Elko: The land of large food portions

For work, my company sent my coworker and me to a mining tradeshow in Elko, a small town in the northeast corner in the state of Nevada in the United States. This post isn’t about my experience at the tradeshow, but rather my experience in a small American town.

The most interesting thing I experienced here would have to be the ridiculous portions of food that is served – it really fulfills the American stereotype. For example, this is what we got at the restaurant at the Star Hotel:

Now a standard fork is probably about 7 inches in length, so using the fork as a scale in that picture, the steak is probably about 9 inches long and about 2.5 inches wide. I was expecting a steak of half the size. Not to mention it came with spaghetti, beans, fries, soup, salad, and bread on the side. I ate all of that over two meals.

Naturally, we also explored the town. The road we mostly travelled through was Idaho Street and we really saw how small the town was. When we were there, the temperature was about 30°C and not very humid, making it very unpleasant to walk outside.

According to Wikipedia, Elko had a population of 18,297 people in 2010 – that’s pretty small compared to what I’m used to. The primary industry in Elko is gold mining – hence the reason to hold a tradeshow. The tradeshow lasted two days and after that we drove to Salt Lake City to catch a plane back to Vancouver.

Link to more photos