Kwame Onwuachi now holds a ceremonial Key to the Las Vegas Strip. Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom presented the honor to the James Beard Award-winning chef on Thursday, Sept. 17, during a ceremony outside Maroon, Onwuachi’s Afro-Caribbean steakhouse at Sahara Las Vegas.
The recognition celebrates what Onwuachi has added to Southern Nevada’s dining scene since Maroon opened in April. The restaurant made history as the first Strip restaurant led by a Black chef, bringing a style of cooking rarely found at a major resort. Its menu draws on Onwuachi’s Nigerian, Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Louisiana roots, with dishes such as oxtail Wellington, curried goat agnolotti, and steaks aged with Jamaican rum.
The timing turned the evening into a double celebration. The ceremony coincided with the Las Vegas stop of Onwuachi’s nationwide tour for his new cookbook, All Hours: Crazy Good Food for Whatever, Whenever, which Knopf releases Sept. 22. Written with Joshua David Stein, the book gathers the dishes Onwuachi craves around the clock, from breakfast through late-night snacks.
Once the key changed hands, guests moved inside for a sold-out, multicourse dinner built around recipes from the book. The menu leaned into the Afro-Caribbean flavors and global influences that define Onwuachi’s cooking, and the chef worked his way through the dining room to greet guests, pose for photos, and share the stories behind each dish.
Maroon takes its name from the Maroons, Africans who escaped slavery and built free communities in Jamaica’s mountains, where jerk cooking took shape. A custom jerk pit anchors the dining room as a nod to that history.
A New York City native raised in the Bronx, Onwuachi found his love of food in his mother’s apartment, where she ran a catering business. He trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and earned the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef of the Year award in 2019. His restaurants also include Tatiana in New York City and Dōgon in Washington, D.C. All Hours follows his memoir, Notes from a Young Black Chef, and his first cookbook, My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef.
The tour continues with a live, late-night-style show at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in New York City on Sept. 22, the book’s release date.
Dining and Cooking