This report was written by Howard Shapiro, Travel Editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and was in today's (11/21/99) Sunday edition.
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Vegas undercover

A writer goes incognito to check out the five newest hotels on The Strip. Huge (of course) and lavish (natch), they imitate locales from Paris to the tropics, and they're no place like home....

No one on Las Vegas Boulevard is going anywhere. Traffic locks solid in the middle of the night at the intersection where Hollywood meets Manhattan, Miami and Camelot - that's the MGM Grand, New York-New York, the Tropicana and Excalibur. Towering video billboards and thousands of festive lights twirl down through the darkness like circus clowns giving me the third degree.

Las Vegas Boulevard, which everyone calls The Strip, is the most bizarre street in America. A constant theater of dreams and magic, greed and elation, hope and heartbreak plays out in the hotel rooms and casinos along this frantic thoroughfare in a desert, and it runs from day through night through day again, like a treadmill without an off switch.

This is rush hour in Las Vegas. It's 1 a.m. Sunday - that's right, very late into Saturday night. I've just arrived from Philadelphia on one of those popular night flights in and out of here, and I've picked up a car. It's 4 a.m., my time. I am locked in the middle of this snarl, and aching to be settled in my hotel called Paris. (Virtually everything here is supposed to be something or somewhere else.) There's no use honking or even cursing quietly. Besides, people in Las Vegas wouldn't understand. Time? A distant concept. Better to warp it than to weave it into your schedule.

Saturday night on The Strip has, for some time, been a dicey proposition for anyone who defines transportation as actually moving. Yet, in the two years since my last visit, it has become unimaginably worse. I sat there motionless, energized by the contagious voltage of The Strip, and it suddenly struck me: The reason no one was moving is the very reason I had come here - five new big-deal hotels have opened on The Strip within the last year. Together, they've added 12,679 rooms along the street. This makes it probably the densest tourist destination in any four miles anywhere.

It's a wonder I'm not still trying to reach the hotel.

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[This message has been edited by Veronica (edited November 21, 1999).]

I stayed in the five hotels a night apiece, with the exception of Paris, which, in case you get confused about where you are, is officially called Paris-Las Vegas. Because I arrived so late at night, I stayed in Paris two nights in a row, giving me a closer look at the newest of the hotels, which opened Sept. 1.

Before anybody starts with hah! how can a travel editor get anything but a cushy experience?, let me say that no one at any of the hotels knew what I do or who I am. I booked the hotels - Paris, Bellagio, the Venetian, Mandalay Bay and the Four Seasons - myself by phone. While in them, I never gave a reservations clerk, front-desk worker, waiter or concierge a hint that I was there for anything but vacation and shedding reality, Las Vegas' specialty. Basically, I was Everyhuman.

I never unpacked; there wasn't time. I literally lived from my suitcase and the hanging bag with shirts, pants and the suit I never wore. Vegas may be going upscale as all get-out, but if you see a man in a suit, he's probably from the FBI or outer space. My days were spent in every public nook and cranny of the places, snooping around the restaurants and shops, testing the chaises and lobby chairs, jumping from pool to pool and monitoring the action at the front desk and in the casinos.

I ambled down many a guest-floor corridor to see if ice machines worked and whether the lighting and housekeeping were good. I found a lot of ice machines on the fritz, fine appointments in the hallways, very good lighting, and housekeepers I would sign up to work in my own house, if I could.

I was a nomad between around 11 a.m. and 2 or 3 p.m. each day, when I would check out of one and check into another. Tip: It's OK to check in early in Vegas.

With the five new hotels, Las Vegas has about 120,000 rooms, more than New York. The new hotels are key to a city that constantly redefines itself, though gambling remains the number-one definition. The hotels, in fact, reinforce a premise that keeps Las Vegas so vibrant: Now that gambling is accessible around the country, give people a reason to believe that this is the only place where gambling really counts.

With the exception of the defiantly subdued Four Seasons, an exquisite hotel, the hotels have in a year's time transformed the nature of The Strip as a whole. Not content to be huge, they are overwhelming.

