It costs a lot of money to attend the Las Vegas Grand Prix. It costs even more to eat a basic pie there.
I was at the Las Vegas Grand Prix because I’d worked on some of the graphics. The tickets (which I got for nish) would’ve cost $3,500NZD each. Somehow still less egregious than the pie.
We purchased it in the Koval Zone Heineken stand. I think it was only available in our area. There was a sort of “Flavors of F1” deal where they’d picked food from the top 10 drivers and also other random ones – there was Monegasque food for Charles Leclerc which was basically a cheese platter, but also food from China. (There are no Chinese drivers currently on the grid, but the food is probably a crowd pleaser.)
This particular meat pie was available from the Australian food stall, in honour of Oscar Piastry (not pastry), alongside a ham and cheese toastie. Notably, neither of these foods originate from Australia. My friend took photos of me buying the “meat pie”. We would have loved to get more shots of other people buying them but literally no one was.
The pie cost $24USD ($44.50NZD at time of writing) plus an optional tip, which we did not pay.
The pie was on the small size, slightly smaller than a Big Ben, but was perfectly warm inside and out. The pastry was thin, buttery and not dry. The top was stuck down fast to the base of the pie, no mince leakage. The contents was more of a bolognese mince than your typical gravy offering – it had a deep red hue with a tomato(-ey) taste and very fine mince meat.
The pie was served with some limp lettuce which mostly ended up in the bin.
They appeared to have been reheated onsite. I wondered which local bakery had supplied them but I didn’t see a single other meat pie on our travels to various cafes in the city over the weekend so they must have been baked custom.
When I was two bites into it, I couldn’t help but think that I’d already consumed 20 New Zealand dollars worth of my dinner and I slowed down in an attempt to make it last longer.
There’s a mindfulness practice made popular by American professor Jon Kabat-Zinn where you are tasked with mindfully eating a raisin – touching it, observing it and finally holding it in your mouth for 5-10 minutes to completely taste the raisin. And I really considered doing that for this review, but I was really hungus so I stuffed the rest of it in my mouth and made my peace with how much the experience cost.
Time to wash it all down with a $26NZD Heineken Silver.
