I grew up in Las Vegas in the 1980s — home of the 99-cent shrimp cocktail and prime rib served year-round like it was weather. My parents were divorced, which in our case meant two apartments running two different economies. By day they dealt drugs. By night they worked the casinos. A pretty normal Vegas childhood, which is to say I was alone for most of it.
My mother was bipolar, and the kitchen kept her score. On the up days she'd cook — real food, the kind the neighbors talked about for a week. On the other days it was a paper bag from a drive-thru window, because she had a craving, and the craving always won. You learned to read the weather by what showed up on the counter.
My father slept all day. Around dinnertime he'd surface, flick a twenty and a takeout menu across the table, and tell me to order something. I was ten. The cupboard held a jar of peanut butter; the fridge held ketchup and the cold air it came with. Then, near midnight, he'd come home from the steakhouse at the top of the Mint — the one that later became Binion's Horseshoe, and later still just Binion's, the way everything in that town becomes the next thing — carrying lobster, lamb, a ribeye still warm in its foil. I ate it for breakfast. That was the rhythm: nothing all day, then a king's plate at an hour no ten-year-old should be awake to eat it.
"If you don't like what I make,
make it for yourself." — my mother, before she left the room
Here's the complication: I'm a supertaster. I've got the gene that turns cilantro into soap. So my mother's celebrated cooking was, to me, a minefield of things I physically couldn't stand — and I said so. Loudly. Often. One night she'd had enough. If you don't like what I make, make it for yourself. Then she walked out, certain that was the end of it.
It was the beginning of it. I picked up a chicken thigh and started working out, from nothing, how you turn that into dinner. I was ten, and I had questions with no one around to answer them.
That chicken thigh turned into a lifelong project with three moving parts, and I'm still working all three. Reverse-engineer the restaurant food I loved — the white-tablecloth steakhouse plates that arrived at midnight — and learn to build them myself. Translate my mother's cooking into versions a supertaster can actually eat. And feed the compulsion that came with all of it: to taste everything, anything, even the things I already know I'll hate, just to know.
Late Night Cravings is where that project lives now — the recipes worth the late hour, the food reviews, the places worth a detour. Everything gets rated in phases of the moon, because the best food I ever ate, I ate in the dark.
🌙 Richard Mathis