AUTHOR BIO: Mei Chen has worked for nearly a dozen start-ups in as many years, taking her to several West Coast cities. While she’s sure her current day job is permanent, she also has her eye on Carmel.
Kwame Onwuachi has opened an Afro-Caribbean steakhouse on the Las Vegas Strip, which already separates Maroon from the Strip’s vast supply of places selling a rib-eye. The larger distinction is overdue: Onwuachi is the first Black chef to lead his own restaurant on the Strip.
Maroon occupies the former Bazaar Meat space at Sahara Las Vegas, where a custom-built jerk pit now burns at the center of the dining room. The restaurant takes its name from the Maroons, Africans who escaped slavery and established communities in Jamaica’s mountains. Jerk cooking emerged there, with meat prepared over fires designed to keep the smoke from revealing their location.
Onwuachi has translated that history into a steakhouse built for Las Vegas. The menu includes patties filled with oxtail duxelles and topped with caviar, jerk clam flatbread, curried goat agnolotti, oxtail Wellington, and steaks aged with Jamaican rum. A section inspired by Jamaica’s Hellshire Beach offers banana leaf snapper, curry shrimp, and wood-fired lobster. Even the mashed potatoes arrive beneath crawfish étouffée.
The opening gives the Strip something it conspicuously lacked. Onwuachi told KTNV that he hopes the restaurant persuades every resort to say, “We need some culture. We need to do something different so we all can feel seen and can feel heard.”
Maroon continues a major expansion for the Bronx-raised chef, whose cooking pulls from his family’s Nigerian, Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Louisiana roots. Tatiana, his restaurant at Lincoln Center in New York City, has become one of the country’s most difficult reservations. Dōgon, inside Salamander Washington DC, draws from the story of Black mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker. On Miami Beach, Onwuachi created the food menu for the South Beach outpost of rum bar Las’ Lap, serving dishes including jerk mushroom yakitori, wagyu griot, and an oxtail Cubano.
The chef, author, former Top Chef contestant, and 2019 James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year now lives in Las Vegas. Maroon is his first restaurant in the city and his first steakhouse. In a town where restaurants tend to arrive promising something unprecedented, Onwuachi has opened one that actually is.
