When Jason Rocheleau opened Amari Italian Kitchen and Wine Shop at UnCommons in the fall of 2023, he was making a bet that the 40-acre urban campus at the intersection of I-215 and Durango Drive in southwest Las Vegas was going to become something. At that point, the question was genuinely open. UnCommons was an ambitious project designed to function as a walkable urban hub in a city not known for walkable urban hubs, combining office space, residential apartments, and retail in a format more common to Portland or Austin than to Las Vegas’s suburban corridors.
(cite index=”130-1″>Amari Italian Kitchen and Wine Shop was the first full-service restaurant to open at the complex, led by executive Chef Brent Stanford, who was previously the executive sous chef for Brezza at Resorts World. The restaurant is 4,600 square feet and features a restaurant, bar, wine shop, and patio.
Nearly three years later, Amari has become the social and culinary anchor of a development that has proven its thesis. Stix Asia is preparing to open its massive food hall in the same complex. Blue Bottle Coffee is coming. Rare Society has joined the tenant roster. The office campus has attracted genuine technology and professional tenants. And the Food and Loathing dining event calendar regularly lists Amari-hosted events among the week’s most anticipated.
Understanding how a neighborhood Italian restaurant with a boutique wine shop became the community center of one of Las Vegas’s most interesting new developments requires examining what Amari actually does, why the wine program is its genuine differentiator, and what Rocheleau understood about the UnCommons community that the development’s own planning might not have fully anticipated.
The 80 Amari as Founding Philosophy
The restaurant’s name refers to amaro, the Italian category of bitter herbal liqueurs that has been experiencing a sustained global revival for the past decade. (cite index=”131-1″>The beverage program is curated by Corporate Executive Director of Beverage Miklos Katona, who previously assembled a similar program at Brezza at Resorts World. The bar stocks 80 amari, the largest selection in Las Vegas. The cocktail program prominently features amaro, including the Fernet About It, which combines Fernet Branca, Streta, and Lemon Demerara.
Eighty amari is a genuinely extraordinary commitment. Most Italian restaurants carry a handful of the most recognizable labels, Campari, Aperol, Fernet, Montenegro. Eighty represents a collection that spans regional Italian producers, monastery-made digestives, contemporary craft expressions, and rare imports that most American bars have never stocked. Building and maintaining this collection requires active sourcing relationships, significant capital committed to slow-moving inventory, and staff with the knowledge to recommend and explain what they’re serving.
This level of commitment to a single spirits category communicates something specific about the restaurant’s philosophy. Amari Italian Kitchen and Wine Shop doesn’t just happen to be named after bitter Italian liqueurs. The name is a promise about what the restaurant prioritizes, and the 80-bottle collection is the proof that the promise is genuine.
For the southwest Las Vegas community that has made Amari a regular destination, the amari program creates a specific ritual that other Italian restaurants in the area can’t replicate. A post-dinner digestivo from a selection that includes producers you’ve never encountered elsewhere is exactly the kind of distinct experience that builds the loyalty that sustains neighborhood restaurants over years.
The Wine Shop as Community Infrastructure
(cite index=”132-1″>The market in the front of Amari allows guests to purchase a bottle of wine to enjoy in the restaurant, in the quad, or to take home. The boutique retail and wine shop also offers freshly baked bread, sandwiches, salads, and house-made pasta sauces.
This hybrid restaurant-and-retail model creates multiple touchpoints with the surrounding community that a pure dining establishment doesn’t generate. Residents who are picking up groceries at UnCommons can add a bottle of wine and a container of house-made pasta sauce to their shopping. Office workers who want to impress a client with a gift stop into the wine shop rather than driving to a separate wine retailer. Families who dine at Amari on Saturday night return on Tuesday afternoon to pick up bread and fresh pasta for dinner at home.
Each of these interactions builds familiarity and relationship with the restaurant in ways that dining visits alone don’t generate. A customer who has been buying Amari’s bread every Thursday for six months before they book their first dinner reservation arrives as a warm prospect rather than a stranger. The wine shop converts one-time diners into regular community members and regular community members into diners.
This is the specific value of the boutique retail component that most restaurants don’t build because the operational complexity is real and the revenue is modest relative to dining. The return, in community loyalty and word-of-mouth, compounds over time in ways that are difficult to measure but impossible to ignore in a restaurant that has been consistently packed since opening.
Brent Stanford’s Brezza Lineage
Executive Chef Brent Stanford’s background at Brezza, Nicole Brisson’s Michelin-recommended Italian restaurant at Resorts World, created immediate credibility for Amari’s culinary positioning. Brisson’s restaurant, recognized in the inaugural Michelin Guide Southwest’s recommended category, represents one of Las Vegas’s most critically validated Italian dining programs. Stanford’s experience working alongside Brisson as executive sous chef provided the technical foundation for translating that caliber of Italian cooking into a neighborhood format that charges neighborhood prices.