The hotel buildings have a common appearance, a V-shaped facade that might be called Las Vegas chicken-wing moderne. It's the entrances to these butterflied monoliths that zap The Strip with moxie and turn heads. Years ago, New York-New York did it with the Statue of Liberty. Now, The Strip is home to an Eiffel Tower that, at 540 feet, is about half the size of the real one, an Arc de Triomphe and a Paris Opera House complete with fine bas-relief.

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Across the street, the block-long fountains and lights of Bellagio dance spectacularly, synchronized to a sound system that bounces along the block every 15 minutes at night. The music that moves this liquid choreography may be Gene Kelly singing in the rain one quarter-hour, Aaron Copland's Rodeo the next.

The striking Venetian seems set apart slightly from the street, as Venice is from the rest of Italy; it looks like a place that has a canal inside and imported gondoliers who sing arias. The Mandalay Bay is a gleaming, lush resort that says tropics in a more vivid way than the Tropicana or the Flamingo, up the street.

After a while, large parts of the hotel interiors began to look the same to me, even though they are wildly different. How many massive, ornate check-in counters can you confront before your mouth stops dropping and your perspective is entirely trashed? (Trashed perspective: another Las Vegas distinction.) It was only after I was back home, eyeing almost 200 pictures I'd taken and reviewing my notes, that I realized how much the hotels had in common.

So here's a multiple-choice question for you. If you know anything about Vegas you'll probably get it right, even if you've never laid eyes on the five hotels. Because you understand that in Las Vegas, being prodigious is never enough - which is to its credit.

All the new Las Vegas Strip hotels:

1. Contain so much marble you'll think you're trapped in a quarry.

2. Lease space to high-end shops and gourmet restaurants you'll flock to, even though this is where you could really lose your shirt.

3. Have so many hissing mist-making machines at their swimming pools, you'll think your head is stuck inside a tape deck with no Dolby filter.

4. Stock fabulous soaps.

5. All of the above.

Yes, you're right. It's that old standby, all of the above. In virtually any choice of things, the answer in Las Vegas is all of the above.

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[This message has been edited by Veronica (edited November 21, 1999).]

Paris-Las Vegas

It was about 1:45 a.m. when I finally pulled into the long line of cars waiting to be parked by valets at Paris. The large lighted Jules Verne balloon sign was a dead giveaway to the place, to say nothing of the Eiffel Tower, bathed in gold light. I wheeled my suitcase into the reception room, a twinkling area whose tiny floor tiles gleam in the light of stunning chandeliers. Two people were working together at each of 20 check-in counters. "Bonsoir!" they both said, then lapsed into such Las Vegas phrases as "we have no more of the standard rooms you booked" and "you have been bumped up to what we call a premier room," and "no extra cost."

"Ah, oui!" I thought, and made my way through the casino and onto the elevator, to one of Paris' 2,914 rooms. I put the card-key in the door and opened it. The TV was on. Gee, I wondered, why would they keep the TV on for incoming guests? Then I noticed a suitcase in the corner, open. I examined little white sheets of paper on the bedspread: credit card slips. About a dozen of them. I left quickly.

"I don't really think I want to live with the person you assigned in that room," I told the clerks, trying my best to be snarky at such a wee hour. They were horrified. "Wait," said one. He returned with a new key and all new forms to fill out. He apologized three times. "We're giving you a junior suite."

Up I went to my junior suite. I opened it; it was large. The TV was on. Clothes were strewn atop the couches. I could hear someone in the bathroom. I shut the door as quietly as I could. I began to think that once I got a room of my own, the only way to keep things safe would be to bolt-lock myself inside for the entire stay.

Downstairs. Horrified once more. "Wait a minute," said the clerk. Fifteen minutes later he returned. Trouble with the computer system. So sorry, so sorry. Fill out all this registration paperwork again. You get an even bigger suite. "This is embarrassing to me," I responded. "Comp me," I said, universal language in Las Vegas.

He offered to cut my first-night stay in half. It was to have been $169 for a standard room. Now it was $84.50 for a gigundo suite that I later learned costs $550 a night, and to which he personally escorted me and yelled "housekeeping" after he knocked, lest any squatters be popping a split of champagne from the wet bar. He looked absolutely spooked by the thought, and we walked in tentatively.

