In a Town Full of Tourists, This Team of Women is Making Cheba Hut Sin City’s Local Option

When most people think of Las Vegas, their mental image doesn’t expand beyond the Strip, roulette tables and slot machines. To visitors, it’s a place of indulgence and luxury. It’s also incredibly impersonal.

For the more than 600,000 residents who call Las Vegas home, however, it’s anything but. It’s this crowd that Cheba Hut has embraced since first entering the Las Vegas market in 2017, establishing itself as the premier option for locals to grab a bite, have a drink and hang out without any of the tired Sin City hoopla.

Audrey Bolton and Madeline Stamm are two key members of the women-led team responsible for spreading Cheba Hut’s good vibes and delicious eats to locals throughout the city. As district manager and general manager, respectively, Bolton and Stamm’s work is centered around making sure the Cheba Hut atmosphere celebrates Las Vegas residents instead of alienating them.

“The Cheba Hut brand as a whole is chill and encourages guests to come through our doors and be themselves,” Bolton said. “It’s well-tailored to locals and provides an environment to escape the established.”

For many, escaping the established—a Cheba Hut mantra—may, in fact, mean booking a Vegas getaway. For area locals who steer clear of the city’s storied shenanigans, though, Cheba Hut is a breath of (almost) fresh air.

“A lot of times in Vegas, restaurants will have gaming machines at bars, which tends to create a solitary experience. We’re different,” Stamm said. “We’ve created an environment in all of our locations where regulars have built friendships with our staff and each other, making the experience a super communal one. It’s a standout feature of our shops.”

With each of its Las Vegas locations, Cheba Hut has captured a new audience. The brand’s Sahara location—its first in the market—is three miles from the Strip in what Bolton described as a “non-traditional” location.

“When we first came to Las Vegas with plans to open a shop, we had no idea what to look for,” she recounted. “We didn’t know where the ideal spots to open up would be. So when we found this location in a strip mall in a pseudo-residential area that also happened to be right next to a dispensary, it was an awesome opportunity for us.”

The Sahara location opened in September 2017 and was followed up a little more than a year later with the Durango shop, which opened in October 2018. Bolton and Stamm, who currently serves as GM of the location, described Durango as a “super residential” area with a lot of families.

“This is also a pretty non-traditional Cheba Hut in a sense of where we’d typically open a shop,” Bolton pointed out. Despite their unconventional locales, though, both locations have been notably successful, paving the way for further development that has led to its crown jewel in the form of its latest location directly across the street from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas campus that opened in March 2019.

“Because of Cheba Hut’s success in college markets, UNLV was an obvious target for us,” Bolton said. “It really fits the traditional Cheba vibe and puts us in great position to tap into a clientele we haven't yet reached at our other, more suburban locations.”

Beyond just being prime territory to introduce its elaborate sandwiches and munchies to hoards of hungry college students, the UNLV Cheba Hut is also close to downtown Las Vegas, the Arts District, and a number of other popular hangout spots.

“Establishing ourselves in such a vibrant area allows us to connect with so many new locals who may not have had the chance to make it to Cheba Hut before,” Stamm said. The team has wasted no time getting involved at its new location, either. The shop has already hosted a number of events for the Las Vegas Humane Society, the UNLV Women’s Group, among others, and has plans to work with even more local organizations in the coming months.

As for what’s to come in regard to development, Bolton, Stamm and company are squarely focused on getting the UNLV location performing at the high level they believe it can, but acknowledged they see the potential for expansion into the Henderson community in the coming years. While much remains open-ended, one thing is certain, though: the future for Cheba Hut in Las Vegas is—and will remain—female.

“We have a strong female presence here, which is really rad,” Bolton said. “Las Vegas as a whole has set a high standard when it comes to empowering women in the workplace, and Cheba Hut has given us a really cool platform to further that."