Party (in the hot tub) like it's 1989 | New eatery fuses diverse Latin flavors | Departing Main Street antique dealers reflect on a decade downtown
Note: In Anecdotal History, we use social media, traditional interviews, and a good dose of Googling to explore the more obscure chapters of Vegas’ recent past.
GROWING UP on the east side, I lived in a part of town rich with intrigue, particularly for free-range ’80s kids with a penchant for mythologizing our ’hood. In our storied slice of Sunrise Manor, there was the long-shuttered Roxie’s brothel building, a rotten hulk of a boarding house that we were convinced was home to a Satanic coven. There was our portion of the Las Vegas Wash at Sahara and Lamb — to us, a verdant Amazon river filled with cattails and crawdads. And there was Spring Fever, a 24-hour hot tub rental spot — ahem, I mean “romantic private spa suites” — on Sahara and Boulder Highway.
click for more
To hormonal suburban teens whose sex education was a tortured fantasia based on Hustler magazine stashes in desert lots and furtive, hurried doses of scrambled Playboy Channel, Spring Fever, by contrast, thrummed with unbearable vibrations of immanent erotic reality: You just knew actual people were having actual sex in there, whipping up frantic jacuzzi soufflés of chlorinated love-froth.
It’s not as though Spring Fever tried to be coy about it. Consider their TV commercials and promotional postcards (right), with their dewy, writhing models shooting hungry sex-beam gazes. Little wonder Spring Fever had a nickname that serves as an old-Vegas high sign. I only had to float a query about Spring Fever on Facebook to evoke it like a chant:
Oh, if you're talking to locals, be sure to refer to it as Soak & Poke. It's been said there are videos of guest experiences … — Sharon Chayra
OMG. “Soak and Poke”!!! I'm dead. — Melissa Arseniuk
The old soak and poke! — Robert J. Weiss
In ’80s Vegas, Spring Fever was a font of salacious legends about sexual escapades that would rival any VHS-tape porn plot: boss-and-secretary rendezvous; orgiastic high school ditch parties; spouses busted in flagrante delicto as prologue to a steamy threesome; and peeping toms secretly watching the action from the narrow maintenance causeways.
Ironically, Spring Fever has its roots in some venerable Old Vegas names. It opened in June 1979, launched by high-profile businessmen Michael S. Mack, Charles Mack, and Laurence Friedman. Among other things, Michael S. Mack, president of Spring Fever’s parent company Leisure Systems Inc., was a big UNLV sports booster, cousin to Jerry Mack (as in Thomas & Mack), and a prominent member of the local Jewish community. At least at first, the original incarnation of Spring Fever (official name: Spring Fever Tropical Sauna and Spas) seems to have positioned itself more as a health-and-wellness service than a wet ’n’ wild hookup spot; a photo in the Las Vegas Review-Journal noting its opening appears to show Michael, Charles, and Laurence beaming spa-side as two (clothed) young women gamely kick their feet in the bubbling water. However, its eventual rep as a place for making sexytime stew seemed — given its 20 private spa suites — inevitable.
Oh, being young and stupid. That’s all I'll share. — Jennifer Lake Smith
I worked at a radio station that ran a boatload of commercials and gave away free passes. But my fiancée (now wife) and I never partook. Too germ-phobic. — Brian Rouff
When I was a kid and would point that (place) out, my dad would tell me that place is full of dirty water. — Frank Thomas DeFrancesco III
If Spring Fever’s magazine ads and print promos have a certain slick, soft-focus ’80s Playboy vibe, that’s because many of them were produced by a Playboy contributing photographer, Robert Scott Hooper. Some of the promos were shot on site, some in his studio. “It was a difficult place to shoot,” he tells me. “Everything’s wet, the lights are difficult to work with, and it’s all tile.” Hooper, who also did a stint as a Las Vegas News Bureau shooter, was a sporadic Spring Fever client as well. “Oh yes, I used to go down there as a client, three or so times a year,” he tells me. “You’d bring a girl, there were different rooms. I don’t think alcohol was officially allowed, but, you know, people cheated."
On October 13, 1991, George Knapp wrote in the Las Vegas Sun that a new owner had taken over Spring Fever: Michael Washington. He, too, was a notable Vegas personage, but of a decidedly different stripe: Washington was the owner of the notorious outcall service Swinging Suzy’s Dancers and Entertainers; beyond that, his other random claim to fame was the fact that he was a heart transplant recipient from actor and model Jon-Erik Hexum, who’d accidentally killed himself in October 1984 while playing Russian roulette with a blank-loaded gun on set. You couldn’t blame anyone who deduced that Washington’s motives for buying Spring Fever might be tied to his outcall service, long suspected of being a front for prostitution.
