Chef Kwame Onwuachi — the James Beard Award–winning chef behind New York’s Tatiana and Washington, D.C.’s Dōgon — made his Las Vegas debut with a new Caribbean steakhouse in the Sahara. At Maroon, which opened in late April, Onwuachi takes an Afro-Caribbean lens to the classic steakhouse, reimagining it with flavors and techniques from Jamaica and the broader Caribbean diaspora.
The restaurant’s name is a nod to the Jamaican Maroons, who escaped slavery and set up their own communities in the island’s mountains in the 17th and 18th centuries. For Onwuachi, that connection to history feels essential at all his restaurants. “It was super important for me to have that tieback,” he says. “Highlighting these people who created something out of survival and something that we take for granted or don’t really know the story of.” The aspect of storytelling is a common thread across Onwuachi’s other restaurants: Tatiana is named after his sister and explores his West African, Caribbean, and Creole heritage, while Dōgon takes inspiration from Benjamin Banneker, a Black astronomer and mathematician. For the interior, Onwuachi teamed up with design firm Modellus Novus, who he worked with for Tatiana and Dōgon.
For the chef, Maroon presents a lot of firsts: its opening marks his first steakhouse and first restaurant in Las Vegas. “I wanted to provide Vegas with something that it doesn’t have and do something with Afro-Caribbean cuisine, as well as a steakhouse in that light,” he says. “I thought I could kill two birds with one stone.”
Maroon’s menu opens with a series of dishes meant to be shared such as patties stuffed with mushroom and oxtail duxelles, then topped with caviar; coco bread served alongside sorghum butter; a puffy-crusted jerk clam flatbread; and oxtail Wellington with jerk beef bacon and black truffle. A raw and chilled bar offers the usual steakhouse suspects with distinct twists: Find crispy okra–dotted green mango salad alongside a piri piri chopped salad with gooseberry and avocado. A seafood tower arrives with pepper prawns, oysters, ackee and salted hamachi, and caviar, while toro bujol swaps the traditional saltfish for bluefin tuna belly.
The Hellshire Beach section of the menu, named after the beach in Jamaica, offers an array of seafood, including banana leaf snapper with curried okra and squash, curry shrimp with smoked carrot escabeche, and wood-fired lobster. Steak options span a 12-ounce New York strip, a 22-ounce porterhouse, a 16-ounce rib-eye, and an eight-ounce wagyu tenderloin, all sourced from Rosewood Ranch in Texas. A rack of lamb, jerk chicken, pork tomahawk, and barbecue Brussels emerge from the flames of a custom-built jerk pit that acts as a centerpiece in the dining room. “I wanted people to see the smoke and see the fire, see the wood,” Onwuachi says. “I think that’s so integral when you’re eating in the Caribbean. I wanted that to be very present so it could feel authentic.”
Maroon’s trim dessert menu includes chocolate cake with black cocoa buttercream and cacao sorbet, creme brulee with malted chocolate, soursop lime pie with graham cracker crust and Italian meringue, and a mango royale with mango sorbet and vanilla creme diplomat.
Luis “Lu” Lopez shaped Maroon’s cocktail menu, which includes drinks such as the Hurricane Negroni with passion fruit–infused Campari and a soursop margarita. The Kingston Colada, which pairs Wray & Nephew rum with sherry, pineapple, coconut, lime, and nutmeg, is an Onwuachi favorite, alongside the Blue Mountain Sour with Appleton Estate rum, allspice, lemon, and honey. Chris Gaither helms the wine menu, which focuses on bottles from vineyards operated by people of color, women, and those that use sustainable practices.
Maroon opens a decade after Onwuachi’s first restaurant, the Shaw Bijou, debuted in D.C. in fall 2016, before closing at the beginning of 2017. “I’ve been doing this for a while,” he says. “I think each iteration is a growth period in my life of just taking lessons from the past and applying it to the present and continuing to tell stories and giving a voice to the inaudible.” Onwuachi, who is 36, can finally look back to reflect on how his younger self would see him now. “He would be thrilled, so grateful that I’m still doing it, for one, but also I’m continuing to push myself and it’s not just doing the same thing, same cookie-cutter things,” he says.
With the jerk pit fired up and Maroon in the swing of service, Onwuachi says he looks forward to each night at the restaurant instead of searching for a milestone. “We’re able to put up really, really great food,” he says. “The response we’ve been getting from the city of just, ‘Thank you for being here,’ is something that I haven’t felt in a while, and I’m excited for service tonight.”
