When I was a very depressed British teenager, I had an unhealthy fascination with America. I found a way to love its contradictions, to explain away the obvious sins not by excusing them directly but by focusing on America’s enormous size, its capacity to hold infinite different types of people, and its proliferation of true weirdos. 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, conveniently forgetting that most of what I saw along the way would be one-intersection towns with only chain restaurants and dialysis centers. To buy into that stuff is to value something that is odd and entirely itself above something that is good or otherwise defensible. Sure, this Museum of Long CVS Receipts sucks, but at least it sucks on its own terms; it’s not trying to be anything else, and it’s something that only this one guy who really loves receipts could create. 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.
Cablp, which is how the name is stylized (pronounced ca-blip), does indeed belong to magician Criss Angel, the Mindfreak himself. He founded the restaurant in July 2021, buying a local place called Sugar’s Home Plate and renovating it in a style befitting a freak of the mind. He told Nevada Public Radio in 2024 that he originally intended the restaurant to be just “one component to an escape camp for children with childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases,” a cause that lies close to his heart, as his son Johnny Christopher has battled childhood leukemia (now in remission, thankfully). The camp part seems not to have made much progress; Angel said in the same interview that he was still “waiting years and years later for the county and Bureau of Land Management.” Perhaps it was a bad idea to open the restaurant before the escape camp could be built, but that’s not my business.
Cablp’s existence raises a lot of questions: Why is it in Overton and not at, for example, Planet Hollywood on the Las Vegas strip where Angel freaks minds every night? (Actually, that one is easy: Angel “fell in love with” Moapa Valley while taking his kids dirtbiking there.) Why does it serve breakfast, lunch, AND pizza, and why is it named for all three? Why would a magician need a restaurant?
For me, it raised just one question: When can I go?
Last week, my Twitch streamer friends and I held a fundraiser for the Immigrant Rapid Relief Fund, a fund hosted by the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota that provides support to people under siege by ICE. Our friend Stefan Heck raised the topic, as he often does, of Cablp. I thought it would be funny to promise to drive from my home in Los Angeles to Cablp if we raised more than $100,000. I wasn’t joking, but I wasn’t exactly serious either, because there was no shot we’d actually raise that much.
We raised $123,000. No way around it: I was fucked. I had to go to Cablp.
On a Saturday morning, I made a reservation for that night at the Virgin Hotel—which you already knew, because that’s your hotel—and my husband and I set off for Las Vegas. The plan: Drive four hours to Vegas, spend the night there and only minorly expose ourselves to its horrors, then the next morning we’d drive to Cablp for breakfast (or lunch or pizza), see the Valley of Fire State Park nearby, and then go home. Job done, as my people (Warcraft NPCs) say.
This is quite a lot of driving. We put around 800 miles on the odometer for the whole trip, although those who have done the LA-to-Vegas drive will know that time usually shrinks on I-15 between Barstow and Vegas, and it never feels quite as long as it is. Meanwhile, the drive from Vegas to Cablp seems longer, perhaps because you’re so hungry for B, L or P, or perhaps because of ill-set expectations. The Cablp website features a possibly doctored screenshot from Google Maps saying it takes 45 minutes to get from Las Vegas to the restaurant. Google Maps actually and accurately says it takes an hour without traffic, even if you put in exactly the same part of Vegas they did. It’s an amusingly inconsequential lie; if someone wants to go to Cablp, the extra 15 minutes can’t possibly be the thing that deters them.
On a quiet Sunday morning, we drove north, past the impossibly enormous hotels. Then warehouses, then huge developments of solar panels, then nothing. Just desert, rocks, distant mountains. We exited toward Overton and started to see signs of humanity again: churches, farms, houses, people, animals. Grass, improbably. There were multiple big billboards for a candidate for Congress named Cody K. Whipple, which I misread as Codyk Whipple and didn’t question.
We arrived just in time to catch breakfast (B) at Cablp, and we were the only customers. Staff outnumbered us two-to-one. You can’t say Criss isn’t creating jobs.
I have danced around it for long enough: The food at Cablp is not very good. I believe the term for this is probably “set up to fail.” I have no reporting to back this up, but it seems very likely that this restaurant, allegedly meant to be part of a camp for children that has never materialized, might be sort of low on Criss’s priority list. I imagine it is probably expensive to get good, fresh ingredients in the middle of the Nevada desert, and it maybe should be if we are to have any hope of surviving the next century. I feel awful saying it, as someone who enjoys cooking herself—imagine if my friends could write bitchy reviews of the dinners I made for them? How do professional restaurant critics do it?—but it all tasted like Sysco-ass diner food. I ordered the breakfast burrito (that’s the B), which was a little overcooked and served with underseasoned breakfast potatoes, while my husband ordered the Mindfreak Burger (there’s the L), which was enormous and pretty good.
I was ready to be mad at Criss for insisting on not serving normal French fries but instead “Phenom chip fries,” which are like a cross between a chip (American) and a chip (British). They were actually really fucking good. Get the Phenom chip fries. All the drinks were served in to-go cups.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s 2021 review of Cablp, one need only “touch just the right book, and the shelves swing back to reveal a charming new space that seats 10, where Angel displays magic paraphernalia from his personal collection, including one of the first tricks he performed as a child.” I’m sad to report that we did not see The Magic Room. I knew that it had to be behind this suspiciously out-of-place bookcase, but it had a sign saying “Please do not touch items,” and I am terrified to break rules, which is just one reason why I’ve never opened a restaurant that serves breakfast, lunch, and pizza.
