The Curtains Draw on The Corner Store Las Vegas

At The Corner Store inside The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, arriving for dinner feels like the opening scene of a Hollywood golden-age film. There’s a dash of suspense, a pinch of intrigue, and a generous pour of icy-cold drama, all cast in an amber glow that makes the main character—you—look like a million bucks.

Located on the resort’s third floor, The Corner Store is adjacent to restaurants such as Zuma, STK, Scarpetta, and fellow New York City import Beauty & Essex. The facade is just that: a Manhattan neighborhood storefront with green fluted panels, burl wood pilasters, Art Deco-inspired sconces, and curtains concealing the windows, giving little indication of the evening unfolding within. The front doors open into a velvet-lined vestibule, with the dining room still tantalizingly out of sight. Beyond it waits a succession of rooms dressed for a glamorous evening, each revealed with another turn. The walk to the table deserves its own soundtrack.

You are not imagining this storyline, nor is it happening by happy accident. It’s all carefully choreographed by three of the project’s masterminds: MGM’s Ari Kastrati, Rockwell Group’s Shawn Sullivan, and restaurateur Eugene Remm. “We pull that team together as a film director would. They know who the cinematographer will be. They know who the score producer will be. We do the same thing,” says Kastrati, MGM Resorts International’s chief content, hospitality, and development officer, who has brought an A-list of international restaurant brands to Las Vegas.

Opened November 9, the restaurant from Tilman Fertitta, Remm, and Catch Hospitality Group marks The Corner Store’s first expansion beyond SoHo. It has earned a reputation as one of the city’s most sought-after and hardest reservations, and it’s packed to the walls with celebrities and socialites. Rockwell Group designed both locations, but the Las Vegas edition occupies 5,612 square feet of guest-facing space, compared with New York’s comparably cozy 1,850. Sullivan divided the former Blue Ribbon restaurant’s largely open interior into a sequence of smaller, interconnected rooms. Each has its own proportions, seating, and sightlines, allowing the restaurant to grow without losing its intimate scale—and giving guests more corners to disappear into.

There’s a long-held Las Vegas superstition that a restaurant needs to show its hand to succeed: Guests walking past should be able to see the room, size up the crowd, and picture themselves at a table before committing to dinner. The Corner Store throws that old wives’ tale out the window—and draws the curtains. Here, the promise of what’s behind the doors is part of the attraction.

“I really love the mystery of our storefront. You want to learn more,” says Sullivan, a partner at Rockwell Group. Consider the entry vestibule’s corduroy velvet walls, tasseled drapery, and red marble-topped host stand—and its black-and-white photograph of Debbie Harry sticking her tongue out at Studio 54—your irreverent invitation into Vegas’ latest reinvention, far from the corner of West Broadway and Houston Street. “Then, you find your way into the restaurant, discovering the bar, martini bar, main dining room,” Sullivan says.

Let the flooring lead the way: The vestibule’s patterned stone, framed by two-tone wood borders inlaid with brass, gives way to black-and-gold checkerboard marble in the bar and Martini Room.
The main bar has that wonderful old train-car feel. A gold-yellow marble counter curves above green fluting, with rounded brass rails tracing its edge and a custom pendant running overhead. Ceiling moldings frame acoustic panels that soften the room’s sound. Across from the bar, two leather-upholstered banquette niches sit a step above the floor, like private train compartments with a view of the action. Above them, antique mirrors bordered in green tile run along the ceiling trim, a detail carried over from the New York original.

This isn’t just a bar; it’s a dining space in its own right, offering another scene. Sitting at the counter means settling in for dinner. The stools have upholstered backs and leather seats, satisfying one of Kastrati’s firmest requirements: “The number one rule is the chair has to be comfortable, and it has to have a back. And if it isn’t comfortable, you can’t eat here.”

