Opportunities to eat out in Northern Nevada are ridiculously plentiful. A local dining guide for Reno / Lake Tahoe had 430 separate restaurants listed and these are family dining, fine dining and upscale restaurants only. They paid to be in this guide. That does not include all the fast food joints and pizza places.
Reno, although dubbed the "Biggest Little City in the World" has a sizable population of 220,500. A Google search reveals Reno sports ten McDonald's, six Burger Kings, eight Taco Bells, seven KFCs, ten Subways, ten Port of Subs, ten Quizno's and four Jimboy’s Tacos. Cheap, tasty and quick food is always a few minutes away.
Nearby Carson City has a population of 57,701 and has more than 15 fast food restaurants alone, four McDonald’s, three Taco Bells, one KFC, two Subways, two Port of Subs, one Quizno’s, two Burger Kings, and one Jimboy’s Tacos. The capital city, though much smaller than sprawling Reno, is no slouch in the fast food game.
Never mind that Reno has a flair for offering exotic cuisine on nearly every block of our main drag, Virginia street. At nearly every turn in this city, you'll find pizza joints, Mexican restaurants, steak houses, Oriental restaurants, Basque restaurants, barbecue joints, Italian cafes, family style diners, bar and grills, upscale dining places, and chains like Chilis, Applebee’s, Sizzlers, Dennys, iHOPs, and Chevy's. Last, but not least, casinos are everywhere and inside you'll find sumptuous buffets often covering an enormous territory (see the video on the sidebar of the unbelievable buffet feast served up at Toucan Charlie's Buffet inside the Atlantis Hotel Casino in Reno. Casinos also offer specialty cafes, grills and steak houses, sushi bars, fine dining restaurants, and often all of these eateries under one glittering roof.
Almost every casino sports at least one cheap all-you-can-eat buffet with endless mounds of food. Smaller casinos offer daily restaurant specials where you can get a platter of food for $5.99 or a big breakfast for $2.99. Free drinks including soda and alcohol are readily offered to gamblers seated at gaming machines and tables. Liquid calories can add up fast, particularly when they're free.
A Google search for Reno restaurants in all categories turns up 4080 results. A quick perusal shows 23 pages of nothing but eateries listed. That's a lot of dining options for a town of 220,500. The Carson City Yellow Pages has 39 pages of restaurant listings alone (some pages are full page menus so you can order food delivered right to your door. No exercise needed). Of course Carson City gets a small share of Nevada’s 50 million tourists a year. And tourists share the food wealth, but that’s an excessive amount of food establishments by any standards for a small city of roughly 58,000 residents.
Northern Nevada cities are ripe with opportunities to snack, nosh, sup, put on the feed bag, chow down, or flat out indulge in acts of gluttony of astronomical proportions. Citizens of Reno and Carson City (and Sparks and Lake Tahoe for that matter) are never far from foodie temptations. So, how does someone surrounded by a culinary utopia manage to avoid overweight, obesity and the damage that can accompany weight gain? We'll look at solutions and strategies for choosing a healthly and balanced lifestyle in a food oriented city like Reno in part three.
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