Shrimp cocktail in Las Vegas: what it is, what to order, what to avoid

Overview

Las Vegas did not invent the shrimp cocktail. Cold shellfish under a sharp red sauce was a fixture of American dining rooms long before the city had casinos, and by the middle of the last century it was the default starter at every supper club and steakhouse in the country. What the city did was make it cheap, and make it a reason to walk through a door.

That is the whole story of the dish here. Casinos have always sold food below cost to bring gamblers inside and keep them there: the late-night steak and eggs, the buffet, and the shrimp cocktail. Downtown, on Fremont Street, one of the oldest casino hotels began selling a shrimp cocktail in 1959 for fifty cents, and for about half a century it cost under a dollar. The house kept a running tally of how many million it sold. That count is the casino’s own, and it is better read as advertising than as a statistic. The famous glass left that casino’s menu in 2017, and the downtown version has since been revived elsewhere at a price closer to ten dollars than one.

The downtown version is its own form, and it is worth knowing what it looks like. It is not a few large shrimp hooked over the rim of a glass. It is a tall glass, often a tulip-shaped sundae glass, packed with small cooked shrimp, heavy on the cocktail sauce, with a wedge of lemon. You eat it with a spoon or a small fork, and it is closer to a snack than a starter. Shrimp in the middle of a desert was always part of the joke and part of the appeal: it was a luxury food made ordinary by refrigerated trucks and a casino’s willingness to lose money on it.

There is a second shrimp cocktail in the city, and many residents would call it the real one: the Mexican coctel de camarón, served in seafood restaurants across the valley. It is a different dish under the same English name, and it belongs here just as much.

What to order

There are three things sold as shrimp cocktail in Las Vegas, and they share little beyond the shrimp.

• The downtown glass — small shrimp, cocktail sauce on top rather than on the side, lemon. This is the one with the history. Order it as it comes; there are no meaningful variations to ask for, and its point was always that it cost little.
• The steakhouse cocktail — four to six large shrimp, chilled, curled over the rim of a glass or set over crushed ice, with a ramekin of sauce in the middle. Menus describe size by count per pound: U-10 means fewer than ten shrimp to the pound, which is genuinely large; 16/20 is ordinary. If a menu says “jumbo” without a count, the size is whatever the kitchen decides jumbo means.
• The coctel de camarón — shrimp in a cold, loose, tomato-based broth, often made with tomato-and-clam juice, with diced onion, cilantro, cucumber and avocado, served in a large glass or schooner with saltine crackers and a bottle of hot sauce on the table. You eat it with a spoon, and it is a full meal rather than a starter.

At a Mexican seafood counter the words worth knowing are campechana, a cocktail that mixes shrimp with octopus, oyster or other seafood, and vuelve a la vida, “come back to life”, a generous mixed cocktail with a hangover-cure reputation. Ask for chico, mediano or grande: the sizes are real, and the large is a lot of soup.

The cocktail sauce itself is ketchup or chili sauce sharpened with horseradish, lemon and often Worcestershire. A good one should make your nose run slightly. If you want more heat, ask for extra horseradish, which most steakhouses keep on hand and few volunteer.

What to avoid

The risk with cold shrimp is not a fake version but a tired one.

Shrimp should be firm, slightly springy, and taste of the sea faintly or not at all. Mushy texture or any smell of ammonia means the shrimp is past it, whatever it cost, and the right response is to stop eating. Shrimp that has gone pale and waterlogged has usually been thawed and held too long; shrimp with dark lines along the back has not been deveined, which is a sign of a kitchen in a hurry rather than a danger.

Be wary of the open buffet tray. A heap of peel-and-eat shrimp on ice is fine when the ice is fresh and the tray is busy; shrimp sitting in meltwater, or on a tray whose ice has turned to a shallow pool, has been out too long. The busiest hour of a buffet is the safest one for anything cold.

A sauce that tastes only of ketchup is the clearest sign that the cocktail is an afterthought. The horseradish is what makes the dish; without it you are eating cold shrimp with a condiment.

On the Strip, “shrimp cocktail” is often a resort-restaurant starter priced as a statement, and the price does not tell you the size. Look for the count. In a Mexican seafood restaurant, the warning sign is the reverse: a coctel that arrives with the broth already watery and the avocado browning was assembled earlier and left to wait.

Practicalities

The downtown glass is no longer the giveaway it was: where a downtown restaurant serves the old-style glass today it has been priced at around ten dollars, and whether and where it is on a menu changes, so check before you go. A steakhouse cocktail runs roughly $20 to $35 depending on the count and the room. A coctel de camarón is usually $12 to $25, the range set mostly by size, with a campechana toward the top.

Steakhouses serve it as a starter at dinner, from around six. Mexican seafood restaurants are at their busiest at lunch and on weekend afternoons, which is when the cocktails are being made fastest and the broth is freshest, so go then rather than late.

Cards are accepted almost everywhere, including at casino counters. Where there is table service, the American tip of roughly 15 to 20 percent applies; at a counter, a dollar or two in the jar is enough.