For anyone who is under the impression that the Las Vegas food scene consists of $5 all-you-can-eat buffets and tacky theme restaurants, the authors behind Eating Las Vegas: The 50 Essential Restaurants, will change your mind. John Curtas, Max Jacobson and Al Mancini, highly respected and highly feared Vegas food writers, spent countless hours deliberating, arguing and finally agreeing on the 50 restaurants that are worth trying out.

In a recent interview in Las Vegas Weekly, Curtas talks about the long process in creating the list. “We had two rules that are kind of contradictory. One was, two can always outvote the third. But the corollary to that was, each of us had absolute veto power. And somehow it worked.”

The restaurants that were vetoed are given their own section in Eating Las Vegas. It includes the name of the restaurant, the reason it should be in the top 50 and why it was vetoed, i.e. why a writer hated it.

Eating Las Vegas also gives us a glimpse of lesser-known dining spots. Although the majority of the top 50 are restaurants on the strip, about 70%, the writers did expand their list to include several off-the-Strip places. One in particular, Los Antojos, is a whole in the wall Mexican food joint that serves an amazing chicken soup.

Eating Las Vegas: The 50 Essential Restaurants is available at barnesandnoble.com

Alina Tarkhanian is the First Course editor.