“Washington says the police have already been snooping around to see if there is a connection between the spa and the outcall biz,” Knapp wrote. “There isn’t, he says. The place is being run the same way it always has.” Theresa Hooper, Robert Scott Hooper’s spouse, longtime assistant, and archivist, certainly made that deduction after meeting Washington in the early ’90s. “Michael thought he was going to turn it into a place where his escorts could take their johns,” she recalls. Given his later run-ins with the law, she was probably right about his intentions.
Spring Fever hosted countless steamy scenarios over its 16-year history, and its climax was certainly wild — and wet.
Only stories I know are the tales that were told. Especially “the fire” started by a jilted lover. Please post the story, I’m excited to read it! — Julie Medchill Eckard
Sweet, fiery revenge. That’s the myth, anyway, of Spring Fever’s end: That it burned down in a dramatic conflagration started by a jealous spouse who’d caught her husband cheating at the spa with another woman. One thing’s for certain: It burned down. At about 9:30 p.m. on July 20, 1994, the building caught fire, requiring about 50 city and county firefighters to battle the blaze after three couples and some employees were evacuated. Retired firefighter Allan Albaitis remembers the incident.
“After pouring water on it for 40 to 45 minutes, we were going to go in for an interior attack and make entrance from the front,” he tells me. “We were inches from being under the mansard, when the whole thing came down. It would have killed anybody underneath. It would have been catastrophic.”
No one was injured in the fire, perhaps a metaphorically fitting end to a legendary hot spot known for hosting passions both licit and illicit. County fire investigators concluded that the cause of the devastating blaze wasn’t jealousy, wasn’t revenge, but something no less dramatic: lightning .
BY THE TIME this story runs, Aroma Latin American Cocina should have a proper sign out front. Since it opened in November 2021, the tiny eatery has had only a simple banner hanging outside. A few doors down from a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym and a beauty supply store, the tiny café doesn’t stand out from its neighbors. It’s nearly impossible to see from the street. And, on top of all this, chef Steve Kestler is serving dishes unfamiliar to many American palates. You could predict Aroma would be another shuttered restaurant before too long. If it weren’t for one thing ….
click for more
The food is incredible. What Kestler is doing at his tiny Green Valley storefront is as exciting as any new concept on or off the Strip.
It evokes Jamie Tran’s opening of The Black Sheep off Durango and Warm Springs in 2017. Vietnamese comfort food with French influences wasn’t something Las Vegas diners were accustomed to. It was also in a hard-to-find strip mall stuffed with other businesses. But the food was different, dynamic, and worth seeking out. Word quickly spread. Now Tran is a James Beard finalist, who almost won a recent season of Top Chef.
Aroma Latina American Cocina is in different part of town, Kestler is cooking a different style of cuisine, and he hasn’t had the publicity that Tran has. But as with Tran and The Black Sheep, it seems inevitable that once people find Kestler and Aroma, they'll be fans.
Kestler, who’s 40, spent years in high-end kitchens, including Bouchon, Bazaar Meat, and EDO Tapas & Wine, before striking out on his own with the Maize St. food truck. It was in the world of mobile eateries that he met Yassir Zermeno. The two teamed up for Aroma, with Kestler running the back of the house while Yassir handles the business.
The pair’s goal was to find an affordable space, which, in the current market, wasn’t easy. So, they took the hidden storefront, rebuilt the interior themselves, including the handmade lighting fixtures and host station, and let their food do the talking.
Aroma offers a tour of Latin American cuisine, which sounds both buzzy and dangerous. Usually, when a chef tries to combine dishes from different countries in one menu, they suffer from a lack of focus and cultural knowledge. Kestler is the exception, however. Born in Guatemala, he serves dishes from his home country, as well as Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. And, like his former kitchen-mate at EDO, Oscar Amador, many of the plates have a heavy, thoughtfully executed Asian influence.
Unlike Mexican or Peruvian cuisine, Guatemalan food hasn’t cracked the American mainstream, but it’s intriguing to imagine what Kestler will introduce to the Las Vegas culinary scene. Consider his Guatemalan enchiladas: “If you go out to the street in Guatemala, you'll see these ladies on the corner with giant baskets of tostadas,” he says. “They'll have the pickled beets, the cabbage, the meat with tomato sauce. That dish, I'm not doing anything different with it. It's just pure nostalgia from back home.” The crunchy tostada, the acidic beets, the flavorful beef picadillo and the sharp cotija cheese are tied together with a hard-boiled egg that adds a rich through-line bite after bite.
Often, Kestler takes an ingredient or experience and puts his own spin on it. The mangonada salad, for instance, is both simple and complex with just five ingredients — mango, jicama, greens, cashews, and chamoy vinaigrette — that undergo a sophisticated preparation. Inspired by snacks he’s found in the Mexican market near Aroma, Kestler slices the mango thin, creating an exotic carpaccio. Then, he sous vides it overnight with chamoy seasoning, giving the fruit layers of flavor that’s reinforced by the vinaigrette. The jicama and cashews also are dusted with chamoy, intensifying the flavor profile and adding texture. It’s a provocative plate, something not often said about salad.
