Harrah's Cherokee drive-by (no, not like that) - Feb 2024

THAT'S RIGHT Y'ALL MOTHERFUCKERS YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS:

About 9pm Eastern.

...Oh, and it's also time for ANOTHER DAD-BLAMED JACK O. BETTER TRIP REPORT, this time from my flying visit to my favorite Southern casino, Harrah's Cherokee, located on Eastern Cherokee land in the mountains of North Carolina. It just so happened I was going to be driving past it on a trip, so obviously I had to stay a night and show off the current state of the place. If you haven't been, or haven't been recently, you might be surprised at what HC looks and feels like in 2024.

And now, in the words of Mario: Let's-a go!


PART THE FIRST: GETTING THERE, GETTING IN AND GETTING YOUR SHIT TOGETHER

Harrah's Cherokee is in the hills. And I mean that sumbitch is in the hills. Allow Google Maps' terrain view to paint you a picture. For reference, East to West in the below image is about ten miles:



Now, having said that, it's a lot easier to get to than it may look. If you're coming from Atlanta, 23 is probably your best route. If you're coming west from Asheville, the most direct route is 19, but you may want to take a small detour after Maggie Valley via 74 if you don't like mountain driving. And if you're coming from Tennessee and you don't like mountain driving, what are you even doing crossing the mountains?!

Anyway, no matter which way you come you'll be treated to absolutely beautiful mountain views. This is about the most mediocre in the area, but unfortunately the only one I thought to record for posterity:



It's really hard to overstate just how beautiful of a setting Harrah's Cherokee is in. The mountains are gorgeous any time of year. Even in winter, the authorities do a good job of keeping the abovementioned highways salted. HC is one of the few casinos where going for a local hike is a popular pastime of folks who stay there.

If you get a room toward the top of any of the hotel towers, you'll also be treated to lovely mountain views. My own room, in the Cherokee Tower, wasn't even very high up and I still got to see this:



But, dearest readerino, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Once you get into Cherokee proper, the casino is very easy to find, being the only building for miles in any direction that's taller than a few floors. You have a choice between two "ends": the original hotel resort, which contains the Creek, Soco and Mountain towers, and the newer Cherokee Convention Center part which contains the brand-new (2021) Cherokee Tower.

I'm gonna make this real easy for you: unless you smoke, stay in the Cherokee Tower. Not only is the whole building completely non-smoking but, in my opinion, the rooms are much nicer. If you're a smoker, Soco and Creek have designated smoking floors. Problem for non-smokers is that even the non-smoking rooms in Creek, Soco and (the connected) Mountain tend to smell faintly of smoke due to the shared elevators and hallways. So, if that bothers you, stay in Cherokee.

There's ample self-parking on both ends of the resort and 24 hour valet service, too. Check-in was a breeze at the fancy new Cherokee lobby:



Next to the lobby is the resort's Guy Fieri restaurant - yes, many of the CET favorites from Vegas et al are represented, though sadly I neglected to take any pics of the local Fieri joint- and the very nice Cherokee elevators. (Piece of trivia here: You may have heard of this casino because it notoriously has the most Seven Stars coded guests of any CET resort - in fact, it used to have more Seven Stars members than there were available hotel rooms. This was part of the reason the Cherokee Tower was built.)



As for the room itself, I would say that - like most of the resort - if you put it in Vegas, it would be at a mid-tier Strip level or a high-end Downtown level. All the rooms in each of the towers are basically the same. Cherokee's rooms are on the smaller side but they are still well-appointed and comfortable. Behold, the main living space with a nice desk, chair and comfy king bed (and microwave, and coffee):





You get a funky little fridge, too:



Closet is on the smaller side but perfectly functional:



And the bathrooms, which have a lovely rain shower but, sadly for you tub nutters, no tub. You have to get a room in one of the other towers for that, I believe.




