New Orleans celebrity chef Alon Shaya to open new restaurant in Las Vegas
$5,000 Welcome Bonus
NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - Celebrity chef Alon Shaya on Tuesday (Oct. 18) announced plans to open his company’s next restaurant in Las Vegas, in partnership with the Wynn Las Vegas luxury hotel and resort.
“Las Vegas has always been a special and nostalgic place for me,” Shaya wrote in a Facebook post. “It’s where my culinary career first took off and it opened my eyes to the endless possibilities that exist in our industry. ... We couldn’t envision better partners for this project and look forward to sharing more in the months to come.”
Shaya, 43, did not reveal the name of the new restaurant, but said it would open in late 2023 and feature a menu drawing from “modern Mediterranean with Middle East influences.”
Shaya won the James Beard Award as the South’s Best Chef in 2015, for his work at Domenica, Pizza Domenica and a new restaurant that bore his name.
That Magazine Street eatery -- Shaya -- opened in 2015 and won the James Beard Award for the country’s Best New Restaurant in May 2016.
But the chef lost a bitter court battle when he split from partner John Besh in 2017 and sought to take his name from the restaurant as he left. The Shaya restaurant continues to operate under the name, but without involvement from its founding chef.
After that messy divorce, Shaya in 2017 launched his own company -- Pomegranate Hospitality -- with wife Emily. Under that umbrella, Shaya has launched the Uptown restaurant Saba at the corner of Magazine Street and Nashville Avenue, its sister restaurant Safta in Denver, and Miss River and the Chandelier Bar at the Four Seasons New Orleans.
The new Las Vegas restaurant will take over the space of the former Intrigue, a now-shuttered 14,000-square-foot nightclub with an outdoor space leading to a cascading, 90-foot waterfall.
After graduating from culinary school in 1998, the Israeli-born Shaya got his start in Las Vegas, interning at Napa at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, one of the first French dining rooms in a Vegas casino.
See a spelling or grammar error in our story? to report it. Please include the headline.