Such detail is found throughout Kestler’s cuisine. To cook his 15-ingredient mole, he says, is a 10-minute process, but prepping those ingredients takes 12 hours. He uses it in a number of dishes, including a short rib taco with escabeche that’s stunning to look at and even better to taste.
Peruvian food offers a natural opportunity to incorporate Asian influences, because there’s a large Japanese population in the South American country, and the two cuisines have intertwined for more than a century. Kestler’s nod to the traditional fusion is lomo saltado Nikkei, featuring beef tenderloin, beef jus reduction, peppers, tomatoes, onions, fried potatoes in aji amarillo cream, and acidic sushi rice — a mixture that blends harmoniously.
Aroma Latin Cocina is just getting started. As diners continue to find it and Kestler incorporates more dishes into the menu, excitement should build. “We bet not on the location,” he says, “but on our ability to produce good food. Eventually people will know and find us.” In a town full of foodies, it seems like a safe bet.”
FOR NEARLY 15 YEARS, Retro Vegas was one of Main Street’s prime shopping attractions. The vintage furnishings shop was easy to find — you just had to look for the big pink building with twin plastic pink flamingos standing guard at the entrance. If the flamingos were out, then you knew it was open for business. Owned and operated by Bill Johnson and Marc Comstock, Retro Vegas was a mainstay for both tourists and locals, an anchor in a revolving mix of Arts District shops. But that anchor lifted on March 13, 2022, when Johnson and Comstock closed their doors to the public. (The building will be the new home of Esther's Kitchen in 2023.) As the duo prepared for retirement, they shared their parting observations on business in the 18b with Desert Companion.
click for more
How did you arrive at Main Street?
Johnson: So, do you know that when we opened up Retro Vegas, we had taken early retirement and got bored? Yeah, that's how Retro Vegas started: We got bored. Our original look was at Commercial Center, which was much more active than Main Street then. The guy renting Commercial Center wanted to give us a year lease, then after that year would move us to the back, which made us look elsewhere.
We originally opened up where Buffalo Exchange is, and we were trying to buy the building in 2011, but we could not reach a deal with the guy. Then our current building came up for sale.
The big thing we had to do was clear the building from a set designer who did events on the Strip and also had the building that Inside Style is in now, which is twice as big as our building. … He condensed everything down into our building when they foreclosed on the other building. We couldn’t see the front doors inside the building for the first three months we had it. It was so packed — actually up to the rafters full. … But what also happened was, we got to keep half the income of everything we sold out of it, and it actually paid for the down payment on the building.
How was business in the beginning?
Comstock: Main Street was really slow when we started in 2008. The main draw on the street was Casa Don Juan. There was Floyd Armstrong’s Armstrong Emporium, the filming of The Hangover. There wasn't a lot going on.
In December 2008, after the market crashed so bad, Floyd came over and said, “Boys, I made 38 cents today. How did you guys do?" We said, "Floyd, you beat us. We didn't make anything!" That’s how it was in the beginning.
What is your most vivid memory of Main Street?
Johnson: The first thing that pops up in my mind is not my favorite memory, but rather Main Street being destroyed! The upholstery place (Alex Rivas Upholstery) burned — this is the building that now houses Velveteen Rabbit — started by a gas explosion. Within a week, a couple of the businesses around them blew up and burned … Windows were blown out. It was pretty much a disaster area. Almost everything up and down Main Street was boarded up. Where the coffee shop and the brew pub are now, all those buildings across from us, all those buildings were boarded up. It looked like a war zone!
Sum up the evolution of Main Street and/or the Arts District over the time you were there.
Comstock: Main Street went from nothing to incredible. I mean, there was nothing going on down there. When we originally moved in, we were the only antique business on Main Street. All these years later, Martins Mart is the only other retail that was there when we opened. Everything else is new.
How did you survive the Covid-19 Shutdown?
Johnson: COVID-19 was difficult, but we turned a profit all through the pandemic. So, even though we were closed four and a half months total, we still did well, and then when restrictions started to be lifted, we did even better.
Comstock: We’ll keep selling records with Red Kat (which has moved to a new location further south down Main Street), but that's just because I kind of enjoy that. They asked me to, and I said I'd do it. But that's more hobby than work.
How will you fill your extra time now?
Johnson: Of course, we're planning on traveling. We've been looking at RV travel trailers or maybe a Class C, but at this point, we're so busy closing that we don't really dwell on that too much. Not yet.
What will happen to all the merchandise you had in the shop?
Comstock: It’s all sold! We had an auction house take over sales, and that ended Wednesday, April 27. The remainder went in the dumpster. Stragglers had a few days to claim any items.
Photos and art: Spring Fever: Hooper Productions; Food: Facebook; Q&A: Retro Vegas homepage, courtesy Marc Comstock and Bill Johnson
Subscribe to Fifth Street and get news, profiles, commentary, and humor in your inbox every week.