When you've gotten settled in, you probably want to go to gamble, or maybe get a bite to eat. And this is the only slight downside of the Cherokee Tower end. It's about a five minute walk to the rest of the place - which itself is kind of long-and-thin shaped, meaning that when you first reach the casino (and awesome bowling alley with its own food, another thing I forgot to take pics of!) you may have a few more minutes to go. I present the following pictures from my journey to my favorite eatery on the premises, Truffles Pub located in the Gordon Ramsay Food Court.










PART B: STUFFING YOUR FACE, OR "JACK! THE FUCK YOU MEAN, 'GORDON RAMSAY FOOD COURT?!!'"

Yep: Gordon Ramsay Food "Market," i.e. Court. Essentially, this place is like a greatest hits of various Ramsay establishments from Vegas, like Gordon Ramsay Burger and his fish and chips place, with some other stuff added like a pizza place, a coffee place and (not pictured) a seafood place.





Truffles Pub, which I again neglected to snap a picture of, is an attached sit-down restaurant. (You know how Toscana is kind of an appendage of Eataly at Park MGM? Same kinda thing.) Truffles - a name destined to be dated in terms of culinary fashion, ooooh, right about now - serves its own menu of slightly higher-end fare. Tragically, there is no Beef Wellington - but there is a sticky toffee pudding, and it's about twice the size of the ones you get in Vegas.

In fact, the GRFC (?) being better value than Vegas is kind of a theme. As an illustration, here's the menu for Truffles. Not that cheap; maybe just slightly less so than Vegas.




But look at how much lobster salad you get on the lobster roll! And these are decent chunks of lobster meat, mind you, as you might be able to tell by the one that FELL OUT BECAUSE THE ROLL WAS SO OVERSTUFFED:



Absolutely delicious. And for another example... does this menu look familiar? Perhaps to anyone who may have eaten a GR-themed burger in Vegas?



I've eaten here before, and can confirm: Basically the same food, with only small alterations to use local ingredients. For way less money. FAR better value than its Vegas counterpart. Naturally all this food can be used to add TCs/RCs to one's Caesars Rewards account.

But let's be real. Most of you didn't come here for the restaurant pics. Well, except you, @LovablePenguin! Nope, you degenerates want GAMBOL.


PART Ɣ: OKAY SO YOU PIECES OF SHIT WANT GAMBOL, I SEE HOW IT IS. TOUGH SHIT! CASINO TOUR FIRST BITCHES

Let me paint you a picture.

No, not a real one. I'm a shitty artist.

I mean, let me paint you a picture of the FUCKING SIZE of this place.

Harrah's Cherokee has 150,000 square feet of casino space. For y'all keeping track, that's more than Caesars Motherfucking Palace. It would be one of the biggest casinos on the Strip in terms of casino size.

And it'd be the biggest in terms of what all it has. Yes. THE biggest.

Three thousand slot machines, for example. Dozens and dozens of tables with every carny card game you could want plus tons of affordable classics: $10 and up BJ (albeit 6:5, boo) and $15 and up roulette and craps. There's a high limit slots room and a very nice new high limit tables room. There's a dedicated baccarat area with "Big Bacc" plus mini-bacc right outside that area on the main gaming floor.

There are almost four fucking hundred video poker machines in the place, for crying out loud! And you know how I know this? BECAUSE I WENT AROUND AND COUNTED THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS. I hope you appreciate my sacrifice because just when I thought I'd found them all I'd spot ANOTHER BANK. Not the first time video poker has made me want to weep, but possibly the first time because there was too much of it...

It's incredibly difficult to capture the size of this place in pictures, but I tried my best for the general casino area (all faces blanked out to the best of my ability). Included is the largest bar, the colossal Myst Bar. Yes, it does have a FUCKING STAGE IN THE MIDDLE.