I finally had my own room - rooms, really: a cherry-wood king-size bed with a huge black wooden box at its foot, and when I pressed a remote button a TV burst through the top, as if I were in Dr. Strangelove's boudoir; a living room with a three-seater sofa, two fine tables and many comfy chairs; two bathrooms, one with a large workspace, whirlpool and a white pedestal sink with brass fixtures. And not just a commode, but a bidet as well. Paris, remember?

I chalked up the bad experience that led to this room as an opening-month glitch with my own silver lining. But at 4 a.m. - adrenaline would not allow me to sleep - I ordered scrambled eggs and hash-browns from the lively and handsome cafe in the casino. At 4:35 I mentioned to the waiter that this was not a difficult order to fill. At 4:36 he brought the food, not the way it had been ordered. Paris-Las Vegas, beautiful in its physical execution, appeared to be in service-delivery denial.

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The next night, I dined with my cousin and a friend, both Las Vegans, in Paris' Le Village Buffet. With upscale hotels come enhanced buffets: about $24 at Paris. It was hardly the old Vegas $3.95-er, with three instant puddings, mounds of canned corn and lots of steam-table mystery meat. Norman and Baron, my tablemates, are well-schooled in Las Vegas ways, and they too were taken by the place and its meticulously prepared food - and service.

Here was Paris-Las Vegas at its best, in the form of Suzanne, our waitress, who was more like a tour guide to the offerings and at one point gave us a pep talk: "Yes, I'm happy to see that you are relaxing. This is too good to rush. You must sit, sit, stay as long as you can. This is the way to do it! People relaxing, people having a good time over the food!"

The food stations are divided into five regions of France, and the main menus for each change every eight days. Provence (olives, pastas, duckling), Burgundy (carved meats, cooked with care), Normandy (fish and a wide variety of seafood), Alsace (sauerkraut, sausages, pork) and Brittany (crepes, lamb and meats cooked with vegetables) are complemented by a cheese and salad buffet dripping with smoked salmon. A dessert buffet is staffed by the evil bakers of Lenotre, a bakery in the real Paris, for whom even a chocolate truffle is a piece of sculpture.

For all its fine food, the setting was the element that fueled our experience at the buffet. Deep in the heart of the building, it managed to feel as though we were on a large patio on a pristine evening. The buffet is one of eight French-themed restaurants in Paris.

The entire hotel has a European flavor, from its un-glossed marble and the French military hats atop cocktail waitresses, to the magnificent wrought-iron train station structures that house the gaming tables in one of the prettiest casinos I've seen. The staff has been trained to say si'l vous plait, merci and, at the tables, bonne chance!, even if they sometimes have to translate to a blank-faced guest.

I rode to the top of the Eiffel Tower ($8), which offers a fine view of The Strip, keeping you firmly rooted in Las Vegas, not France. French actress Catherine Deneuve, who flipped on the lights of the tower opening day, purportedly said that when she opened the curtains of her Paris-Las Vegas hotel window and eyed the Eiffel Tower, she thought she was looking at the actual city. If she really believes that, she should fire her optometrist at once. Certainly the big-ticket imitations of its namesake help make Paris work, but the resort triumphs because it's a constant production that includes the entire staff, a show open 24 hours. This French feel does not let up. In a maneuver that out-Vegases Las Vegas, Paris' top brass have carried their theme to the point of illusion.

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Bellagio

By now, the quality of Steve Wynn's Bellagio - the first of the new hotels to open - is a given. From the minute you enter the tree-lined driveway, ogle the eight-acre lake with the dancing fountains and Dale Chihuly's extraordinary cut-glass flowers over the lobby, you sense that this picks up where Wynn's Mirage, up the street, left off. The staff seems good enough to have written the staff training handbook; it's as though they've personally invited you to join them in this happy place.

I spent time in the immaculate conservatory and gardens, in the gallery of art, and at the six pools and courtyards framed by cypress and olive trees. I'm convinced that people who come to Bellagio expect to find taste and, believe it or not, decorum. In return, people treat the place as though it is a gift from a philanthropist rather than a smart corporation's well-wrought casino-hotel.

