You admire Las Vegas restaurants more than I do. Most people do. These days they consist mostly of oversized emporiums run by celebrity chefs who are almost never around. I don't blame the chefs. I'd love to be paid a few hundred thousand dollars a year not to work.

I was talking to a former executive at the Flamingo hotel who is still active in the Vegas restaurant business. (The Flamingo was famously built by Bugsy Siegel.)

The top restaurant there was the Candlelight Room (click here for their classic menu). Everybody remembers that. Nobody remembers the chef there. Except for my friend, the executive.

"The chef was a little guy we called Yosemite Sam because he looked like him, but boy, could he cook. He lived in a bungalow behind the hotel and didn't make much money, so once in a while they'd fix the slot machines so he'd win. You couldn't do that today."

Now you know why I can't reveal his name. Fixing slot machines isn't something a man who wants to keep working in Vegas is supposed to discuss.

He told me another story I liked, about the practice of giving free meals to gamblers. He remembers Howard Hughes taking over the Sands and instructing his general manager to put an end to the practice of comping everybody at the Regency Room, the top restaurant of the Sands.

"The whole reservation chart was in red, comped," he said. "The GM walked in and said to the maître d', 'Give everybody a check.' He did. After that, they all went to Caesars Palace to gamble."