Ask a Palms Place resident what happened to the restaurant on the building's own pool deck, and you'll often get a pause before an answer. It closed sometime last fall. Whether anything moved in afterward tends to draw a shrug, because for most of a year, nothing did.
That's the smaller half of the story. The bigger half sits one floor below the SkyTube walkway, in the main resort next door, where a James Beard chef's barbecue restaurant spent the past year turning into 224 slot machines.
Both changes happened inside twelve months. Neither was random. Together they say something about where the property is actually putting its money right now, and it isn't into another marquee kitchen.
The Sixth Floor Went First
Palms Place has its own pool deck on the sixth floor, and for a few years that deck had a real restaurant attached to it: Laguna Pool House & Kitchen, a glass-walled space run by chef Luke Palladino, along with an adjoining lobby bar called Rojo Lounge. Both closed after service on October 12, 2025.
That space has a longer memory than one operator. Before Palladino took it over in 2023, the same pool-facing room had belonged to the late chef Kerry Simon. So the physical location has now cycled through at least two distinct restaurant concepts in a short run, even though the pool, the cabanas, and the tower around it haven't moved an inch. The room turns over. The building doesn't.
As of now, no replacement has been announced for that sixth-floor space. Residents still have the pool, the spa, and the fitness center that come with owning at Palms Place, just not a sit-down kitchen of their own a few floors down.
Two Flagship Chefs, Sixteen Days Apart
The same weekend that Palms confirmed the Palms Place closures, it also confirmed two more, both inside the main resort. Mabel's Bar & Q, chef Michael Symon's barbecue concept, served its final meal on September 12, 2025. Fifteen days later, on September 27, Vetri Cucina, chef Marc Vetri's Italian restaurant on the 56th floor of the Ivory Tower, closed as well.
Both chefs carry James Beard Awards. Both restaurants had reopened under the property's new ownership in 2022, Mabel's when the resort itself reopened that April, Vetri Cucina that November. And both exits, along with the Palms Place closures, were announced in the same statement, not spread across a year of separate news cycles. Four food and beverage venues, one announcement window. That's not the pace of a property quietly trimming its menu. That's a property clearing the deck on purpose.
Where The Mabel's Space Actually Went
Here's where the story gets specific. Nearly a year after that announcement, the old Mabel's footprint reopened in late August 2026, and it isn't a restaurant. It's an enclosed, smoke-free slot room spanning 7,300 square feet and housing 224 slot games, replacing the space Mabel's used to occupy just off the casino floor. Palms held a public grand-opening celebration for the room on September 1, 2026, complete with a celebrity charity slot challenge.
That makes it the second-largest smoke-free gaming space in Las Vegas, trailing only Park MGM, which is fully nonsmoking. Palms General Manager Kevin Glass has said the move was driven by a need for more gaming space, not a dining strategy.
The part worth understanding is why Palms could move this fast when bigger operators haven't. In 2025, shareholders at several publicly traded casino companies voted on proposals to even study the cost of going smoke-free, and the proposals drew little support. Wynn Resorts, Boyd Gaming, and Caesars Entertainment each tried, unsuccessfully, to keep those proposals off their own proxy ballots, a sign of how nervous public operators are about losing smoking gamblers. Palms doesn't answer to that kind of shareholder vote. It's owned outright by the San Manuel Gaming and Hospitality Authority, an arm of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, which means a decision like converting a shuttered restaurant into a nonsmoking gaming room doesn't need to clear a public board first. A 2022 industry report from Las Vegas-based C3 Gaming had already found that smoke-free policies no longer cause a dramatic drop in gaming revenue, and Palms' ownership structure let it act on that finding faster than its Strip-adjacent competitors have.
The Kitchen The Property Is Betting On Instead
Nothing that has opened at Palms since those closures looks like another headline restaurant. Chronic Tacos, a casual Mexican chain out of California, landed in the food court. The bigger investment has gone into A.Y.C.E. Buffet, which built out a full 2026 calendar of rotating theme nights rather than adding a new sit-down concept:
- Italian Night, August 29
- Hawaiian Night, September 12
- Filipino Night, October 10, timed deliberately to coincide with the annual Las Vegas Pinoy Festival
That's a buffet doing the work a second chef restaurant used to do, drawing repeat visits through variety instead of a single fixed menu. Combined with the new slot room, the pattern reads clearly: casual dining and gaming square footage are where the property is expanding. Standalone chef partnerships, at least for now, are not.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
For a Palms Place resident, the practical shift is a shorter dining list than a year ago. Scotch 80 Prime, Tim Ho Wan, Send Noodles, and Serrano Vista Cafe are all still standing on property, along with A.Y.C.E. Buffet's expanded theme-night lineup. But the fine-dining count on site has dropped by two since last September, and the sixth-floor restaurant inside your own tower is currently just a pool deck.
The gaming floor where Mabel's used to sit is worth knowing about too, especially if you or your guests prefer a room without cigarette smoke drifting into nearby hallways and elevators. Glass has said he isn't sure yet whether the smoke-free area will expand further if it proves popular, which means this may not be the last square footage the property converts.
None of this changes what the building itself offers: the SkyTube connection to the main resort, the pool and spa on your own sixth floor, the Strip and mountain views from the tower. It does change what's actually operating around you day to day, and that's worth knowing before you plan where dinner happens this month.
If you're weighing a purchase or sale at Palms Place, or trying to figure out how a building's amenity turnover affects long-term value in a Las Vegas high-rise, Brady Luxury Homes tracks these changes as part of knowing the property, not just the price. Work With Us.
