Marc Marrone understands Vegas glitz and glamour better than just about anyone.
After helping open the original Tao in New York, the chef came to Vegas and was soon overseeing Tao Group’s celebrity-filled restaurants in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Singapore and other markets. Yet all of that seems far removed from the Marrone who hosted the Food and Loathing podcast last week at his new butcher shop and deli, sharing tales of horses, cattle and cowboys.
Marrone left Tao Group in 2019, with plans to launch several new concepts. His Chinese-Italian fusion concept Graffiti Bao operated successful locations in the Southwest Valley and inside T-Mobile Arena. During COVID, he created Gemma Gemma Pizza to keep his staff employed.
Then he seemingly disappeared.
Marrone spent the years that followed working on restaurant projects in Utah, consulting on international hospitality development, and navigating the same post-pandemic uncertainty that reshaped much of the restaurant industry. But few of his Las Vegas fans were aware of how far his career had taken him.
“COVID definitely shifted any plans you had in 2019 dramatically,” Marrone said.
“I kind of reset and started thinking about what I wanted to do next.”
Today, the chef wants to talk about raising wild horses, regenerative ranching, supply chains and sandwiches.
From Chef to Rancher
Marrone’s post-pandemic journey eventually led him to a veterans’ equine therapy program that paired military veterans with neglected wild mustangs. Initially involved on the business side, he later participated in the program himself.
What began as an introduction to the world of horse training became a passion.
“I kind of realized pretty quickly that I had a lot of my own stuff to work out,” Marrone said. “We’re from that generation where you just bury it down and go to work. I fell in love with it, and I happen to have an affinity for it. So I train wild horses now.”
That interest eventually led him to regenerative ranching — a conservation-focused approach to raising livestock that emphasizes land stewardship and animal welfare.
The unexpected career shift inspired the creation of Diamond Spur Provisions & Meats, a ranching and meat production company with operations in Arizona, Missouri and South Dakota. The business includes ranches, a meat-processing facility, and a direct-to-consumer sales operation focused on beef raised without feedlots, hormones or antibiotics.
Now Marrone and his business partner Todd Lunger have brought that business back to Las Vegas.
Located on Fort Apache Road in the southwest valley, Diamond Spur Butcher Shop & Deli serves as both a retail butcher shop and a neighborhood deli. Customers can purchase beef sourced directly from the company’s ranches, along with pork, chicken, eggs and other products. The deli menu includes burgers, rotisserie chicken, steak frites and a pretty serious chicken parmesan sandwich.
Back to the Neighborhood
For Marrone, however, the shop is about more than selling meat.
He says the idea grew from concerns about rising food costs and a desire to provide families with greater transparency about where their food comes from.
“Nobody’s going to the grocery store without checking prices anymore,” Marrone said. “The first thing I thought about was how do we service the community? How do we get back to the neighborhood we know and the people we care about?”
By controlling everything from ranching and processing to retail sales, Diamond Spur eliminates many of the middlemen traditionally involved in the food supply chain. The result: lower prices for his customers.
The shop is also a tribute to Marrone’s upbringing in New York City.
Inspired by the old-school butcher shops and markets of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, the space features vintage décor, wood paneling and a distinctly neighborhood feel. Marrone wanted to recreate the sense of community he remembers from visiting those markets with his family as a child. So, in addition to beef, chicken and pasture-raised eggs, his shop offers sandwiches (try the chicken parm in spicy vodka sauce) and beef tallow fries.
The result is one of the more unusual second acts in the Las Vegas restaurant industry. But for Marrone, Diamond Spur represents the culmination of a journey that has taken him far beyond the kitchen while ultimately bringing him back to the city where much of his career was built.