Now, the casino area has been completely non-smoking since Covid... until now. The main casino is still non-smoking, but there's a pretty neat enclosed smoking slots area:



And I know what y'all smokers are thinking, but 1. it's much bigger than those ones at LAS are, and 2. The cocktail servers do actually go in there. (No comp cocktails, though. Yes, I know. Blame North Carolina. The casino would love to comp alcohol but state law doesn't allow it. Non-alcoholic drinks are freely comped, however.)

High Limit slots looks pretty cool, like being inside a giant fusion-reactor torus. In fact, the whole theme of this place seems to be 'futuristic purple and blue shit.'



Obligatory Ruth's Chris (there are a bunch of places to eat here - there's also a Brio Italian Grille and a couple other neat places):



One of those 'neat places,' the pan-Asian Noodle Bar, that's open til 2am (after this, there's an Earl of Sandwich and Dunkin' Express in the casino's former mini-food court that cover the rest of night shift):



Nice large sportsbook - look at the sportsbook cage under the screens for an idea of scale:



And, yes, as you probably already guessed from the fate of many of its counterparts, the Laurel Lounge is no more. It closed during COVID for 'remodeling.' What this turned out to mean is making a very large combined high-limit-tables-and-bar-slash-lounge area, a little like the Aria or Bellagio high limit rooms, if a touch less fancy. Much larger, though. Not pictured: a small side room for the very highest-limit slots, but sadly no video poker. This is also the only bar in the HC main casino that doesn't have video poker terminals.




I could have gone on, and on, and taken so many more pics. This place is absolutely vast.

But by now, I was tired, so I wanted to sit down for a while. In High Limit slots.

PART IV: NO I'M NOT GOING TO POST 25 SCREENSHOTS OF VIDEO POKER. JUST THE HIGHLIGHTS. SO STOP WHINING

So this place has some really cool older VP machines, such as about 150 (!!!) Pot o' Gold setups in linked banks running Shamrock 7s. If you haven't seen this, which you may not have if you've not been to many tribal casinos, it's basically progressive VP with Sega Genesis style graphics, slightly tweaked paytables and, if you happen to get a 3OAK of 7s, you get a bonus round in which you can win large multiples of your bet. I didn't get a picture, of course, because I hate you all.

There are also a few of those neat giant older IGT machines with the two-person bench:



(I'm pretty sure they're all TITO now, but the coin-out tray is certainly awesome to see!)

There are also a few banks of those newer multi-game five-cent machines that let you bet from one credit (trash-tier paytables) to fifty credits (better paytables):



But you know my habits by now, dearest reader. I wasn't interested - well, I did run one dollar through the above five-cent machine one 5c credit at a time. While praying this wasn't when my next Royal would strike. But most of my play happened in HL slots on standard IGT multigame slant-tops. These offer some of the better pay tables in the casino. One thing I did notice was that pay tables per denomination were actually pretty uniform, although I did see a few, say, $1 denom tables on the main floor that were inferior to the same game and denom in High Limit.

An aside here, because some shit needs to be said again and again. I asked for a drink from one of the drink servers passing through HL, as you do. When she brought it - and bear in mind she was very friendly and helpful with no trace of attitude - she immediately turned on her heel and walked away. Puzzled, I called her back.

She didn't understand why.

I gave her the modest tip. She was very excited. Because I guess that doesn't happen often. After she left, I was fucking furious. If you play in any casino, especially in High Limit, TIP YOUR FUCKING SERVERS. I DON'T GIVE A SHIT IF YOU'RE POUTY THAT THERE'S NO FREE ALCOHOL BECAUSE OF STATE LAW. TIP THE FUCKING SERVER!!! How rare must tips have been for her to just immediately walk off like that without even giving me a second to get a bill out?! It made my blood boil.

Anyway.

Deuces Wild! One of the very first hands I hit, for a nice start:



Later came a fake-ass RF (ie one with a Deuce):



A couple of Satan's 3OAKS in a row, which was FUCKING METAL:




And, to cap off my session, this blazing RF with Deuces that, like an RKO, came OUTTA NOWHERE:



After this, it was time for me to go to BEB.

