Grand slam event: Denny’s to open in downtown Las Vegas

A new place to feed your hangover - and your kids - opens downtown today.

Denny's, home of Grand Slam breakfasts and other low-cost comfort food, will begin serving customers this afternoon at its "flagship" diner in Neonopolis.

The 24-hour restaurant features Denny's standards, plus a few Las Vegas extras. Starting around Valentine's Day, you can get married in its chapel, then cut into a wedding cake made of Pancake Puppies. More importantly, there's a full bar - in case you're hankering for some hair of the dog to wash down your Moons Over My Hammy.

The bar was important "considering the environment, downtown and the clientele," Shami Sall, senior director of company operations for Denny's Western division, said Wednesday as staffers, friends and family gave the restaurant a dry run. "We wanted to make this a destination point. We wanted to take it up a notch, do something different."

The 6,400-square-foot restaurant's opening is the latest boon for Neonopolis, a long-struggling development that has recently regained some of its glow, thanks to the renaissance of downtown.

The retail center is now 60 percent leased. Its new tenants include a tattoo parlor, a beer brewery and Krave Entertainment, owner of the Drink and Drag bar and bowling alley, where drag queens perform and serve drinks. Krave is slated to open Krave Massive, the "world's largest gay nightclub," in Neonopolis by the end of the year. Other tenants include the Heart Attack Grill, Luna Rossa Ristorante, Fremont Mediterranean Cafe and the Toy Shack.

Long-suffering Neonopolis developer Rohit Joshi, who has a penchant for referring to himself in the third person, couldn't be happier.

"It's a great feeling to have success finally come," the Indian-born Joshi said. "It's no more 'Mr. Joshi the failure.' All of a sudden, we are heroes."

Neonopolis, built in 2002 by Prudential Real Estate Investments in partnership with the city, was envisioned as a retail anchor for Fremont Street and as the catalyst for downtown redevelopment. In 2006, FAEC Holdings Wirrulla LLC acquired the development. While Joshi, as the holding company's representative, managed to land a few tenants , the recession wiped out any progress Neonopolis had made.

The development's checkered past includes a well-publicized dispute between its landlords and its air conditioning provider, which led to a temporary cooling shut-off in 2009.

Along the way Joshi abandoned grandiose plans for the development and focused on pragmatically filling it one tenant at a time.

Everybody said Neonopolis was "an albatross around Joshi's neck," he said. "I knew it could be a pearl necklace if we worked at it."

Renewed interest in downtown redevelopment, spurred by investments like Zappos' takeover of the former City Hall, gave Neonopolis the boost it needed.

A new, hipper Denny's is an ideal tenant to fuel that growth, Joshi said.

"Is it Nordstrom? No. It's Denny's," he said. "They needed to do something unusual with it, and, boy, did they."

Billed as the "Diner of the Future," the new Denny's, which brings about 100 jobs downtown, includes a webby yellow façade mean to symbolize the information superhighway.

"The diner is the original social network where the community gathers to share and connect with one another," said Frances Allen, Denny's chief marking officer.

The theme underscores the fact that "we are a neighborhood," Joshi said. "We are a social networking place ... called Denny's."

Contact Lynnette Curtis at Lynnette.Curtis@yahoo.com.