And let there be light. “Lighting has to be theatrical. If it doesn’t have the drama, then it’s just lighting a surface. We’re not lighting surfaces. We’re lighting a universe, and we’re lighting people,” Kastrati says.
To get it right, Rockwell brought the lighting into the design process quite literally. “When we have our meetings, and we’re looking at materials, we actually bring in the lamps, and we dim down the lighting in the meeting room, and we really look at them with the actual lighting on,” Sullivan says.

Throughout the evening, timed settings take the rooms from early evening to dinner to late night, with the possibility of a fourth adjustment if the occasion calls for it. The transitions are almost imperceptible. Everyone keeps looking better, and the martinis can’t take all the credit.

In Vegas, The Corner Store’s signature drink gets its own residency in the Martini Room. Beyond an arch edged in beveled mirror and amber drapery, a green onyx counter framed by illuminated textured glass sets the stage for a drink with rather elaborate accessories. Catch Hospitality Group beverage director Lucas Robinson and The Cosmopolitan’s head of mixology, Gedeon Tsegaye, oversee a lineup that includes Tomato, Chamomile Vesper, and Sour Cream & Onion martinis. Frosted glasses arrive on silver trays beside little carafes nestled in crushed ice. Oli’s Dirty Martini comes with mascarpone caviar olives. Oli, short for Olive, is the restaurant’s martini man mascot, a jaunty waiter carrying a cocktail. In Las Vegas, he has appeared as an ice luge and a topiary, with miniature versions making their way onto the picks holding together the French dip. This guy gets around.

In the main dining room, heads turn as new guests enter, but there are also plenty of places to tuck yourself away. The train-car references continue through warm wood tones and textures, curved booths, and antique mirrors framed by arches that catch the room’s amber glow. Three Hollywood banquettes along the back wall wear the same rhythmic velvet stripes as their SoHo counterparts, each lit by a vintage-inspired pendant. Overhead, green velvet ceiling panels sit within detailed moldings, surrounded by burl wood veneer and soft cove lighting.

“We really spend a lot of time planning how intimate each area is. Whether you’re in the main dining room, which is one of the bigger spaces, you still only feel half of the room at a time because there’s a big banquette with a little glass screen that separates you from the other side of the room,” Sullivan says.
Once you’re settled into your corner, the menu takes the spotlight. Chef Michael Vignola and Las Vegas executive chef Daniel Bernardo give American favorites the same dressed-for-dinner treatment as the room. Five-cheese pizza rolls arrive under a generous snowfall of grated cheese, with whipped ranch on the side, on green-rimmed plates bearing the restaurant’s name. “Expect the menu to be your greatest hits of Americana. It’s what an experience would have been in a glamorous basement in the 1970s in New York, where Basquiat and Warhol would have had dinner, cuddled up into a corner,” Kastrati says. The Wagyu French dip brings 72-hour slow-roasted Westholme Australian ribeye to crusty bread, cut into three portions and served with a bowl of jus. Each piece is held together by a miniature Oli pick.

In the private dining room, polished burl wood catches every glint and framed black-and-white photographs featuring Muhammad Ali, the Beastie Boys, and Robert De Niro flank a long table patterned with intersecting diamonds. Illuminated cabinets display liquor bottles. There’s even a secret separate entrance for high-profile guests.

The notion of Basquiat also appears in a photography collection drawn from New York’s art, celebrity, and cultural worlds. Rockwell worked with an art consultant to source images that would give the rooms a sense of history. “One of the things about these old neighborhood places is that they have artwork and materiality that just collects over the years,” Sullivan says.

For all its New York references, this production has been staged for a Las Vegas audience—one Kastrati knows arrives expecting dinner to deliver more than a meal. “If there’s one environment in the world where you could actually take a risk by blurring the lines between entertainment and dining, what better place than Las Vegas? The consumer comes already pre-wired with the expectation of being entertained when they come to Las Vegas,” he says. By the time the lights slip into their late-night setting, settle back into that comfy chair and pour the last of the martini only to find there’s another scene waiting to unfold.