White Castle is a privately owned fast-food chain synonymous with its signature sliders. Founded over a century ago by American business owners Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson, they revolutionized the American fast-food industry with an emphasis on cheap prices and fresh ingredients.
White Castle has yet to open a location in California as of Sept. 11, 2025. To make this review possible, I recruited freelance videographer Falco Zimmerman for a three-day, high-speed jaunt to Las Vegas — the closest location for a fresh White Castle slider.
We drove through the Mojave Desert for 12 hours and walked the Strip for five more. By the time we found the White Castle on South Las Vegas Boulevard, we were beat.
As we entered the establishment, we were greeted by a sprawling hall of buffalo themed slot machines on the right, and a newsstand-sized White Castle built straight into the wall on the left.
The layout of the store was as skinny as it could get. Bar seating at a half-wall cordoned us away from the slots den, and the restaurant got thinner as you approached the register.
Nine years after White Castle’s 1921 launch, Minnesotan medical student Bernard Flesche reportedly survived 90 days with only water and White Castle sliders, reporting no health problems by the end of the experiment. By 2014, Time magazine crowned the White Castle slider as “the most influential burger of all time.” The chain had a lot of weight to throw around, and I was eager to taste the hype of the century.
My videographer and I ordered 20 of the Original Sliders, two soda cups and two fries using a dirty tablet at the front. The employees didn’t turn or acknowledge us during the entire $42 transaction. We had to steal one of the cooks off of the burger assembly line just so we could grab cups.
The soda fountains were gruesome. One machine was completely busted. Masking tape covered its face and soda trickled from a missing nozzle into a puddle of bile on the floor. Its neighbor worked, but the soda dispensed four seconds longer than it was supposed to, filling my cup 150% and dousing my hands in sticky syrup.
We hustled back to claim plastic swivel seats in the restless dining hall. We didn’t want to be stuck at the bar where everyone stared at the rumbling backsides of slot machines, nor the window seats where the sun’s uninhabitable temperature slowly roasted you.
A nearby family of four had run late for Blue Man Group and left without cleaning up, so we shoved all their leftover garbage to one side of the table and unboxed our 20 individually packaged sliders.
The anticipation was almost over. I raised a slider to my mouth with playful hesitance. The small, delicate bun was like a pillow against my brutish fingers.
It had long been a dream of mine to try White Castle in ridiculous circumstances, far away from home, but I wasn’t able to ignore the mortal pain, spiritual failings and overwhelming saltiness I soon felt in my body.
I took a bite and rendered a soggy slice of beef and onions apart with concerning ease. I was desperate for it to make sense; to me it tasted the same as the frozen White Castle products they sell at the grocery store.
The burger’s whole surface was sweating. I forced it down and my mouth and eyes watered with the never-ending steam of sour, rehydrated onions. This was the least satisfying thing I had ever eaten.
My gag reflex worked overtime for every morsel that I washed down with Cherry Coke. Round after round, slider after slider, we knocked them back like shots. Every tiny burger carried more guilt than the last.
Neither I nor my videographer could finish our share. My limit was eight sliders, which hit my stomach like a nuke — I felt embalmed.
With a handful of unusable photos and videos filmed in a carbohydrate stupor, we stood up to leave the South Vegas purgatory restaurant feeling bloated and on the verge of something severe. A crisp “O” that the security guard had blown from her vape gently ushered us out of the doors.
I left my last two unpalatable sliders (along with a small portion of fries and Cherry Coke) atop a street-side garbage can somewhere on South Las Vegas Boulevard — an olive branch to the wicked city.
