Details unveiled for Aladdin’s Desert Passage

John Wilen

Tuesday, May 25, 1999 | 11:07 a.m.

TrizecHahn Development Corp. announced eight of the fourteen restaurants that will populate the Desert Passage mall at the Aladdin hotel-casino.

They include Commander's Palace, a previously announced New Orleans restaurant; Blue Note Jazz Club, a Greenwich Village-style jazz club; the Anasazi, a southwestern themed restaurant; Bice, an Italian restaurant; the Buddah Bar, a combination bar, music venue and restaurant featuring a huge gold Buddha; the Macanudo Steakhouse & Club; Lombardi's, a combination Italian trattoria, French bistro and Moroccan bar; and Beluga, a turn of the century-style wharf bar and seafood restaurant.

The announcements were timed to coincide with the International Council of Shopping Centers trade show, which is at the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Las Vegas Hilton through Thursday.

TrizecHahn also unveiled a prototype storefront from the Desert Passage, a 500,000-square-foot "experience retail" center that will take visitors on a trip through the spice routes of the ancient world.

"It provides more of an immersive experience," said Paul Beirnes, director of marketing for Desert Passage.

The mall will combine the traditional aspects of a shopping center -- stores and food outlets -- with entertainment elements designed to make people feel they are in an Indian marketplace, an Arabian spice market or a port city.

"We're trying to take the success of the Forum Shops one step further," said Jack Illes, vice president of strategic design at TrizecHahn, referring to the shopping mall at Caesars Palace hotel-casino. "The idea is that you really have the sensation of travelling."

Shoppers will enter Desert Passage through Gibraltar Gate, an area designed to evoke the Moroccan architecture and fragrances of southern Spain and North Africa. They then proceed into the Lost City, an area based loosely on the lost Jordanian city of Petra that will contain a live spice market and restaurants on terraces rising to the area's 85-foot ceiling.

Other evocative areas will include the Sultan's Palace, an area of home furnishing shops designed to look like the inside of a rich spice merchant's home; Harbor Gate, a representation of a North African harbor village complete with wharfs, an anchored steamer and real thunderstorms that move in from the sea, rain and move inland; and India Gate, an area designed with the ornamental architecture of the Indian subcontinent.

TrizecHahn plans no anchor tenants for Desert Passage, officials said. The company's strategy is to sign only specialty stores. Toronto-based TrizecHahn has not announced its retail tenants.

The Desert Passage will cost about $250 million and will open next year.