Mr. Bionda and I are celebrating our upcoming anniversary with a last-minute trip out west! We’ll fly into Vegas and spend the next 6 days road tripping to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, followed by a few nights in Canyon City and Springdale Utah to see Bryce and Zion National Parks, and ending with a night in Vegas. Would love some food recs for the trip. We’ve been to Vegas once before and enjoyed great food on and off the strip, including Lotus of Siam, Bouchon, the Paris brunch buffet and much more. We’ll probably stay on the strip again this time, but I doubt we’ll have time for more than one lunch and one dinner in Vegas proper given our sightseeing itinerary.
Keeping in mind that we live in NYC and can visit most celeb chefs’ flagships here, where would you recommend we eat in Vegas? Any cuisine other than sushi is fine (even sushi is okay if the restaurant also has ample non-raw fish offerings), no budgetary restraints. I’d also love recs for any of the small towns we’ll be passing through on our road trip (St. George, Springdale, Kanab, Glendale, Canyon City, etc. in Utah; Jacob Lake, AZ and Pahrump, NV, among others). Thanks in advance, HOs!
Buy the best bread/ cheese/ lunchmeat you can in Vegas. Bring a cooler with you in the car. Pack a picnic into the parks and enjoy gourmet sandwiches at fantastic viewpoints of the canyons and rock formations.
Its been a while since we did that loop so no recs from me. I think last time we almost exclusively did sandwiches during the day and cooked at night so I am useless here. We ate out in Moab since it is a lot more developed. Not going to Arch?
I know you said no sushi, but Raku was the best meal we had in LV. They do have plenty non-seafood offerings, like their *incredible *tofu they make fresh daily.
Vegas has a handful of small and delicious family-run Lao restaurants and quite a few more good Thai restaurants if you want to scratch an itch NYC does not.
Hurricane has a really good Peruvian restaurant of which I forget the name but its on the main drag.
The sandwich idea is the right one for your park days as the cafeterias are so-so and will be inevitably crowded in the summer.
Have you been to that area before? There’s the most development around Zion, the rest of your road trip will be … sparse.
Are you camping? Hiking or just the viewpoints?
Zion is gorgeous but crowded, for me the mandatory shuttle bus with all of humanity ruins the park experience, ymmv. If you prefer serenity with your majestic landforms, consider Capitol Reef NP or Kodachrome Basin State Park instead.
I remember reading @Mr_Happy 's review of this and it does look good - the only problem is that it’s not open on Sunday (which is the night we’ll be in Vegas for dinner if we stick with our current itinerary). Any other recs that are open Sunday evening?
Also, noted about sandwiches/cooler. We will be staying at the North Rim Lodge at the Grand Canyon (where there is a restaurant) and three nights in Springdale (which apparently has plenty of cute restaurants), but we’ll be on the road or in the parks for most lunches. Right now we’ve basically got a day at GC North rim, a day at Bryce, three days at Zion and a day in Vegas. No Arches - it looks cool, but going that far east will make for a LOT of driving.
Definitely up for Lao or Thai - we used to live near the fabulous Sripraphai in Queens but haven’t had great Thai since we moved to Westchester. Will check out the Peruvian place when we pass through Hurricane as well.
We haven’t been yet, other than to Vegas proper. We’ll be doing a mixture of hiking and viewpoints, maybe a helicopter or horseback excursion somewhere. I have read all of the warnings about the crowds at Zion and I admit that part doesn’t sound fun to me. I’m hoping there will be fewer people since we’re going after Labor Day and schools will be back in session. However, our current itinerary puts us in Zion on Friday/Saturday so there will be weekenders. I read somewhere that you can rent e-bikes in Springdale as an alternative to taking the shuttle, so we may do that one day (we have 2.5ish days planned for Zion). I’ve heard Kodachrome is beautiful too, but it looks like a smaller park we could combine with Bryce if we wanted?
Yeah, I’m sure we’ll be huffing and puffing! Our day at Bryce will actually be divided - right now we’re planning to leave GC around noon and drive up to Bryce, check into our hotel and freshen up before a sunset hike/drive. Then in the morning we’ll go back to see whatever we didn’t see the previous day before heading over to Zion. We’ve got 2.5-3 days for Zion, though, so we could certainly take a half day for Kodachrome before heading that way.
