LAS VEGAS — The steaks at Maroon, Kwame Onwuachi’s new Caribbean restaurant at the Sahara Las Vegas, arrive without the ceremony one might expect at a celebrity-chef restaurant, or from a steakhouse in a city buttressed by excess and luxury. There is no silver platter. The meat does not glide across the room beneath a gleaming dome. Just a slab of meat from Rosewood Ranch in Texas, sliced into thick, leaning ribbons fanned out like a winning hand of cards.
Sheathed in a mahogany crust, my hunk of rib eye is flushed pink. There’s an initial burst of salt and crunch, then a rolling thunder of jerk spice, spiked with the vibrant, herbal freshness of Caribbean green seasoning and a whisper of cinnamon and nutmeg. Each forkful moves in waves of char, smoke and caramel-vanilla sweetness.
That roller coaster of flavor and tenderness comes from dry-aging the steaks for 30 to 40 days in rum, and a marinade that involves both jerk spice and Onwuachi’s mother’s Creole green seasoning, a paste of herbs, aromatics and peppers. It is the best steak I have eaten in recent memory, both in Las Vegas and far beyond. I don’t make that claim lightly, drawing from memories at nearly every major steakhouse in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and the vicinity of the Strip.
Las Vegas has more steakhouses per capita than any other place in the world, with hundreds along the Strip, and a single hotel (the Venetian) that boasts seven on its property alone. Though the American steakhouse originated in New York City, Las Vegas helped propagate and elevate the genre into the ultimate form of aspirational dining. It became a place of celebration, a way to lure people to the poker tables and a destination for gourmands from all over the world.
Enter Maroon. Its existence marks a turning point in the Las Vegas dining scene, and a milestone for Caribbean food in America. It’s the first dedicated Caribbean restaurant on the Strip and the first Las Vegas steakhouse to attempt a fresh, singular perspective: infuse the classic American genre with the flavors of the Afro-Caribbean canon.
“The name Maroon is for the runaway slaves that can’t be caught,” says Onwuachi, referencing the formerly enslaved and their descendants in Jamaica, and across the Caribbean, who built communities in the island’s Blue Mountains. The restaurant honors the origins of jerk cuisine, and the flavors of shared survival. The maroons adopted the pit-smoking technique of the Indigenous Taíno people and combined it with their own African seasonings. “In hiding, when preparing for battle, they would get wild animals and rub them with ingredients like allspice, thyme, chiles, [pimento] leaves and dig these pits in the ground, add some coals and cover it with banana leaves. That’s how jerk cuisine was created.”
Those distinct flavors help set Maroon’s steaks apart from the hundreds of steakhouses crowding the city, with four core cuts of meat: New York strip, rib eye, porterhouse and filet. The 24-ounce rib eye emerged the favorite, its generous marbling gripping the rum’s sweetness and the heady spices. Order one for the table, then build the meal around Onwuachi’s handful of sides. Crunchy plantains are addictive as French fries, coated in lime zest and a sweet and briny shrimp-shell sofrito spice. The creamed collards are a rendition of a Jamaican rundown, with greens braised in coconut milk reduced into a thick, almost custardy sauce. The Robuchon-style potatoes are smothered in crawfish étouffée.
Onwuachi, whose rise to fame began as a contestant on Bravo’s “Top Chef” competition show, is one of the most influential chefs in the country. His cooking tells the story of his Nigerian, Jamaican, Trinidadian and Creole roots, weaving culture and history into dishes like flaky patties filled with curry goat, and peekytoe crab and egusi soup dumplings at his New York City restaurant Tatiana. He earned a James Beard Rising Star Chef award and was named a Food & Wine Best New Chef. His memoir, “Notes From a Young Black Chef,” is being adapted into a film.
Last year, he was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, and was chosen by Anna Wintour to create the menu for the 2025 Met Gala. It’s a level of fame that comes with a sizable platform. With restaurants in New York, D.C. and Miami, Onwuachi wasn’t seeking space in Las Vegas, but when the opportunity presented itself, he took it as a chance to spread Afro-Caribbean cuisine and culture to one of the world’s busiest tourist destinations.
Establishing a sense of place can be especially challenging inside a casino, where it could be 3 a.m. or 3 p.m., in the desert or Atlantic City. But Maroon is transportive. From a small casino on the northern end of the Strip, you traverse the depths of its slot canyons. You walk through a hall of smooth, curved walls into a dimly lit cocoon with tables spaced far enough apart to afford a sense of privacy. A strip of colored lighting runs along the top of the oxblood leather booths, like you’re sitting amid the dynamic cabin lights of a luxury car. Drawers built into the table hold extra silverware — a thoughtful way to keep your party self-sufficient and in the moment.
Onwuachi reimagines nearly every steakhouse staple, recalibrating flavors and presentation to register as equally groundbreaking and familiar. Instead of crabcakes, he plucks the meat from gargantuan red king crab legs and tosses the lumps in a rich aioli built on the savory foundations of étouffée. Then he shoves the meat back into the legs and covers them in crunchy panko, inviting diners to excavate the shells.
His pillow-soft coco bread is baked into shiny Parker rolls, served alongside a malted sorghum butter that tastes of toasted grain and dark honey.
Diners can splurge on a Vegas-appropriate $210 seafood tower stacked with ice-cold tiers of oysters, prawns, crab and caviar. Or travel back in time to Onwuachi’s family home in Trinidad and Tobago, where his grandfather made buljol saltfish salad. The Maroon toro buljol is a polished interpretation, with translucent slices of toro and hamachi in a pool of Sungold tomato vinaigrette. Scattered around the bowl are wedges of avocado, sweet Sungolds, tender medallions of octopus and rings of pickled onion. You take a saltine, burnished and dusted with a house spice mix, and attempt to scoop up as much of the fish and garnish as possible on the tiny square.
Onwuachi’s tribute to the origins of jerk chicken unfolds over five days. The bird is brined, steeped in two separate marinades, rubbed with jerk paste, then smoked low and slow over pimento wood imported from Jamaica. The smoke seeps deep into the meat and lingers on the skin, with a crackly brown surface punchy with cinnamon, allspice, ginger and thyme. It is impossible not to lick your fingers.
The $120 whole chicken sparked plenty of online chatter, though the $65 half-chicken is substantial enough for a party of four. If you have the means, I hope an order finds its way to your table.
By the time dessert arrives, you’ll likely be half sunken into your booth, lulled into a pleasant stupor by the sheer volume of red meat, and maybe a passion fruit-infused Negroni or two. If you can manage it, save room for the soursop Key lime pie, Onwuachi’s take on the quintessential steakhouse dessert, softening the lime’s signature sharpness into something lusher and more tropical, with hints of white peach and mango. The pairing of soursop and lime felt inevitable.
By the time I’m back under the bright lights of the casino, any notion of a traditional American steakhouse and its classics feel like distant memories.
“I want to pique diners’ curiosity about Caribbean food,” says Onwuachi. “I shouldn’t be the only person out there doing this.”
With a little Vegas luck, he won’t be for long.
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