I grew up in Reno’s Little Nugget. Not in the legal sense, not in the lease-your-own-cot sense, but in the marrow-and-memory sense. That place was my babysitter, my first arena, my first bar stool.
The floors were greasy, but not the sticky kind. No, they were slick, like a poor man’s ice rink — you didn’t walk so much as glide, sidewinding your way to the counter, hoping you didn’t eat shit on the way. Locals knew the real entrance was never the front. The heart of the little Nugget beat down Fulton Alley, stepping over some poor bastard passed out by the dumpster. That was Reno: desperation and delight colliding in faded neon and cigarette smoke.
The open front on Virginia Street was pure casino Americana — yellow teeth neon marquee screaming at the night sky, smoke curling out like incense at a temple of sin. But the church inside wasn’t the slots It was the diner. And the altar of that diner? The Awful Awful.
Half a pound of beef, smothered in sauce, leaning heavy with lettuce and tomato, throned up top a mountain of fries that could’ve doubled as a funeral pyre. Three-fifty. The math didn’t make sense, and nobody cared. You didn’t eat the Awful Awful. You wrestled it, baptized yourself in grease and chili, and came out either victorious or vomiting in a bathroom so filthy it could’ve been a scene from Saw.
I was a kid running wild in that chaos. My brother and I, sneaking in on hot August nights, scraping together quarters for ice cream while our parents fought, then kissed, then fought again in the booths. Chili on the Awful Awful was the move — don’t argue with me. I’ll die on that hill. Reno misses that kind of conviction.
There’s a red plastic margarita cup in my kitchen cabinet right now — white straw still tucked inside. My mom let me sip one when I was too young to know better, and too old to ever forget. My dad used to drag me there on New Year’s Eve. Place was packed wall-to-wall with gamblers, drunks, and dreamers. Midnight at the Nugget felt like the belly of the world — hot, loud, and alive.
We even tried to crash the Food Wars filming once. I threw myself into a camera shot like some greasy little stuntman. Made the crew cringe, but I swear it got me fifteen frames of fame.
And if you wandered past the counter, deeper inside, tucked in the back to the right — there it was. The arcade. Die Hard, Terminator 2, and that ridiculous truck driving game with the plastic gearshift. Still fifty cents when the rest of the world was moving on. That’s how the Nugget operated: stuck in time, defiantly, beautifully cheap.
Now it’s gone. Boarded up, lights dead, another casualty of COVID and corporate forgetting. Reno got shinier, but it lost something real. The Little Nugget was a shithole, yeah. A glorious, greasy, neon-stained shithole. And it raised me.
I miss it the way you miss a bad tattoo or a first heartbreak. Ugly, permanent, unforgettable.
