimmings) were showcased along with impressively meaty jumbo lump crab cakes, a chopped salad of house-cured bacon, Old Bay-brined tiger shrimp, Spanish white onions and hothouse tomatoes, and some reliably tasty sides, including German Fried Potatoes, creamed spinach and sautéed cremini mushrooms.
Those savory standards were followed up with cheesecake, apple strudel, and hot fudge sundaes, all served with generous dollops of “Schlag”, Luger’s homemade whipped cream, typically spooned over desserts or plopped into cups of after-dinner drip coffee.
Fans of Lugers—and there are many—can be assured that enjoying a solid steakhouse experience at the new Vegas restaurant is a decidedly safe bet. It’s likely the best place to dine at Caesars (unless you’re craving Japanese, in which case the casino’s Nobu branch would be the best move).
The buzzy opening comes after Peter Luger’s Brooklyn lost its Michelin star in 2022, in a purge that also afflicted fellow New York City culinary heavyweights Carbone and Marea. That came just three years after a famously scathing New York Times review of Luger’s that sent shockwaves across Gotham’s steak-gobbling cognoscenti.
Turtel—whose great-grandfather Sol Forman bought the steakhouse at auction after Peter Luger’s death and ran it for half a century before he died in 2001—concedes that a few adjustments were made in the wake of such high-profile criticism, but adds that the brand is more concerned with catering to Luger loyalists.
“Look, we’re a restaurant that’s existed since 1887,” Turtel says. “The truth is, we exist for the customers and not the critics. It would have been much more distressing, if, for instance, our long standing customers canceled their Luger’s accounts and reservations, and obviously that didn’t happen. After the Times review, we actually got a crazy bump in business because everyone wanted to come in and show support. And that was awesome.”
Turtel says that while Peter Luger Steak Houses haven’t made any changes to their “core beef program”, they have fiddled with other menu items. “The things that we tweaked were minor,” he explains. “Like, ‘Oh, can we upgrade our salads?’ Sure. You’re at a restaurant that’s been open for a long time and it’s really easy to get complacent. So of course you pay attention to those things.
“I guess the short answer is, ‘Yes we take these things very seriously.’ But you’re not going to be the darling of critics forever. Our customers are incredible and as long as they’re happy, we’re happy.”
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