PART THE NEXT PART: THE SHIT I DID WHEN I WOKE UP

Went back to sleep.

PART FINAL!!!: THE SHIT I DID WHEN MY ALARM SUBSEQUENTLY WENT OFF

Got up, showered and packed. Begrudgingly.

This brings me to the only piece of sub-par service I've ever gotten at this place. I'd given my car to the valet to park when I'd gotten there. Reader, don't do this. Just self-park. You'll get your car back much quicker. But I never learn this lesson, so I always use my benefit of free (tip aside) valet. The downside is that it can take them a little while to get your car. Well, when it had been longer than usual, I went to ask. Turns out they'd pulled it up at the incorrect entrance - Main Hotel instead of Cherokee Tower - not seen me, and parked it up again. Not a huge issue; just an inconvenience.

Anyway. I had my shit together, so next stop was the very delicious Selu Garden Cafe for breakfast. They do have a decent and decently priced breakfast buffet here from 7-11, but I elected to order from the brunch menu instead:



Selu is right next to the creek that runs through the resort, and some of the seats are by the window for a relaxing view:



Again, I neglected to take a picture of the basic two-egg breakfast I ordered, but it was delicious.

Selu also has a neat chocolate and candy mini-shop kinda attached to the side. Jelly Belly dispensers!



And from this point, my friends, I proceeded to THE SLAUGHTER. There aren't any pics of this VP session, because I want to forget it. I went two hours of fairly rapid play and never saw anything higher on the pay table than one single solitary- count it - full house. By the time I stemmed the financial bleeding I was back in the negative again on lifetime gambling. Ah, well. All is as it should be in the land of the Law of Large Numbers.

Not much else to tell from here. I got in my car, still sulking, and drove on to my destination. I hope you found this report enlightening. I think HC is a criminally under-rated casino; if more people realized how nice it was and how beautiful the surrounding area is, then, hell, they'd probably have to build another new tower. I propose they call it the Vegas Message Board Trip Reports Tower.

And now, just like the folks who were sitting next to this awesome fire fixture near the main lobby, I'm off to get cozy.



See you in my next TR, probably at the end of this month. I've now done three in quick succession and, damn it, I need a break.

Oh, and shout out to the Eastern Cherokee, or the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to use their correct title. They run an excellent casino.

 

Also, I like how I don't bother proof-reading these, so I post them and then have to edit them about ten times to fix all my stupid errors. Extremely high quality professional writing behavior.

 

Dude. You write a fuckin 10/10 NON VEGAS trip report, and then you'll probably try and convince me you're not a professional author.

Thanks for the TR, makes me want to go back and actually spend the night. I've only done a 5 hour trip once, during the construction of that food court. I sat at that exact 2 person VP machine with my dad!

If/next time I'm there, I'm taking you hostage until you write a TR for me

 

Nice report - I love Cherokee!!!

 

I sometimes find errors in my TRs years later after reading them several times. Lol

Nice report and pics! I am disappointed that I was so engrossed in live/online poker the one time I visited there in 2008, I feel like I missed out on a lot more.

Bummer about the VP, but a wild royal is more rare than a natural quad.

 

See, there's just so much there that I knew I'd miss things. I forgot to mention their nice poker room which runs WSOP regionals, for example.

 

Not only does it run the WSOP circuit but it is the largest circuit event with 3 stops annually and hosts the annual championship event.

 

See, this is the kind of info you miss when you mostly play Fake Computer Poker for Nerds.

 

Finally got a chance to catch up, looks like an nice place. That lobster roll does look great

I don't know if I'd ever have a reason to be in the area but I'd keep it in mind if I was!

 

Love the TR. I do really like the place but hate paying for drinks. Love sitting by the fire pits next to Soco Creek.

 

Great TR. Cherokee is definitely my favorite non Vegas property even if you have to pay for drinks. For those that have never been just dont confuse this for Cherokee Valley or you will be disappointed.