The corridor to the Magic Room is also lined with photos of Criss meeting famous people, from Dana White to Gordon Ramsay. The ladies’ restroom features one of the most enormous photos I’ve ever seen outside a museum, depicting Criss amid the flames, presumably during his Vegas show that we elected to skip.
Before we left, I figured I had to ask about the Italian ice, another selling point of the restaurant. Cablp’s “gourmet Italian ices” are “manufactured in Criss’ MINDFOODS plant in Las Vegas,” according to the menu, which also pitches them as a “delicious natural alternative to ice cream.” The waitress, who was extremely nice, said they no longer sold scoops but they did sell the entire pints. Today’s options were lemonade, sugar-free cherry, and mango. I got the mango, and tried it in the car. It was extremely good, despite the fact that the container said it was best served by November 2025. Whatever is going on at the MINDFOODS plant is very magical indeed.
The magic trick it promises to teach you comes in the form of a QR code inside the lid, which links to a video demonstrating a card trick. I am not going to link it here. Go to Cablp if you want it; I had to, after all.
As we viewed thousand-year-old petroglyphs and breathtaking rock formations at the Valley of Fire State Park—a must-see, by the way, similar to but enormously easier to access than The Wave—I felt a painful truth gnawing at my mind: I had to go back for pizza. I couldn’t drive all this way and spend an entire weekend on this project without trying B, L, and P. I was also receiving desperate messages from my friends who wanted Cablp T-shirts, which I hadn’t been brave enough to ask about. I gritted my teeth and admitted to my husband that we were going to have to go back for more Cablp.
I walked in and placed a normal sort of order: one personal-size pepperoni pizza and three T-shirts, please. I felt I had to explain myself, saying I had told my friends I was going to Cablp and they wanted shirts, as if I wasn’t getting one myself. The server smiled at me and said, “He was here last week, you know,” answering a question I hadn’t asked. I asked whether Criss was there often, and the man said he was there “as often as he could be; he’s a busy man.” (Criss has a dedicated space in the parking lot, just in case.)
This mirrors what Angel told Nevada Public Radio in 2021, which was that if Cablp “was closer to where I reside I would probably eat there every day!” This again raises the question of why he started a restaurant so far away from where lives, which I have to imagine is some sort of underground palace made of ice and shadow, but whatever. (Also, the staffer who sold me shirts said he commutes from Vegas, which makes me feel like Criss could try a bit fucking harder to do the same.)
For the next few minutes, the intrepid Cablp staff member rifled through fabric bins filled with shirts in individual Ziploc bags, a jumble of sizes and designs (I later learned these are available on Angel’s website anyway). The psychic weight of the inconvenience I was placing on this poor dude grew heavy, as my perception of how long each second was expanded, which is how I’ve ended up with a shirt with “Moapa Valley – PROUD AMERICA” on the back that I will never be able to wear outside the house.
I got my pizza and ate two slices in the parking lot. It was not, as the Review-Journal described in 2021, an “excellent pizza, which has a stretchy thin crust,” but instead a C-minus pie with the crunchy-bottomed crust of a cafeteria pizza.
But it was still pizza, made with care, and I had just hiked a few miles. I find it somewhat hard to believe that the recipe for the pizza is, as the website claims, the “best-of-the-best” from the East Coast, the product of “Pizza Master Chefs.” Next time I will get the Margherita, which the menu implies is his grandma’s “classic” recipe. I say next time because I feel sure I will go again, despite having no particular plans to.
I can’t say this is all that different from my daily life, but: The entire day I was burdened by shame. Shame that I had driven 400 miles to eat diner food. Shame that I had participated at all in the indefensible project of Las Vegas, an ecological crime of a city that should never have existed and exists only by exploiting gambling addictions, and that I had spent $15 on a bottle of Coke Zero and a bag of Trolli sour gummy worms at the hotel. Shame that the 18-year-old version of me who wanted nothing more than to live in the United States would be giddy with joy that I was doing this sort of thing. And a fearful sort of shame that the staff of Cablp, who were completely lovely and just living their lives, might feel I was taking the piss by being there. A fucking podcaster from Los Feliz showing up to say their breakfast burrito is bad while they were at work. Jesus Christ.
And yet. If I can hold onto any part of that adoration I held for Weirdo America, the towns that are improbably far from anything you’ve heard of, where a guy is building a giant chicken out of Q-tips, it’s that people doing weird stuff is how you get good stuff. You just have to accept a lot of bad stuff that gets produced on the way.
Cablp is not good, and Criss Angel is very odd for doing it. It is a somewhat lazy reskin of an existing diner with unpleasant aesthetics and promises of magic that never materialize, on the plate or in the Magic Room. It is staffed by extremely nice people who seem hardly fazed by the ridiculousness of it all. I am so glad I went there. I will go back again. I hope it never closes. 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. Just let me have some more mango Mindfreeze before I go.