We happened upon by chance both Capitol Reef and Kodachrome State park on our first trip to Utah NPs years ago. Both were wonderful surprises that we returned to several times since. We haven’t been able to get back since we adopted our son years ago so I don’t have any current eating recs except to say that we found the Torrey area near Capitol Reef to have more unexpectedly good food than we had imagined (and better than around Bryce), and the CR area is probably even more interesting now for food.
Yeah, I don’t think Zion needs 3 full days, but after labor day should be OK timing. I was there in April, it was full with families on Spring Break. There’s a cool un-signed short trail beyond the tunnel, ‘many pools’ trail on AllTrails. (If you’re not familiar, you can explore by your own parameters or check out my hike lists for that area - I’m AT) Yes, Kodachrome is smaller, there’s a nice loop trail. Bryce Canyon is mindblowing, I did the Fairyland Loop, totally worth it. I was camping the whole time, so no food recs.
Nice, thank you for the recs! I’m not sure we’re up for the Fairyland Loop, but I think we’ll try to fit in the Queens Garden and Navajo Loop trails, maybe the Peekaboo loop as well depending on how much time we allot to Bryce. If you had to choose, would you spend extra time at Bryce or try to take in Kodachrome as well? DH is fine with stealing a half day from Zion for either purpose.
Just over to the North Rim, then up to the Utah parks and back to Vegas. We weren’t sure the South Rim sounded like our cup of tea after researching, and since we really want to see the Utah parks it felt like just doing the North Rim made sense. We’ll probably stop at the Valley of Fire on the way back to Vegas from Zion. I may reverse the order and go to Zion first if a room at the GC Lodge becomes available at the end of our trip - that would put us in Zion on Tues/Weds/Thurs, Bryce Fri/Sat, GC Sat/Sun, Vegas Sun/Mon (home on the red eye). Maybe better for avoiding crowds but I like the idea of getting the longest drive of the trip out of the way early on.
I know you don’t want to drive over there, but if you have half a day, consider driving to Arches and do the easy hike to the Delicate Arch late afternoon and wait for sunset. It is absolutely magical at that hour.
Quick update - we booked our flights, and it turns out we’re going to arrive in Vegas sometime on Sunday and then leave Monday on the redeye, giving us time to get dinner at Raku beforehand! Woo hoo! I already booked it. So, recs for Sunday night? We’ll probably stay on the strip but we’ll have wheels.
Quick trip report: it was a fantastic vacation. We ended up seeing GC North Rim, Bryce and Zion only - after long drives and lots of high altitude hiking, we were too beat to squeeze in anything else. However, we’ll be back to the area for sure - DH is already talking about another trip to do Canyonlands and Arches. Simply stunning part of the world!
Anyway, foodwise we took your advice and kept a cooler in the car - came in handy more than once. We found delicious Mexican food at Arriba in Bryce Canyon City (fabulous green chile enchiladas and chile colorado, plus a host of excellent (and HOT) housemade salsas). Decent pizza and pasta at Zion Pizza and Noodle Co. in Springdale. Otherwise, most meals were unremarkable. Portions were huge across the board so we were happy to find microwaves and fridges at most of our hotels - leftovers were a better option than most of the breakfast offerings.
In Vegas, we enjoyed brunch at Peppermill and then dinner at Raku, though the latter was not as interesting as I had hoped. I loved the foie gras rice bowl (except for the completely unnecessary and distracting shredded lettuce) and the butter grilled scallop, DH’s favorites were the pork cheek and skirt steak - but we both found the saucing/seasoning on the various meats underwhelming. We both made good use of the condiments on the table, and I guess that’s what they’re there for, but I was expecting more.
What would really ruin it is allowing every private car to mosey up that particular road to the trailheads.
As for the OP, what I recall about St. George’s is a whole buncha fast food and fast casual places. But, since Culver’s isn’t in NY, I had a ButterBurger.
BTW, this will be construed as ridiculous to suggest to someone else in NYC, but I think Siegelman’s Bagelmania in Vegas has some fun bagel sandwiches:
