december-2009

dispatches
NOTES FROM ALL OVER
Las Vegas
Totally Tubular!
A Vegas casino makes liquor quicker.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY GRAHAM ROUMIEU
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM | DECEMBER 2009
WHEN YOU VISIT the newly opened ARIA Resort &
Casino in Las Vegas, order a drink and ask the person
on the next bar stool to guess how far he thinks the
libation will travel from the bottle to your glass. If he
gets it right, you’ll buy the next round.
The answer: between 1,000 and 10,000 feet, or up
to two miles.
The ARIA, which is part of the stunning new
CityCenter, has been constructed with a fi rst-of-itskind,
computer-driven liquor transportation system.
Deep in the bowels of the hotel reside six so-called “pump
rooms” containing 32 brands of booze. In each room,
1,344 bottles stacked six deep are placed upside down in specialized holders controlled by a computer.
Some 26 miles of tubing—or just under a marathon’s worth—zip the liquor around the facility.
Say you’re in the blackjack pit and you feel a little thirsty. You place your order with a server, and she
sashays over to a bartender, who punches a code into one of his three liquor guns, sending a signal to
the central computer. Precisely measured jiggers of hooch are dispatched through a network of quarterinch-thick
plastic arteries winding behind the casino’s walls. Et voilà: Your Long Island iced tea, sir.
While this set-up helps the casino to monitor its liquor inventory and prevents bartenders from being
egregiously generous, it also ensures that customers get their cocktails promptly. “Our liquor guns are
pretty intelligent,” explains Heidi Hinkle, beverage director at ARIA. In a casino, every second lost to
a bartender fumbling with a bottle of Absolut is time a customer isn’t gambling—and the house isn’t
profi ting. To make sure nothing goes wrong, ARIA does what casinos usually do: It watches things, very
closely. “We have employees monitoring the pump rooms twenty-four hours a day,” Hinkle says. “Just in
case.”—MICHAEL KAPLAN
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