Meals: Lunch weekdays, dinner nightly brunch Saturday and Sunday.

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Price range: $19.99-$32.99 Southern California Casino Guide Specialties: Crab brunch on Saturday and Sunday crab dinner Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Meals: Lunch weekdays dinner nightly brunch Saturday and Sunday. Where: 777 Harrah’s Rincon Way, Valley Center Price range: $15.99-$24.99 Harrah’s Resort Southern California Bottomless mimosas available during Sunday brunch for an additional $5. Meals: Lunch Monday through Saturday dinner nightly Sunday brunch. Price range: $11.95-$25.95 Fantasy Springs Resort Casino Specialties: Themed dinners most nights lobster and seafood Friday barbecue Saturday Sunday brunch. Meals: Lunch Thursday, Friday and Saturday Dinner Thursday through Sunday breakfast Saturday and Sunday. Nowadays, options are more limited, though these buffets remain favorites among tourists.Sign up for our Casino Insider newsletter and get the week’s best bets for food, entertainment and fun at Southern California’s casinos. El Rancho Vegas’ Buckaroo Buffet only charged a dollar for all-you-can-eat fare when it opened back in the day.īefore the pandemic, Las Vegas had more than 70 buffets inside casinos, spanning from Aliante to Henderson, Summerlin to the Strip, serving gourmet fare at various stations. Those early chuck wagons might have served some hot dishes along with cold cuts. It may have seemed like no big deal at the time, but the casino buffet would become a Las Vegas signature restaurant.” Knowing that the hungry gamblers would be happy with good, plentiful meats and snacks, the El Rancho Vegas’s managers created the all-night chuck wagon. “The buffet filled a need for the casino, which wanted to keep its late-night gamblers happy, but didn’t want the expense of keeping a full restaurant open all night. As UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research writes, “quantity was usually emphasized over quality.”

El Rancho Vegas, the Strip’s first resort, came up with the chuck wagon, the earliest version of the modern-day buffet to turn up in Las Vegas. Culinary trailblazers back in the 1940s found a way to keep gamblers inside the resorts with cheap food, and lots of it.

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