Reno after dark

The only genuinely 24-hour part of the city. The casino floors never close, the riverwalk is best on a hot afternoon, and Virginia Street is at its most photogenic at dusk when the Arch reads against a lit sky rather than a black one.

This is the part of Reno that works without a plan. The casino floors, their bars and their showrooms are within a few blocks of each other, three of them — the Eldorado, the Silver Legacy and Circus Circus — are connected by enclosed skywalks, and Cargo and the Pioneer Center are a walk from any of them.

The Riverwalk is the pleasant end of downtown for an early evening and its restaurants carry into the night, but the late hours happen a couple of blocks north, under the Arch.

An evening district, and firmly so. It comes alive from about 5pm and is at its best on a Thursday to Saturday night. Weekday afternoons are quiet enough to look closed.

Midtown is the independent side of the evening: breweries, cocktail bars and restaurants along about a mile of South Virginia Street, plus The Holland Project, an all-ages non-profit music venue that puts on more shows than anywhere else in the city.

We do not list individual bars here, and that is deliberate. Bars turn over faster than anything else a guide covers, and a list that was right last year is worse than no list. Go to the strip and look — that is how it is meant to be used.

Getting there Do not drive here to drink, and do not expect to park easily on a weekend evening. From downtown it is a short rideshare; the walk down Virginia Street is flat and direct if you would rather.

The casino floors are the reason downtown has a 24-hour rhythm at all: they do not close, their bars do not close, and neither does the food inside them. That is genuinely useful at two in the morning and it is worth knowing whether you gamble or not.

The properties away from downtown — the Peppermill and Atlantis south, the Grand Sierra east, the Nugget in Sparks — run the same hours but are self-contained. You drive there, spend the evening on one property and drive back. That is a different kind of night out from walking between three of them.

The honest answer is the casinos. Reno’s independent restaurants keep normal hours, and Midtown’s kitchens close earlier than its bars do; the round-the-clock food in this city is on the casino floors, which is one of the few things the old Reno still does better than the new one.

We do not publish a late-night restaurant list, because opening hours are the fastest-moving fact in any guide and a wrong one strands somebody outside a locked door at midnight. Check the property or the restaurant directly for tonight.