Chef Kwame Onwuachi — a James Beard Award winner, Top Chef champion, and the force behind New York’s acclaimed Tatiana — is heading to Las Vegas. His next project: a first-of-its-kind steakhouse on the Strip that draws from his Afro-Caribbean heritage while shaping the city’s next wave of chef-driven dining.
The Sahara announced that Onwuachi’s newest restaurant, Maroon, will open at the resort in late 2025. Unlike his acclaimed New York restaurant Tatiana — twice named the best in the city by The New York Times and his Dōgon restaurant in Washington, D.C., Maroon is a wholly new concept — a Caribbean steakhouse that embraces Jamaican cooking, including jerk cooking methods, with Las Vegas’s unique brand of showstopping steakhouses. Fittingly, Maroon will open in the space currently occupied by chef José Andrés’s Bazaar Meat — which is closing and reopening at the Venetian Resort this year.
Maroon takes its name from the Maroons of Jamaica — enslaved Africans who escaped bondage and created self-sufficient communities in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. In his book, My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef, Onwuachi writes, “There they lived a hardscrabble existence, eking out a life from subsistence farming and occasional raids on the British occupiers.” It was in that rugged terrain, he explains, that Jamaican pepper, Thai bird chili, wild thyme, and a breed of wild hog thrived. “Jerk was born, and it lives still two hundred years later,” he writes.
At Maroon, Onwuachi’s menu will feature live-fire cooking, jerk rubs, dry-aged cuts, scotch bonnet-infused sauces, grilled seafood, and sides that draw on West African, Jamaican, and Creole traditions, according to Travel and Leisure. It will echo the Afro-Caribbean influences seen at Tatiana — where curried goat patties and braised oxtails take center stage — and at Dōgon, his D.C. restaurant with dishes like curry-brushed branzino, charbroiled oysters, and grilled wagyu short rib with red stew jam.
The restaurant is a first for Las Vegas — a Black-owned Strip restaurant that puts diasporic flavors front and center, telling a story that’s as personal as it is universal. Its bold vision and Onwuachi’s star power add momentum to a growing wave of out-of-town talent bringing fresh ideas to the Strip — like Simon Kim’s Korean steakhouse, Cote, and Jeremy Ford’s tasting menu stunner, Stubborn Seed.
It’s no surprise that Onwuachi is leaning into big ideas with Maroon. He was named as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2025; he acted as the culinary lead of the 2025 Met Gala, where he curated a menu infused with Caribbean flavors; and he is one of the subjects of Netflix’s Chef’s Table seventh season. In 2023, the World’s 50 Best awarded Tatiana as the One to Watch. In 2019, the San Francisco Chronicle called Onwuachi “the most important chef in America,” the same year he won the James Beard Award for Emerging Chef.
Maroon marks a major moment for the Sahara, a resort on the quieter north end of the Strip. Its last headline-grabbing restaurant debut was Shawn McClain’s Balla in 2022. Now, with Onwuachi’s arrival — and newcomers like Stubborn Seed at Resorts World, and Mother Wolf and Kyu at the Fontainebleau — the north end is quickly becoming one of the Strip’s most exciting culinary frontiers.