This is not to say that visitors are somber or even very quiet. But they stop and look things over as in no other casino, as if the whole complex were a gallery. Las Vegas may do many things, but it doesn't typically nurture the kind of respect that the Bellagio's visitors show.

Wynn and his troops have created a new Las Vegas style; they've taken the city's ever-larger excess and combined it with taste. The house show, Cirque du Soleil's O, is a fragile, riveting piece of art that commands the highest ticket price in town, $100. The resort's restaurants include New York City's Le Cirque, Boston's Olives, Julian Serrano's celebrated Picasso and a buffet as big and pricey as Paris' but without the setting and not quite as careful a kitchen. (Here, I argue by tiny degrees.) Shopping? Armani, Chanel, Gucci, Tiffany, Lagerfeld, Prada . . . the list goes on.

My standard bedroom ($179) was handsome and roomy, decorated in tans and sands. The mirrors in the oversized bathroom sat in gilded frames, the table in the room was marble and the carpeting had a subtle crisscross weave. Bellagio operates at a very high level, and with confidence in its place in the city's history.

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Venetian

I entered the Venetian lobby and was struck by its massive space and lack of any seating. It is one big, striking marble shed. The desk clerk unlocked a secret for me: Because I was staying only a night, the people who wanted standard suites - all the Venetian's rooms are suites - for three or four nights got them and I was bumped up. I would have to settle for a deluxe suite that normally costs $650 a night, not the standard-suite $189 I still would be paying. "Awwww," I said.

I wheeled my luggage through a long open hallway with compass-point marble inlays - a design theme in the hotel. Once on the 32d floor, I opened my door to what was more a movie set than a suite. The foyer, a bathroom to its side, was the size of a New York efficiency. The wet bar had a large TV and a wide, round marble table with fine chairs.

Beyond that, the sunken living room paced off at 30 by 15 feet and held two oversize chairs with ottomans, fronting an even larger TV, a sofa and matching chair, side tables and brocade curtains. The color scheme: rust and green with gold threads, a magnificent effect. The bathroom, with whirlpool and separate dressing room, were done in fine shimmering white and marble; water flowed from the shower, though, in a disappointing slobber, as if the shower head had only one large hole.

The bedroom, with the third TV, was the hands-down winner. The king-sized bed was lighted by a perfect shaft of yellow from the top of curtains that swept up the wall, tent shaped, to frame the headboard. In Las Vegas, where lighting matters almost as much as manners do in other places, this effect commanded a vocal expression of disbelief. I hope they didn't hear it in the adjoining rooms. Beside the bed was a divan and beside that, curtains that revealed the sunken living room. I considered never leaving the room for 24 hours.

But I pulled myself into the pretty casino and made my way through the colorfully lit branch of Canyon Ranch, the spa, and then into the shops. Here, developer Sheldon Adelson's billion-dollar dream resort really comes to fruition, in a tony shopping mall that re-creates the best of Venice. It's set along a Grand Canal with the Rialto Bridge and culminates in a jaw-dropping evocation of St. Mark's Square. (Without the famous pigeons. The Venetian has removed the pigeons. They were trained. But not in everything.)

The one thing you won't find here is a buffet, which Adelson has said is an act of courage on his part. I don't think people miss it.

After the 15-minute gondola ride, worth the $10 admission just for the "O Sole Mio" sung by Alberto the gondolier, I headed for one of the 15 restaurants. I chose Canaletto, the Italian (what else?) restaurant set in a corner of St. Mark's Square, and proceeded to feast on huge prawns and a crisp salad. Again, a sweet setting, and a feel of being outside.

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Mandalay Bay

By the time I pulled into Mandalay Bay, at the southern end of The Strip, I was feeling the headiness of excess and indulgence, two more concepts that Las Vegans fail to recognize. I was pleasantly surprised because this tropics-themed resort - which nowhere mentions the troubled nation of Myanmar, where the real Mandalay sits - only lightly pursues its theme. Colorful parrots adorn large cages in the lobby, where one of them wisecracks the day away.

