Question of the Day - 16 April 2018

Nope.

“We don't have any submittals for new plans for there,” says Clark County Public Information Officer Dan Kulin.

The café is still under license to Tao Group’s Marc Packer, who hasn't done anything with the property since closing it on Oct. 30, 2016. Mind you, the restaurant had a 19-year run, pretty impressive in a city as transitory as Las Vegas. The sticking point is that the underlying real estate, along with a swath of land down to Showcase Mall, is owned by Chicago-based interests. 

“This portion of the Strip has achieved some infamy for the stretch of retail adjacent to the cafe, frequently derided by Clark County Commissioners for its perennial shabbiness,” reported Eater Vegas’ Bradley Martin.

There were once grand plans for the site. Billionaire Robert F.X. Sillerman, who’d made a killing by flipping radio stations, scraped together a string of Strip-facing real estate parcels with the idea of building a high-end Elvis Presley-themed megaresort. He paid the Presley estate $100 million for rights to Elvis’ name and likeness. It was to adorn a 93,000-square-foot casino, a similarly sized retail mall, a 1,605-seat showroom, 14 restaurants, and 2,900 hotel rooms and 147 condo units. 

Sillerman even bought up all the assets of the now-defunct Elvis-A-Rama museum. He finally had everything — except money.

The price tag and size of the planned megaresort grew to $3.1 billion and 3,047 hotel rooms. But in November 2008, it was announced that the project was “unlikely” — as the Las Vegas market was crashing. Sillerman’s company was forced to sell off the property for a $220 million pittance.

The area is now owned by Spectrum Group Management, but managed by Chicago-based Urban Retail Properties. The latter seems quite content with its 83-store retail mall, which anchors the block, home to Hawaiian Village (a.k.a. The Hawaiian Marketplace).

Not only would the long and relatively shallow strip of land constrain the kind of resort that could be built, much as the Cosmopolitan's “stacked” layout was a function of necessity, but financing could be similarly straiten-jacketed. Both the abandoned Alon and the bankrupt Lucky Dragon resorts encountered difficulty obtaining bank financing and the same problem appears to be dogging the notoriously slow-moving Resorts World Las Vegas megaresort.

In mid-2015, Spectrum went fishing for investors in a “Project Jackpot,” which was the first and last heard of that particular casino resort. Nor does Spectrum seem to have kept its 2011 promise to “to clean [the area] up and explore every option to upgrade it.” Seven years later, we’re still waiting.