Criss Angel’s restaurant Cablp (pronounced Ca-blip… I think?) has been open for a few years. And while there have certainly been dealings with the diner in the magic community (ask Harrison Greenbaum about it), I have yet to come across a recounting of a visit there as good as Libby Watson’s in Defector.
Libby Watson
Watson, who lives in Los Angeles, found herself driving 800 miles roundtrip to dine at Cablp by offering it as a stretch goal in a fundraiser for the Immigrant Rapid Relief Fund; if the event garnered more than $100,000—a number she thought would not be reached—she would go.
She raised $123,000, so off to Overton, Nevada, she went. And luckily for us, she wrote about it for Defector.
The whole article is extremely well worth the read. Here one of my favorite excerpts, to give you a sense of the piece:
From my cramped and cold British bedroom, I browsed the website Roadside America and dreamed about driving across the country, before I could drive at all, to see things like the World’s Largest Chair…. To buy into that stuff is to value something that is odd and entirely itself above something that is good or otherwise defensible…. You need this muscle, even if it’s buried deep down under crusted layers of realization about how the country actually sucks, to enjoy a visit to a place like Criss Angel’s Breakfast Lunch and Pizza in Overton, Nevada.
Other tidbits include calling out the Cablp website for allegedly doctoring their Google Maps image to say it’s 45 minutes from Vegas, when in reality Google Maps will say it’s one hour with no traffic. “It’s an amusingly inconsequential lie,” she writes, “if someone wants to go to Cablp, the extra 15 minutes can’t possibly be the thing that deters them.”
She and her husband also ordered breakfast, lunch, and pizza—the “B,” “L,” and “P” in Cablp—and gave most of it middling reviews. She did like the Mindfreak Mango gourmet Italian ice she had, even though it expired three months earlier.
“I am so glad I went there. I will go back again. I hope it never closes,” Watson ends the piece with. “I hope Cablp outlasts every blaring neon light and high-end sushi restaurant in Las Vegas. I hope Cablp kills me. If this is the only way I can find my way to coping with the contradictions of living in America, of having thrown my lot in with this ridiculous and awful place, so be it; I don’t deserve any better.”