The massive Mandalay Bay encourages the pleasures of being outdoors and by water. Guests stroll a walkway around the perimeter, and except for the construction site of even more Mandalay units, it's a lush and comfy walk. In a flagrant nose-thumbing to nature, the resort has installed a beach in the middle of the Nevada desert, covering it with a ton of chaises and fronting it with a wave pool. These waves swell from the back of the pool and roll forward solidly at about one-minute intervals; a long line of hotel guests is able to catch the current and ride atop a wave at the same time, like horses coming out of the starting gate. Next to the wave pool are other pools, and a relaxing lazy river ride, a la the nation's waterparks.

The desk clerk had given me options for room views: mountain, Strip or pools. I took the rocky desert mountains, and found myself in a large standard room ($99) with comfy furniture, an armoire that held a TV, two large closets and a king bed. The color scheme was tan on cream, carried out in marble in the airy bathroom. Water pounded out of the shower like a masseur.

People roaming through the casino and other areas in Mandalay Bay seemed hip and happy. On one end of the casino is the 2,000-seat House of Blues, with a jammed performance schedule that rivals Beale Street's in Memphis. The resort's other big draw is 15 restaurants, most notable among them Wolfgang Puck's Trattoria del Lupo and Charlie Palmer's Vegas version of New York's Aureole. Wine stewards strap on harnesses and glide up and down pulleys to retrieve bottles from Aureole's four-story, 10,000-bottle wine tower, like angels at a bacchanal.

I chose to go light at two resort restaurants, the Noodle Shop (tasty, no-frills Chinese) and the 24-hour Raffles Cafe (large selection and well-prepared food).

Two more attractions at Mandalay Bay go to Vegas extremes, which here is a compliment: The restaurant/nightclub rumjungle, decorated by fire and falling water and pulsating every night with Caribbean rhythms, is always a party. And a branch of Red Square, the Miami hot spot, has more than 100 frozen vodkas, many caviars, a Russian decor, and a mighty statue of Lenin, without his head.

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The Four Seasons

I was happy to get to the Four Seasons, a hotel that doesn't pretend to be anything it is not. It operates in the style of many European hotels that occupy only a part of a much larger building - in this case, the top floors of Mandalay Bay. It has its own striking entrance and large public spaces - they do not include a casino - and there's a walkway to the glitz of Mandalay Bay if you're inclined. It has a beautiful elevator lobby, and a bank of encyclopedic concierges.

The Four Seasons' pool is in its own area, too, beside the Mandalay Bay's water complex; Four Seasons guests may use either. The hotel is a fine-tuned masterpiece - large floral bouquets dot the landscape, fronds reach out from small palms that decorate the major corridors with elegance, the staff members are the nicest people you'd want to meet, the designers reject all the holy-cow allure that draws people to this city. Understatement gives the Four Seasons its cachet, like Mandalay's beach or Paris' tower. The tasteful Four Seasons sign has no twinkling lights and is the smallest on The Strip. Yet it's the largest of any Four Seasons hotel.

My standard room ($195) had a fine bed, beveled mirrors, a glass desk with two chairs, a plump green-and-yellow chair at a small marble table, and an armoire with TV. The color scheme was yellow, soft green and white, and the marble in the bathroom had a wide range of colors in each slab. Here, also, the shower was high-pressure. Almost everything about the place said, relax. Nothing about it said go hog-wild!

Of all the pools I jumped into and sat around that week, the Four Seasons' beckoned me to chill out. Unlike the other hotels', this pool has no cabana fee; you occupy one poolside, you're in a cocoon.

I had three meals there: an ample and super-fresh breakfast buffet that comes with the room price; a light lunch at Veranda, among the prettiest poolside restaurants I've encountered; and a dinner at the major restaurant, the First Floor Grill. The food there was excellent and clever - my meaty whitefish, called walu, came in a large circle crusted with parsley, atop whipped potatoes and spiked with caviar. But unlike the celebrated Fountain in Philadelphia's Four Seasons, the restaurant was all business, a bit joyless and stuffy, I found.

Perhaps I was just done in from spending almost a week in Las Vegas. The next day, I took another long look around this pretty, sane if rarefied hotel, wheeled my suitcase from the lobby and made my way out of Las Vegas and into real American life.

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