Peeking Inside Tom Colicchio's Heritage Steak

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• Future Mirage lobby entrance to Tom Colicchio's Heritage Steak.
• Future lounge and bar entrance to Tom Colicchio's Heritage Steak.

Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio's Heritage Steak at the Mirage will feature a separate lounge, walls created with split wood logs, a private room in a glass wine vault and art from an old friend.

Interior details were first reported by VegasTripping and confirm new specifics revealed to Eater Vegas of Colicchio's steakhouse replacement for the former Kokomo's seafood and steak restaurant.

The 8,163-square-foot space will receive a $1 million makeover. The restaurant effectively becomes two visually separate, but physically connected sections. A main dining room with the primary entrance in the hotel lobby is unchanged from Kokomo's days and a spacious lounge area with a 20 stool bar, accessible from the casino floor. A digital menu board will entice the gamblers. From the casino angle, visitors can peek over a five-foot, planked walnut fence to spy the lounge. The main dining area will largely be be hidden behind the existing and unchanged atrium foliage.

Walnut is the key color palette, adding bronzes, coppers and blackened steel. Vases, planters and accents are all weathered in texture. But walnut is everywhere, in the furniture, flooring and decorative trellises that hide the lighting.

A 30 by 16 foot private dining room is being created inside a glass-walled wine vault, the walls filled with backlit reclining wine bottles. Walls are an important part of the look. One is furnished with padded leather. The bar back and the wall surrounding the exhibition kitchen consists of irregular stacks of mixed quarter split logs in maple and mesquite.

On other surfaces, art will be mounted, including work by Colicchio friend, artist Stephen Hannock, who has created more than a dozen pieces of work for Colicchio's restaurant empire since his first installation at the Gramercy Tavern in 1991.

The dominant image, other than the 100-foot-high atrium ceilings, will be a 30-foot-wide exhibition kitchen, dividing the main dining room and a very substantial standard kitchen. The Heritage Steak emphasis is meats cooked on an open flame using wood-burning ovens or charcoal grills. A robata grill, wood show broiler and churrasco rotisserie are being considered for the kitchen.

Tables and banquettes will be custom made, the long seating using tailored leather with black steel and walnut accents. Single chairs feature clean lines and walnut shades. Two large, circular tables for groups are visual stand-outs. Although the sentiment is a woodsy steakhouse, a modern urban addition is a large barista station finished in ceramic tile.

While rumors persist the adjacent Japonais could become chef Masaharu Morimoto's first Las Vegas restaurant, work is underway to create a screen between Heritage Steak and its neighbor that complements the existing Japonais design.

Kokomo's structural remnants have been removed and construction has begun. The former Kokomo's Bar, at the restaurant's entrance and open to the hotel lobby, was recently renamed the Lobby Bar and is not part of the current overhaul. Heritage Steak aims to open this summer.
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