Food Casinos

Food at casinos is nothing new – it’s perfectly normal to have a nice restaurant next to the playing floor or to have something delivered to your table during a long poker session, but…..have you ever gambled with your food instead of money?

Placing all your chips/fries on red and hoping the roulette wheel bumps your bankroll to a burger or steak sounds kind of crazy, but several recent ‘pop-up’ casino nights have offered exactly that!

PokerStars recently joined up with Jones and Sons restaurant in London to offer a good-natured and well-balanced evening of poker and food to run alongside the UKIPT event, with players and diners able to gamble on their evening’s culinary delights.

Named the ‘All-in Kitchen’ for the evening, groups and individuals were able to bet their desserts – a win affording them a free 3-course meal, along with a cocktail – with names such as ‘The Bluff’, ‘The Raise’ and ‘The Call’.

Lose, and you have to fork out real money – but the meal is capped at £10 so you’re not really going to go broke in search of sustenance in this alternative dining experience. As Josh Barrie relates in his colourful account of the ‘All-In Kitchen’ evening:

The game requires a win of 10,000 chips or more to satisfy paying absolutely nothing for dinner”, he adds, “and 5,000 means you cough up for half; any fewer and the bill is dished out in full.”;

In true ‘poker with food’ fashion, real skill is combined with clever and amusing marketing. The menu is split into Flop, Turn, and River – with the starters being the initial cards, a main course hitting the turn and your dessert equating to the river card.

The meals themselves take up the same theme – ‘Jacks’ is a bourbon glazed pork belly, while ‘King equals a prawn cocktail. ‘Three of a kind’ offers three versions of duck dishes, while quads includes four dishes of lamb.

"You get the idea,” says Barrie, who opted for “Queens—queen scallops, har har—and ‘A Royal Flush’, a crab thermidor with straw fries.” His side dish –the blind- “is a bowl of very buttery vegetables” while his ‘river choice is “a pear tart and a millionaire’s shortbread.”

A similar experience awaited Samantha Rea when she visited ‘The Diner in London’s Soho district, who were running a 1950s-themed party “fuelled by gambling, burgers, and puns”.

Called “Raise the Steaks,” the former croupier joined her professional poker-playing friend to celebrate the launch of 777.com. Organiser Sivan Finn Shalev stated in his pre-event press release that:

Shalev, which saw players and diners given boxes of fries on arrival, said:

Rea, who with her playing buddy Jerome Bradpiece managed to “make enough to order chocolate and strawberry milkshakes,” from their roulette table strategy explained:

The resulting story of the evening on Vice.com makes for enjoyable reading, and makes the idea of a food casino very tempting to try, despite Bradpiece not being hugely enamoured with the idea himself. He explained:

But then it’s not poker pros who the food-gambling idea is aimed at.

As Rea points out:

Food casinos might not become a regular institution in gambling, but they are certainly an interesting and fun way to combine several desires at once, and you can expect to see more of these pop-up evenings hitting the gambling scene soon.