Ferraro’s executive chef Francesco DiCaudo nods casually when informed that Las Vegas supposedly devours 30 tons of shrimp a day. An arm’s length away, at his bar during a recent lunch hour, Gino Ferraro says, “Thirty tons!” The restaurateur’s eyes bulge. “That’s 60,000 pounds! Every day!”
DiCaudo, though, requires no abacus. He nonchalantly invites the man who signs his checks to visit, on any evening, the Bacchanal (Caesars Palace) or Studio B (M Resort) or Carnival World (Rio) buffets, or any other trough of gluttony on the Strip or its outskirts. You will view mountains of shrimp, DiCaudo says. Every day. “Mountains.”
Thirty tons would nearly fill the semitrailer of an 18-wheeler, complemented by a swimming pool of cocktail sauce. Although Ferraro eventually accepts DiCaudo’s presumption, his initial incredulity about the city’s daily shrimp appetite is shared by other industry veterans.
Todd White, vice president of sales for Santa Monica Seafood, among the city’s main suppliers, has spent nearly half of his 54 years in the food business in Las Vegas. He couldn’t peg his company’s average daily or weekly output, but he’s skeptical about that 30-ton estimate.
“I’m not saying it isn’t possible, it just seems gigantic,” he said. “That’s a huge number. Seems a little out there, but I wouldn’t doubt it’s a big number.”
A colossal tale? An essay in the January issue of The New Yorker attributed a 30-ton factoid to a “PBS NewsHour” episode. By press time, a “NewsHour” editor had not responded to a months-old inquiry. Further digging unearthed, at a 2008 sustainability panel in Monterey, Calif., a 60,000-pounds-per-day comment by Las Vegas chef Rick Moonen.
Some in the business discount that consumption rate, others confirm it without pause, and a faction believes it’s higher, much higher. Las Vegas, to be certain, has a voracious appetite for shrimp.
“Yes, pretty amazing,” says R.T. Bauer, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and a foremost expert on the little critters, in an email. “But people love their shrimp, and the supplies are good.”
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says the fishing of shrimp, or wild caught, has plateaued. Production via aquaculture, or farming, began exceeding fishing in 2010. About 4 million tons of the annual global supply of 7 million tons hail from farms, the FAO said.
One such operation, run by Blue Oasis, started in North Las Vegas in mid-2011 and hoped to supply an annual harvest of 250 tons. It produced a delectable Pacific white shrimp, says a competitor, but it was expensive. It closed in 2013.
A shrimp’s lifespan is about 18 months. Bauer is not so troubled about the sustainability of the species — or how a single city like Las Vegas can affect its population — because a female can produce a million eggs in a single spawn. Survival rates are low, he added, but enough survive to ensure a regular supply of the crustaceans.
If Las Vegas does gorge annually on about 11,000 tons, that represents almost 7 percent of the country’s total consumption rate of 165,000 tons in a year — the 12-month span that ended in September 2016, a trade newsletter reported.
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At the Global Seafood Market Conference in January in San Francisco, 2017 was declared “the year of happy shrimp.” Not if they’re destined for Las Vegas. Like crab cakes to Maryland and clam chowder to New England, shrimp, in cocktail form, is hailed as the signature dish of the city.
Golden Gate owner Italo Ghelfi began serving the shrimp cocktail in 1959, four years after he and partners took over the property. The appetizer’s popularity grew, and at least one website called it the food item most associated with Las Vegas. Another said it had become a cliché. In 1991, in what is still commemorated on a wall of plaques in the Golden Gate foyer, it peddled its 25 millionth cocktail.
The California dining institution Du-par’s began operations and serving the shrimp cocktail in Golden Gate in 2010, but it was shuttered in February. The cocktail recipe, however, is proprietary to the property, and Golden Gate owner Derek Stevens has vowed to revive it in a future dining iteration.
The shrimp cocktail endures on the fringes, in the Skyline Casino on Boulder Highway. For $1.50, a sizable portion arrives in classic glass tulip stemware. Downtown, at the Lanai Express in the Fremont, it is served in a small plastic cup — the top third cocktail sauce, the bottom third a horseradish-lettuce foundation — for 99 cents.
Shrimp cocktails, grocery stores, seafood markets and restaurants, though, are feathers on the city’s shrimp scales. The Island Pacific Seafood Market sells about 120 pounds a day, a Whole Foods about 30. King’s Fish Market in the District goes through 25 pounds daily, and Il Mulino New York in the Forum Shops at Caesars about 200 a week. At Herringbone in Aria, executive chef Geno Bernardo needs 125 pounds every other day.
Ferraro calls his U8s — six or seven colossal prawns a pound — mini lobsters. They are fished from the Pacific waters off Mexico just a few weeks every autumn, and an appetizer trio costs $26.
“No flaws,” he says. “Oh, my God, so sweet. The best in town. Nothing like those tiny, tasteless, rubbery things” served elsewhere in such mass quantities.
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Thirty tons inflicts no shock on Justin Cooper. The room chef at the Green Valley Ranch Resort’s Feast Buffet has worked all over town and has a keen gauge on its crustacean craving. He helped procure a Strip hotel’s 12-month contract with a distributor for 500,000 pounds — 250 tons a year, or about 5 tons a week. It’s different at GVR, where Cooper estimates a daily requirement of 250 pounds.
DiCaudo suggests that more than 80 percent of the city’s shrimp damage is done in buffet lines. Coarse pleasure, wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky of gluttonous behavior. An athletic feat, penned John Updike, a stretching exercise. In a city that offers a Buffet of Buffets, allowing customers to feast at five different Harrah’s buffets three (or four, played right) times within 24 hours, its chefs know gluttony.
Cooper talked about ravenous appetites on a recent episode of “Inside Edition.”
“But we also discussed getting the biggest bang for your buck, and seafood — primarily shrimp — is the No. 1 item,” he said.
Bernardo, at Herringbone, agreed. Thirty daily tons doesn’t make him flinch. Consider all the buffets, the round-the-clock chowing, the conventions, the troughs around the ice sculptures, the varieties in which they can be served.
“People come from a lot of places,” he said. “The Midwest … the farther you go (inland), shrimp is harder to find. It isn’t on every menu. And they come here. (People are) gluttons for punishment: ‘Let me eat all the shrimp I can.’ ”
Still, 30 tons is a vague notion until it comes into clear and frigid focus. Southwest of the Strip, in a mammoth warehouse kept at 8 degrees, Andrew Goodman, executive vice president of Supreme Lobster, guides a tour behind the cold curtain. Sales representative Lawrence Manheim rushes to provide thick winter coats.
A dozen palettes, each holding 1,800 pounds of shrimp, are in one aisle. Goodman says this represents the company’s average daily delivery. All of this, he adds, is headed for Caesars properties. Approximately 20,000 pounds. Ten tons, from one of the city’s five main distributors to one corporation’s outlets, in a single coarse, athletic day.