Things arrive at the table and unneeded things disappear from the table with elegant efficiency. The staff is timely but unobtrusive, friendly, but not in your face. We were given water and offered drinks, and perused the menu. (A follow-up check on their website has this description: Located in the Four Queens Hotel-Casino in downtown Las Vegas, Hugo’s Cellar offers romantic and elegant dining with exquisite service in a casual setting. Most restaurants in town now cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of dress in the sense that you have to be dressed, and that's about it. The dress code is pretty much the same as it is all across Vegas - if I had to sum it up it would be something like 'Pants Required. Hugo's is traditional gourmet room service, with crisp linens, proper place settings and tableware, and a full team of gastronauts to launch your tastebuds into orbit - bus folks, waiter, sommelier, maitre'd, and so on. But why the cellar?Īs I regarded the restaurant bar and it's two or three tables I realized that it would be an extremely civilized place to have a quick pre-dinner drink, a nice place to unwind away from the hubbub upstairs, where one could debrief the day's gambling events, and argue over whether pimento is a thing unto its own or a part of something else that gets pickled and called a pimento. Part of it was obvious, since someone who really likes faux red bricks would obviously be named Hugo.

But it's well regarded, well established, traditional, classy without being pretentious, and there are many (like me) that hope that it never changes. Hugo's is almost out of place at the Four Queens, it's such a cut above. Hugo's ambiance coddles you as you make your way in, as if you were entering a velvety, muted chamber. Boisterous shouts from the casino faded away and I felt myself relaxing. As I left the Four Queen's casino floor with it's gaudy buzz and carnival atmosphere and descended about a floor down the gently curving steps into Hugo's Cellar.

Four queens casino restaurants