8 Nevada Foods and Drinks That Confuse Every Out-of-Stater
Nevada’s governor signed a law in 2025 naming an official state drink, and it isn’t anything poured on a casino floor.
It’s bitter, brandy-based, and plenty of Americans have never heard of it.
Nevada eats and drinks a handful of things like that, and a visitor’s face gives them away every time.
These are the Nevada foods and drinks that confuse every out-of-stater.
1. Shrimp Cocktail
Shrimp cocktail in Nevada comes from a casino deli counter, not a restaurant, and it has for more than 60 years.
Golden Gate Hotel & Casino in downtown Las Vegas started selling it from the hotel’s snack counter in 1959.
It cost a flat 50 cents, served in a tulip-shaped glass instead of a proper stemmed one.
Out-of-staters expect a seafood appetizer with white tablecloths, not a paper cup handed over next to the craps pit.
There’s no stemware in sight.
The deli kept the price at 50 cents for more than 30 years.
Golden Gate finally raised it to 99 cents in 1991, right after selling its 25 millionth cup.
Du-Par’s diner then ran the counter until it closed in 2017.
Derek Stevens moved the recipe downtown before it landed at Circa Las Vegas, first to 7th and Carson’s sports bar in 2019, where the same cup cost $9.99.
Saginaw’s Delicatessen inside Circa still pours it in the same tulip glass, and between 3 and 5 a.m. with an entree purchase, it’s a 99-cent throwback.
Any other hour, expect to pay closer to $11.
2. Picon Punch
Picon Punch tastes like a grapefruit peel picked a fight with brandy, and the brandy lost.
Almost nobody outside Nevada has heard the name, even after Gov. Joe Lombardo signed Assembly Bill 375 in June 2025 and made it the state’s official drink.
Basque immigrants first mixed the drink in San Francisco‘s North Beach neighborhood in the late 1800s, and Basque sheepherders carried the recipe into northern Nevada soon after.
Bartenders in Elko, Gardnerville, and Winnemucca still pour it without a menu prompt more than a century later, long after San Francisco moved on to other drinks.
The drink mixes a bittersweet orange liqueur with brandy, club soda, and a splash of grenadine, finished with a lemon twist.
Nothing about it tastes normal.
A first-time visitor usually orders it once out of curiosity and never orders it again.
What’s Inside Nevada’s State Drink
Picon Punch doesn’t use the French liqueur its name suggests.
Bartenders pour Torani Amer instead. The company began making its version in the 1930s, decades before Picon Punch needed a substitute.
The original French Amer Picon vanished from U.S. shelves in the 1960s after regulators banned calamus root, one of its ingredients.
Torani’s version became the only one left on the shelf, and it’s been the standard ever since.
Torani stopped making it in 2025, so a Reno company called Ferino Distillery took over the recipe that same year.
Nevada’s state drink is now made inside the state that claimed it.
3. Solomo
Solomo confuses a lot of visitors who’ve never seen a marinated pork loin sandwich land on a Nevada plate before.
The dish traces back to the Basque sheepherders who settled Nevada’s rural counties in the late 1800s.
It’s still on the menu at the Martin Hotel in Winnemucca, the Basque boarding house the Martin family took over and renamed in 1913.
Dinner there still arrives family-style, with strangers sharing one long table and course after course landing whether anyone asked for it.
Nobody orders a la carte.
The soup, salad, beans, and fries all show up before the solomo does, and a visitor who skips lunch to save room usually still leaves full.
4. Awful Awful Burger
The Awful Awful is a Nevada burger that sounds like a complaint and eats like a dare.
The name means “awful big, awful good.”
The sandwich backs that up with a toasted bun, a hefty patty, and a secret sauce.
Cooks pile a full pound of french fries on top instead of serving them on the side.
Reno’s Little Nugget diner made it a fixture for about 70 years before closing in 2020, and out-of-staters who’d grown up on it kept asking where it went.
It didn’t stay gone.
Baldini’s in Sparks brought the Awful Awful back in 2025, same recipe, same absurd amount of fries.
Psst! How much do you know about Nevada’s food and drink history? Take a guess on each of these, then tap to see if you’re right.
5. Liquor-Filled Chocolate
Liquor-filled chocolate sits on ordinary store shelves in Nevada in a way it can’t in many other states.
Ethel M Chocolates opened its Henderson factory in 1981, after founder Forrest Mars discovered Nevada’s liquor laws allowed something many states won’t touch.
Bourbon, tequila, and Baileys Irish Cream go inside the candy, sold right next to the gum and mints.
That loophole still exists.
Grocery stores elsewhere lock that kind of thing behind a liquor license.
An out-of-stater who grabs a box expecting a regular truffle usually figures out the difference on the first bite.
6. Pine Nuts
Pine nuts confuse visitors who assume the small, pricey nuts sold in gourmet grocery aisles are imported from Italy or China, not gathered from the mountains outside Reno.
Nevada’s piñon forests have fed people here for far longer than any casino has stood on the Strip.
The Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone tribes harvested the nuts from those forests for thousands of years, roasting the cones and grinding the kernels into flour that carried families through winter.
That harvest never stopped.
Those pine nuts turn up in pesto and on pizza as often as in anything traditional now.
Nevada’s Bureau of Land Management district offices in Battle Mountain, Elko, and Ely have auctioned harvest permits for the same public forests generations of local families have worked.
A pound of Nevada pine nuts sells for about $20, a lot of money for something growing wild in the hills.
A handful of family harvesters still gather them from the same mountains their grandparents worked, one truckload of cones at a time.
7. Frey Ranch Whiskey
Frey Ranch makes whiskey out of grain that never leaves the Nevada farm it grew on.
The Frey family has worked land outside Fallon since 1854.
About a decade ago, they started distilling the corn, rye, and barley they grow into bourbon right on the property.
Many whiskey brands buy their grain from someone else.
Not Frey Ranch.
Frey Ranch farms it, malts it, ferments it, and bottles it without the grain ever crossing a state line.
Out-of-staters who picture Nevada as nothing but sand and slot machines rarely expect a working farm behind the label.
8. Hearts O’ Gold Cantaloupe
Hearts O’ Gold cantaloupe turned a patch of Nevada desert into melon country, and outsiders still don’t buy it.
A Fallon-area farmer named O.J. Vannoy crossbred the variety in 1911, and the melon’s tough rind let it survive a cross-country train trip that ruined more delicate varieties.
Forty-four farms were growing it within a decade.
The Depression came for it.
The Great Depression nearly wiped the crop out once farmers switched to alfalfa, and six Chinese immigrant families kept the seed alive through the lean years that followed.
Fallon still throws an annual festival for it, drawing more than 15,000 people.
That’s a lot of visitors for a farm town many people would otherwise drive straight past on their way to Reno or Las Vegas.
Drought still cuts into that water supply, and a 2021 shortage on the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District trimmed deliveries to Churchill County farms by 30%.
The festival still runs a 5K race and a Cantaloupe Pageant every August, alongside the country fair games that have drawn crowds for decades.
8 WinCo Bulk Bin Mistakes That Cost Nevada Shoppers More Than They Save
WinCo keeps Nevada grocery prices low largely thanks to its self-serve bulk bins, which skip the packaging costs other stores pass straight to the shopper.
A handful of bulk bin habits cancel out those savings anyway, and many shoppers don’t realize they’re doing them every trip.
8 WinCo Bulk Bin Mistakes That Cost Nevada Shoppers More Than They Save
