“Don’t say anything,” chef Kwame Onwuachi told the Observer on Saturday night as we started complimenting him on the delicious food we were eating. Maroonhis new Caribbean steakhouse at Sahara Las Vegas. “You’re going to make me cry all night long.”
Onwuachi was surprised by the response he received from guests at his restaurant on Saturday, and was still riding the adrenaline of Friday night’s grand opening at Maroon.
Friday’s blowout bash brought more than 1,000 guests to Alex Meruelo’s Sahara casino lounge and was highlighted by both a performance by Busta Rhymes and a drone show about Onwuachi’s rise in the food world. One night later, Maroon’s kitchen was noticeably closer, although the staff must have been tired after the previous night. And Onwuachi was encouraging his guests to continue the event.
“Welcome home,” she said. “I hope you have started dancing on the table.”
Everything created and accomplished by the James Beard award-winning Onwuachi, incl Tatiana (named New York City’s No.1 restaurant by New York Times in 2023 and 2024) and The Dogon (the Washington, DC area that did the opening The 50 best restaurants in North America list), led to Maroon.
Onwuachi did not come to Las Vegas to play. He lives here now and is busy with his efforts to bring Afro-Caribbean flavors to the masses while creating something distinctly new.
“In my mind, I was like, I’m going to get Vegas what it needs, not what it wants,” Onwuachi said Thursday as he prepared for the weekend festivities. “What Tatiana wants. What she wants is something I did. But Vegas needs something Vegas. You have to be in Vegas to come to this restaurant.”
This is a beef place where the beef is aged. It’s a restaurant where jerk chicken and oxtail fried rice outsold steaks most nights. It’s something new where both the margaritas of lime pie and mixologist Lu Lopez are powered by soursop.
Onwuachi wants okra (which he uses in dishes including a green mango salad with a delicious tomato paste) and oxtail to be treated like luxury ingredients. He fills the patties with oxtail, smoked mozzarella, shiitake mushroom and black truffle, then tops the patties with ossetra caviar and more black truffle.
“It’s too bad, isn’t it?” Onwuachi said. “I definitely wanted something that screams Vegas. So I have it, and I have an oxtail Wellington.”
Needless to say, Maroon is the only place in Las Vegas where you can get filet mignon wrapped in oxtail and jerk beef bacon. And the only Vegas Steakhouse with a jerk pit. Onwuachi isn’t just changing the gameāhe’s creating an entirely different playing field in Las Vegas.
“The jerk pit is one of the most dangerous parts of the restaurant,” Onwuachi said. “It adds vibration. You can hear the sound of the screams and the flames. You can smell the food.”
The jerk pit, where Maroon has a custom Grillworks set and smokes chickens over pimento wood and cooks over oak and apple wood, turns out dishes like smoky Colorado lamb chops and Iowa pork tomahawks. Maroon’s impressive array of sauces, from herbaceous chimichurri to spicy chili sauce to tangy barbecue mixes, is a choose-your-own-dipping option that enhances every bite of protein.
For surf and turf, Maroon has great options like head-on curry shrimp, wood-fired lobster and grilled branzino. Banana leaf snapper comes with curried okra and squash.
“I think this is a restaurant like no other on the Strip,” said Onwuachi. “I wanted to create something very different for Vegas.”
Onwuachi knows the spotlight is on him now. He was embracing it on Friday night, dancing to Busta Rhymes before taking the stage to greet and thank his guests.
At Friday’s party, Macy Gray and Flavor Flav mingled in a crowd that included Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis and hospitality executives like Plaza CEO Jonathan Jossel and Carversteak founder Sean Christie. While heading to the Sahara Theater bar during a Busta Rhymes performance, we ran into DJ Spider, Jonathan Shecter of Playback Prodigy and Los Angeles nightlife scene makers Mark and Jonnie Houston. As we passed by Maroon, we spotted Michelin-starred chef Phillip Frankland Lee chatting with poker pro Scott Seiver. Maya-Camille Broussard, the Chicago baker/Netflix star behind Justice of the Pies, stopped by and reminded us that chefs from all over the country will be appearing at Onwuachi’s opening.
Friday night was good and fun, but now it’s time for Onwuachi to focus on the important work we do, every single night, in the city where he lives.
Onwuachi wants Maroon to be a restaurant for everyone, a place that attracts locals and tourists of all kinds. But, of course, he is a Black chef who wants to cater to the growing number of Black tourists and retirees in Las Vegas.
“There are no restaurants on that Strip that cater to people,” Onwuachi said. “I think it’s important. I think it’s necessary. I hope, I wish that this can be a beacon of light and that other restaurants can open the way for us with this kind of food. This has always been my job. I want to shine a light on why this food is important.”
Maroon at Sahara Las Vegas, elise 2535 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV, It is open from 5:00 to 10:00 Sunday-Thursday and from 5:00 to 11:00 Friday-Saturday.
