I Traveled 800 Miles To Eat Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza At Criss Angel’s Breakfast, Lunch, And Pizza

When I was a very depressed British teenager, I had an unhealthy fascination with America. I found a way to love its contradictions, to explain away the obvious sins not by excusing them directly but by focusing on America’s enormous size, its capacity to hold infinite different types of people, and its proliferation of true weirdos. From my cramped and cold British bedroom, I browsed the website Roadside America and dreamed about driving across the country, before I could drive at all, to see things like the World’s Largest Chair, conveniently forgetting that most of what I saw along the way would be one-intersection towns with only chain restaurants and dialysis centers. To buy into that stuff is to value something that is odd and entirely itself above something that is good or otherwise defensible. Sure, this Museum of Long CVS Receipts sucks, but at least it sucks on its own terms; it’s not trying to be anything else, and it’s something that only this one guy who really loves receipts could create. You need this muscle, even if it’s buried deep down under crusted layers of realization about how the country actually sucks, to enjoy a visit to a place like Criss Angel’s Breakfast Lunch and Pizza in Overton, Nevada. 

Cablp, which is how the name is stylized (pronounced ca-blip), does indeed belong to magician Criss Angel, the Mindfreak himself. He founded the restaurant in July 2021, buying a local place called Sugar’s Home Plate and renovating it in a style befitting a freak of the mind. He told Nevada Public Radio in 2024 that he originally intended the restaurant to be just “one component to an escape camp for children with childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases,” a cause that lies close to his heart, as his son Johnny Christopher has battled childhood leukemia (now in remission, thankfully). The camp part seems not to have made much progress; Angel said in the same interview that he was still “waiting years and years later for the county and Bureau of Land Management.” Perhaps it was a bad idea to open the restaurant before the escape camp could be built, but that’s not my business.

Cablp’s existence raises a lot of questions: Why is it in Overton and not at, for example, Planet Hollywood on the Las Vegas strip where Angel freaks minds every night? (Actually, that one is easy: Angel “fell in love with” Moapa Valley while taking his kids dirtbiking there.) Why does it serve breakfast, lunch, AND pizza, and why is it named for all three? Why would a magician need a restaurant?