The menu reflects this caliber without announcing it unnecessarily. (cite index=”131-1″>The kitchen produces house-made focaccia served as seasonal varietals, house-made pastas and rich sauces, pizza doughs in multiple styles, prime meats, and fresh seafood. Specific dishes include sesame arancini made with beef and pork sausage with Tallegio cheese, melon and prosciutto with Valbreso feta, big eye tuna crudo with Cara Cara oranges and cucumber, halibut saltimbocca, and polenta cake with citrus and whipped creme fraiche honeycomb.
Polenta cake with citrus and whipped creme fraiche honeycomb is not a dish that a neighborhood Italian restaurant designed purely for accessibility would put on its menu. It requires multiple components, precise execution, and the palate understanding to balance richness with brightness in ways that reward attention. This is the specific kind of dish that tells experienced diners that the kitchen has something to say rather than simply cooking recognizable Italian categories with competent technique.
The Private Wine Room and Event Economy
(cite index=”131-1″>Amari’s 4,600 square feet include a 10-seat private wine room, which has become a specific asset in the southwest valley’s growing corporate and private event economy. Professional communities that have anchored at UnCommons, technology companies, financial services firms, law offices, generate regular demand for private dining events that the surrounding restaurant landscape has been slow to address.
A 10-seat private wine room with a curated selection of 80 amari and a wine list developed by a Brezza-trained beverage director is exactly the product that corporate event planners in the southwest valley need and have been driving to the Strip or to Summerlin to find. Amari’s location within UnCommons, which is simultaneously a professional office campus and a community gathering place, creates natural corporate event demand from the tenants above the restaurant.
The Food and Loathing event calendar’s regular listing of Amari dinners reflects active programming of the space beyond regular dining service. A restaurant that programs special events, wine dinners, chef collaborations, and community gatherings develops a relationship with its neighborhood that passive dining-only operations don’t build. Each event creates new customer relationships and reinforces existing ones in ways that build the community infrastructure that sustains neighborhood restaurants through slow periods.
Notes and Key Takeaways
For Restaurant Operators:
Amari’s hybrid restaurant, wine shop, and retail model creates multiple community touchpoints that build neighborhood loyalty beyond what dining visits alone generate. The 80-amari selection as a founding commitment demonstrates that genuine category expertise, not just good food, can define a restaurant’s identity and create the kind of differentiation that large-volume competitors cannot replicate.
For Diners:
Amari Italian Kitchen and Wine Shop at UnCommons on Durango Drive offers house-made pasta, regional Italian cooking executed by a chef trained at Brezza, the largest amaro selection in Las Vegas, and a retail wine shop that allows community members to bring Amari’s quality home. The 10-seat private wine room accommodates small events. The patio sits within UnCommons’ growing community quad.
For Las Vegas:
Amari’s role as UnCommons’ first full-service restaurant and subsequent community anchor validates the thesis that serious neighborhood dining investment can both serve and shape mixed-use development in southwest Las Vegas. The restaurant’s sustained success three years after opening, as UnCommons continues growing around it, confirms that the southwest valley residential market was ready for this caliber of Italian dining before most developers were willing to bet on it.
Important Insights:
Rocheleau’s decision to open at UnCommons before the development proved its thesis was itself a form of community investment. Being the first full-service restaurant in an unproven mixed-use development carries real risk and real reward. The risk is that the development fails to attract the tenants and residents that make a neighborhood restaurant viable. The reward is first-mover advantage in a market that subsequently develops around you.
The Miklos Katona beverage directorship, shared between Amari and previously Brezza, creates institutional knowledge transfer that benefits both restaurants. A beverage director who has built successful programs at multiple well-regarded Las Vegas Italian restaurants brings accumulated supplier relationships, staff training protocols, and program philosophy that a first-time beverage director would require years to develop independently.
The Italian craft beer selection, including producers like Ducato Verdi Imperial Stout brewed with chili, alongside the amaro program signals a beverage philosophy that extends beyond wine and Italian-American cocktail tradition into the broader Italian hospitality culture. Italy has been producing serious craft beer for decades, and most American Italian restaurants either ignore this or treat it as an afterthought. Stocking Italian craft alongside the amaro collection reflects genuine commitment to Italian beverage culture rather than selective execution.
UnCommons’ continued development, with Stix Asia’s food hall arrival and Blue Bottle Coffee joining the roster, means that Amari’s community position will continue strengthening as the surrounding campus fills in. A restaurant that helped establish a development’s dining credibility before it was proven benefits from the subsequent development’s success in ways that later arrivals don’t share.
The Brezza-trained kitchen lineage creates an interesting genealogical connection within the Michelin Guide Southwest’s recommended restaurant list. Brezza itself is on that list. Amari, whose executive chef learned alongside Brisson at Brezza, serves southwest Las Vegas with a similar culinary sensibility at neighborhood prices. The guide’s recognition of Brezza validates the quality foundation from which Amari’s kitchen developed.
