Lunch at the Maxim: Remembering the Maxim Hotel and Casino on Flamingo Road

The Maxim, 1977. Postcard photo by Don Ceppi.

I was twenty-five and working at the MGM Grand during preopening, before it opened in December 1993, and back then there was no employee dining room.

So every now and then, lunch was the coffee shop at the Maxim.

The Maxim sat at 160 East Flamingo Road, on the northwest corner of Koval Lane, a few blocks east of the Strip. It opened on July 1, 1977. Four hundred rooms, twenty-five million dollars, and a group of Nevada investors behind it.

The owners wanted to call it the Baby Grand, a nod to the first MGM Grand, the big neighbor at the Strip end of Flamingo. MGM said no. They went with the Maxim.

From a Maxim Hotel/Casino TV commercial.

Sixteen years later, I was eating lunch there while helping open the next MGM Grand.

The Maxim worked both crowds: visitors who wandered over from the Strip, and Locals from the neighborhoods within walking distance. Olde Tyme Burlesque, with Bob Mitchell and Dyanne Thorne, ran for years in the showroom. The Cloud 9 Lounge was a late-seventies and eighties hot spot with a talent show, and Redd Foxx and Wayne Newton were regulars. Da Vinci's served Italian built on one owner's mother's recipes. Phil Bryan, who worked his way up to general manager, says that by the early eighties it had the highest-grossing casino floor per square foot in town. It was also the featured hotel in the pilot of Vega$.

By 1993 the Maxim felt dated. It also carried a sense of nostalgia, a nod to the Rat Pack era that was still there when I sat down for lunch in the coffee shop. The place was in a slow decline by then. Bigger resorts were opening on the Strip, and the one I was helping open was the biggest of them.

And if I am being honest, one lunch ran long. The Maxim opened with six craps tables, and one afternoon I found one of them before heading back to the MGM Grand. Lunch, a few rolls, then back to work.

The end came in pieces. The casino closed in November 1999 over a financial dispute. The hotel reopened without it, then closed for good on August 13, 2001. Two years later the building came back as the Westin Casuarina, the first Westin in Nevada. Its casino shrank until it closed in 2017.

The building is still on the corner of Flamingo and Koval, with a different name on the front. Same Koval Lane as The Drink, down the street at Harmon.

Some people remember the Maxim from the showroom. I remember it from lunch.

For the ones who remember the Maxim

Shop the Maxim Hotel & Casino tee →

More from the same stretch of town: Seventy-Five East Harmon: When Vegas Nightlife Belonged to Locals.