DESERT ISLAND

Tastes of Hawati abound in Las Vegas.

- HANNAH GOLDFIELD

Spam, introduced to Hawaii during the Second World War, became a local staple.

Late one recent evening at the California Hotel and Casino, in down town Las Vegas, a few miles north of the Strip, I tried my luck at a slot machine for the very first time. Fifteen minutes later, I was down by twenty bucks or so— thirty if you count the exorbitant A.T.M. fee I’d been determined to win back— and feeling defeated. No matter; it was time for a vastly surer bet, the real reason I was here. Every night, from 11 P.M. to 6 A.M., the hotel’s twenty-four-hour restaurant, the Market Street Café, serves one of Vegas’s most iconic dishes. Minutes after I’d been seated at the counter, next to an eighty-seven-year-old woman in oversized sunglasses, a server presented me with a large bowl of Hawaii-style oxtail soup, a glistening, fragrant broth brimming with carrots, celery, and hunks of oxtail bone, from which supple shreds of purple meat loosened easily. It came with a scoop of rice and a hefty pinch of pounded ginger and fresh cilantro. Had I been sick—with a head cold or a longing for Hawaii, or both—I imagine it would have cured me.