Southern Highlands Restaurants: The Story Behind Two Openings
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Ask a few neighbors near Southern Highlands Marketplace where they ate last month and two names come up again and again: Roma Kitchen and Tuscan Cove Bar & Patio. Both are new enough to still feel like discoveries. Both lean Italian, both pour a full bar, and both get talked about as separate wins for a neighborhood that keeps adding places to eat. That telling isn't quite right. The same two people built both rooms, five minutes apart, inside of eighteen months.
Roma Kitchen opened in August 2024 on South Decatur Boulevard near Cactus Avenue, a dinner-only Italian dining room with hand-shaped pasta, antipasti boards, and no pizza on the menu. The kitchen is led by executive chef Ricardo Romo, who spent more than 30 years cooking on the Strip before this, including stints at Michael Mina inside MGM Grand, STK at the Cosmopolitan, Mastro's Ocean Club, Toca Madera, and Beer Park at Paris Las Vegas. His business partner is Steven Kennedy, a Boston-born hospitality veteran who has spent more than 25 years building restaurants around the valley. Southern Highlands wasn't their first project together. Romo and Kennedy opened Chef's Roma Kitchen in Henderson back in February 2023, then brought the sister concept west to Southern Highlands a year and a half later.
Then in June 2025, they opened again. Tuscan Cove Bar & Patio, a few minutes down Southern Highlands Parkway, marked Romo's third Las Vegas restaurant, and his second inside this one neighborhood.
Before Tuscan Cove, that address inside the Tuscan Highlands apartment complex belonged to Becca's Restaurant & Lounge, a longtime local favorite known for its wine garden, fire pit, and roomy patio. When Becca's closed, the same footprint reopened months later under a new name and a different energy. Tuscan Cove kept the fire pit and the bones of the roughly 5,000-square-foot space, then leaned harder into a sports-bar feel: big screens, stone-fired pizza, smash burgers, and a private dining room that seats up to 70 for parties and corporate gatherings. The patio, strung with bistro lights, still does the job Becca's patio used to do. The menu and the crowd it's built for are different.
The two restaurants read as opposites once you sit down in each one.
Same ownership, same kitchen leadership, two entirely different nights out.
The obvious explanation is that southwest Las Vegas is growing and restaurants tend to follow rooftops. The Las Vegas Review-Journal put it plainly when Roma Kitchen was first announced, noting that Southern Highlands is "one of the fastest growing areas of Las Vegas, and where people go, restaurants follow." That's true, but it doesn't fully explain why one operator chose to build twice in the same zip code rather than spread across two different growth corridors. A restaurant group betting on a neighborhood a second time, in the same stretch of parkway, is a stronger signal than a single opening. It suggests Romo and Kennedy found something at the first address worth repeating rather than something to test elsewhere.
Romo has said the move away from Strip kitchens was intentional. In his own account of the decision, he described wanting to "step away from the glitz and connect with the local community." Two restaurants inside one residential neighborhood, each built for a different kind of night, reads like a team that found its footing here and decided to stay rather than expand outward.
Not every Italian option in Southern Highlands runs through Kennedy and Romo. Spaghetty Western, a family-owned restaurant near the original Marketplace storefronts, has built its own following independent of that group, serving fresh pasta and classic Italian dishes to a delivery radius that covers Southern Highlands proper along with Olympia Ridge Estates, Augusta Canyon, Tuscan Islands, and Somerset Hills. It is the neighborhood's other standing option for residents who want a red-sauce dinner without walking into a restaurant tied to the same ownership group twice.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. A neighborhood with two restaurants under one operator and a third that's fully independent has more actual variety than the restaurant count alone suggests, but it also means two of the newest names on the list aren't really two separate bets on the area. They're one.
If the plan is a casual patio night with the game on, brunch with the in-laws, or a stone-fired pizza that doesn't require a dinner reservation, Tuscan Cove is built for that, gate code 418 and all. If the plan is a quieter dinner table with hand-shaped pasta and a proper wine list, Roma Kitchen up on Decatur is the room built for that instead, even though it shares an owner and a chef with the spot five minutes away. And if the goal is supporting the neighborhood's original family-run Italian kitchen rather than either half of the Kennedy-Romo footprint, Spaghetty Western is still the independent option near the Marketplace.
None of this changes where the food comes from tonight. It does change how you read the next new restaurant sign on Southern Highlands Parkway. The question worth asking isn't just what's opening. It's who's actually behind it, and whether they've already placed a bet on this same stretch of road before.
Knowing a neighborhood at this level of detail, who owns what, what used to be there, and why an operator chooses to return, is the same instinct that matters when you're deciding what a home in that neighborhood is actually worth. If you're weighing a move to Southern Highlands or thinking about what your property here could bring on the market, Mary Jay Yusuf brings that same street-level familiarity to pricing, timing, and negotiation. Schedule Your Consultation to talk through what's next.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Clients benefit from the utmost professionalism, personalized care, and a seamless real estate experience, supported by market insight and a commitment to exceeding expectations.