Las Vegas Nv

The server shows off the charred bistecca fiorentina, then carves the massive porterhouse into finger-thick slices. At $160 for two, it's easily the most expensive steak I've ever eaten, if not the most expensive piece of aged meat in the country. Want to anoint it with horseradish sauce? Here at Carnevino, Mario Batali's new restaurant on the Strip, that'll be $5 more.

Toni Braxton's Las Vegas shows have been canceled this week while the singer recuperates after being hospitalized with chest pain, a hotel official says. "We expect she'll return to the stage next Tuesday," Flamingo hotel-casino and Harrah's Entertainment Inc. spokeswoman Deanna Pettit said Wednesday. Pettit said the 40-year-old Grammy winner was recovering at home after her release Tuesday afternoon after precautionary tests at a Las Vegas-area hospital. The cause of Braxton's chest pain has not been made public.

LAS VEGAS -- Those soft-rock superstars from the Garden State have returned to their old desert stomping ground, and it's hard to imagine anywhere (outside Giants Stadium) they'd be more in their element. Sure, it may be a long way from the industrial corridor around Newark, where the lads came of age amid mobsters and pizza joints, but remember this is where they gorged -- and Madone, can they gorge! -- on the decadent fruits of stardom. "Jersey Boys," the musical biography of Frankie Valli and the 4 Seasons, opened Saturday at the new Palazzo Resort-Hotel-Casino, and Vegas finally has a Broadway show that fits right in with the flashy sensibility of the place.

A hepatitis C outbreak was caused by workers improperly reusing syringes and medicine vials at a Las Vegas clinic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. State officials contacted the CDC this year after two people treated at the now-closed Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada were diagnosed with hepatitis C. Officials have linked 84 cases of the liver disease to the clinic after notifying 50,000 patients to be tested. The CDC reported that during visits to the clinic, investigators saw employees reusing syringes to give sedatives and that interviews suggested it was common practice.

Summer in Las Vegas means triple-digit temperatures and torrid travel deals. And this year, the discounts may sizzle. That's because, reversing the trend over the last several years, Sin City's tourist business is slipping. Through March this year, gaming revenue and hotel rates dipped about 3% from the same period last year. Conventional wisdom blames high oil prices, the mortgage meltdown and a sluggish U.S. economy.

THERE'S A rich irony in the fact that James Caan is being feted this month with the CineVegas Film Festival's inaugural Vegas Icon Award: Caan hates almost all the acting he's ever done that has anything to do with the city. The four years he spent as fictional head of casino security Big Ed Deline on the defunct NBC show "Las Vegas"? He was lowered to doing the TV role by a film drought. "It's sort of the difference between wanting to work and having to work," Caan says.

There are signs throughout the neon city that the Vegas economy has lost some of its shimmer. Casinos have laid off hundreds of workers. Hotels are slashing room rates. Foreclosure signs mar suburban streets. And now, the 99-cent shrimp cocktail has broken the dollar mark. The price of the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino's signature dish recently rose to $1.99, the victim of the escalating price of bay shrimp. The increase was the first in 17 years, and was viewed locally as an ominous indicator.

Nestled in a corner past the Mirage's general pool area, beyond the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat and down a winding concrete path, is Bare, the hotel's exclusive, adults-only pool. Shrouded in greenery and teak paneling, the velvet-roped entrance is guarded by an employee who checks IDs. Loud music booms from within, and after paying a cover charge, you turn a corner and are instantly hit by a scene of bronzed bodies glistening from the sheen of spray-on sunblock.

DESIGNER Christian Audigier was a few hours from opening his first nightclub last week, a swanky spread that looks out at the Las Vegas Strip from Treasure Island, but he was already moving past all that. He's got loftier plans. Much loftier. An airline, in fact. "It's going to be nice, comfortable, with nice waitresses and nice food, a cool drink and a nice movie," Audigier says, igniting one of three cigarettes laid out neatly for him by an assistant along with a yellow lighter.

WANDA SYKES is sucking up to Vegas-goers. A lot. The stand-up comic and actress is stoked about becoming something of a regular at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino. But then she's confronted with the fact she told Ellen DeGeneres earlier this year the audiences she plays to at casinos tend to be, uh, fat. Now she's explaining she didn't mean casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. "Oh, it's totally different in Vegas," the 44-year-old comic insists. "It's like this.