This 24/7 Seafood Counter Inside A Casino Might Be The Best In Las Vegas

Nowhere does late-night dining quite like Sin City. If you're one of the many who finally look up from the blackjack table in the wee hours of the morning — or stumble out of a nightclub bleary-eyed and hungry — you're in luck: Las Vegas is full of restaurants that never close. While 24-hour Chinatown hotspots and endless sandwich options on and off The Strip offer plenty of round-the-clock choices, one of the most distinctive places to eat at any hour is the seafood counter tucked inside Palace Station. Located just off the Strip and beloved by locals, the Palace Station Oyster Bar is an 18-seat counter set right in the middle of the casino floor, and it almost always has a line, even at 3 a.m. Whether you're craving raw clams, seafood pasta, or lobster chowder, this is the place to go.

"The first time I went to Vegas we landed at 10 p.m. and went straight to The Palace Station Casino and stood in line for 3 hours," wrote a Reddit user. "I think it was one of my top three meals to date." "We avoided the wait by arriving at 9:30 a.m. on a Tuesday," wrote a Tripadvisor reviewer. "Tuesday-Thursday are the best days to avoid a long wait." Even so, you never know who will be craving clam chowder and raw oysters at any given time in Las Vegas — it will almost certainly be more than 18 people — so prepare to wait. But once you sidle up to the bar, surrounded by the soundtrack of slot machines and jackpot jingles, you can order oyster shooters with a beer or bubbly and watch the controlled chaos as you eat. Las Vegas truly is the most fun city in America.

There's so much happening right in front of you at the Oyster Bar counter. A half-dozen pressurized steel pots that cook most of the entrées release clouds of noisy steam as chefs and servers deftly pivot between bubbling cookware, beer taps, and the shellfish-filled ice chests lining the back bar. The Oyster Bar does indeed serve oysters on its menu, freshly shucked to order. Gulf oysters are available year-round, alongside rotating seasonal specialties, sometimes Kumamotos, sometimes Blue Points. There are clams, shrimp cocktail, New Zealand mussels, an indulgent "seafood jackpot," and linguine with shrimp scampi or clams.

Cajun-Southern classics anchor the menu: étouffée, bouillabaisse, and gumbo, served in massive bowls teeming with ropey shreds of crab and hefty shrimp. Chowder comes Manhattan, New England, or Alaskan-style, the latter loaded with shrimp, crab, and lobster. (Try ordering it "dirty," half New England, half Manhattan style in one bowl.) If you're not a pescatarian but somehow find yourself at a 24-hour seafood counter, you can order gumbo with chicken or sausage.

Palace Station Oyster Bar's signature dish is the enigmatic pan roast. Despite the dry-sounding name, pan roast is a rich, creamy stew cooked to order in those steam-filled vats — "a jazzed-up bisque," as chef Bob Higdon modestly told Eater. The exact recipe is a proprietary secret, but its tomato and aromatics evoke depth redolent of masala or curry, laced with sherry, served with rice. Choose from spice levels one to 10 — many first-timers recommend level four or five, which delivers warmth without overpowering. Bubbly hot and savory, it's unmistakably why many people return. "The 24-hour Oyster Bar in the Palace Station casino was everything we could hope for," wrote a Tripadvisor reviewer.

The pan roast cooks in minutes, pressurized in steam-powered steel pots bolted to the countertop. The method is old, utilitarian, and built for speed. According to the Los Angeles Times, variations of the dish trace back to East Coast fish shacks and even New York's Grand Central Station, when steam from cooking equipment once doubled as building heat. Others point to Captain Doane's late-1800s oyster roasts along the Pacific Northwest Coast, where he cooked oysters in his own secret sauce, reportedly involving butter, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce. Honolulu Magazine has described it as a Cajun cream-sauce stew, "a spinoff of French bouillabaisse or Italian-American cioppino," dishes that also appear on the Palace Station Oyster Bar menu. Other food historians trace its lineage to Louisiana, where rich roux-based seafood stews are second nature. However it began, the pan roast has evolved into something unmistakably American. In Las Vegas, it has perhaps found its most enduring modern iteration.

When Frank Fertitta Jr. opened Palace Station Casino in the 1970s, the Oyster Bar didn't arrive until 1995, originally conceived as an intimate complement to the casino's steakhouse. At the time, Cajun-style cooking wasn't yet popularized in this part of the world, but Fertitta hailed from the border of Southeast Texas and Louisiana and wanted to bring the flavors to the desert. The Oyster Bar's success inspired imitators — Harrah's operated a seafood counter that served pan roasts for a time, and versions of the dish even migrated to Hawaii. But today, Palace Station remains the king of the Las Vegas pan roast (though there's another at Sunset Station, outside of town, open only 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.), preserving the iconic dish as it ladles up 33,000 gallons each year.