Exclusive: Five Guys is Coming to Downtown’s Plaza Casino

By Scott Roeben, on January 29 2026

5 min read 1 comment

Downtown Las Vegas Las Vegas Las Vegas Restaurants

While it hasn’t been officially announced yet, we’ve got some juicy scoop: Plaza Casino is getting a Five Guys.

Look, Las Vegas has been light on scoop since the holidays, so we’re taking our exclusives where we can get them.

Also light: Details. Don’t worry, we’re going to fluff up this article plenty to give the appearance of details, which in today’s post-details world is almost as good.

Your burger won’t look like this, but it will have the same general vibe.

Plaza has been without a fast food burger since McDonald’s closed on Dec. 15, 2025.

While the closure eliminated a revenue stream for Plaza, it also got rid of a lot of headaches.

There was a path worn between the former Greyhound station and the McDonald’s at Plaza. McDonald’s was popular with vagrants and panhandlers, causing ongoing problems for Plaza’s security team.

Now, Five Guys is entering the chat.

Five Guys is a hamburger-focused multinational fast food chain based in Virginia. The first Five Guys opened in 1986. The chain has won innumerable accolades and honors, but the biggest honor is the fact we personally ate there today in preparation for our story.

This is the Downtown Summerlin location of Five Guys, where the interior design consists largely of “Five Guys sharing its accolades and honors.”

Five Guys operates 1,900 restaurant locations worldwide across 29 countries.

There are six Five Guys locations in Las Vegas. Plaza will be lucky number seven. Granted, seven isn’t always lucky. On the come-out roll, lucky. After a point is established, unlucky. Unless you’re betting the “don’t,” in which case seven after a point is established is good luck. If you bet the “don’t,” however, you will live a cursed life and you might win that one bet, but overall you are condemned to a life of struggle and misfortune, so suck it, asshat.

Anyway, Five Guys is known for a few things: The prices, the peanuts, copious fries and the fact they don’t advertise.

You bet your ass we’re going to mention our high school band.

Yes, yes, the prices are widely seen as a smidge elevated at Five Guys. Our lunch of a basic burger, fries and a soda cost about $20. The burger had two substantial patties (we’d guess about four times the amount of beef in an In N Out burger), and the fries were, indeed, copious.

Five Guys is notorious for overloading their bags with fries for a little surprise and delight. Although, it’s not so much a surprise as a delight, because everybody knows about the practice.

As we say often: Value doesn’t mean cheap. You tend to get what you pay for.

We predict pricing at Plaza won’t vary too much from this, possibly 2% more or less.

Is Five Guys a good fit for Plaza? Yes. It provides a fast food burger option at a price point that deters vagrants and panhandlers.

Where will Five Guys be located at Plaza? We don’t know. They haven’t announced this yet. We are connected, but not clairvoyant. It doesn’t sound like it will be in the food court, so that opens up some interest possibilities.

There are two other concepts slated for the Plaza food court, but we haven’t made any headway in figuring out what they will be.

If you can’t wait for a Five Guys burger, we recommend the burger at Oscar’s Steakhouse. The Oscar’s Steakhouse burger is $24 (a side of fries is $15).

There are a slew of great burgers downtown.

Reliably good burgers include Victory Burger at Circa, Park on Fremont (Fremont East District), Binion’s Cafe (best bang for the buck in Las Vegas) and Whiskey Licker Up at Binion’s, Triple George Grill at Downtown Grand, Carson Kitchen and Fat Sal’s at Neonopolis.

There are also some reliably mediocre burgers downtown, including at Eureka (near El Cortez), Heart Attack Grill at Neonopolis and Steak ‘n Shake at Fremont casino.

To further fluff up our story, here’s an interview with the founder of Five Guys.

A quirky aspect of Five Guys: They provide peanuts. In their shells. To kill time while you wait for your burger. It’s a whole thing.

The Five Guys site claims customers eat 300,000 peanuts per week.

This number doesn’t seem right. With 1,900 locations, that’s 158 peanuts per week at each location.

Five Guys might know burgers, but they don’t seem great at math. Do they mean 300,000 per week at each location? That would be 400 pounds of peanuts per week.

During our visit, we saw a total peanut consumption of roughly a dozen peanuts.

This peanut scandal will not stand.

Fun fact: You can eat all the peanuts you want at Five Guys, but you can’t take them with you. Something about allergies or something. Big babies.

Meanwhile, back at the fluffery, the five guys involved with Five Guys are the founder Jerry Murrell, and his four sons named Jim, Matt, Chad and Ben. Rounding out the collection of Caucasian first names is Tyler, a fifth son who was born late in the game, so he was left out of the business, which would certainly not cause any deep-seated resentment and will definitely not result in a Netflix documentary at some point.

A final thought about Five Guys coming to Plaza.

While they take pride in not doing traditional advertising, we suggest they flex a tad for this location.

One of the quiet but persistent mistakes made in Las Vegas is assuming brand equity automatically equals awareness or success, and Five Guys isn’t immune to that risk at Plaza.

While Five Guys may be well known nationally, a significant percentage of Las Vegas visitors (international tourists, older guests, or infrequent travelers) may have no idea what the brand is, what makes it different or why it commands its lofty price point. Many visitors arrive with no context and limited time to explore. They hit their favorite places and don’t venture far from the places they already love.

Marketing is a must in such a crowded, competitive marketplace. Example: Fontainebleau. The bajillion-dollar resort leaned heavily on the perceived prestige of its name while underestimating the need to clearly define its value, intended audience and purpose in Las Vegas. (Not having a database didn’t help.) The assumption “people will come because they know the name” was flawed (some say a fatal flaw) in a city where visibility, consumer education and repetition matter more than reputation.

For Five Guys, success at Plaza will require explaining what it is, why it’s different and why it’s worth choosing. In Las Vegas, brands can’t coast, they have to earn relevance every day.

We’d say if you look in the dictionary under “resting on one’s laurels” you’d see this photo, but that’s not how dictionaries work.

As a renowned marketer, we can therefore lay out the specific marketing steps Five Guys should do downtown: Create pre-opening awareness (you’re welcome, Five Guys); create an awareness campaign (explain what Five Guys is, especially for first-timers); get ahead of the price narrative (emphasize value and quality); make sure there’s lots of visibility at Plaza (refer to the success of Pinkbox Doughnuts); take advantage of opening momentum; provide incentives for locals (they don’t drive a lot of business directly, but they’re the ones who recommend places to tourists); maintain sustained awareness; integrate into Plaza’s existing marketing efforts (the podcast, casino mailers, loyalty club); don’t do the influencer dance, it’s flushing money.

First rule of thriving downtown: Know your customer.

Not too shabby for a story that could’ve been one sentence, right? Look, this isn’t our first rodeo.

While we have confirmed Five Guys is coming to Plaza, we trust an official announcement will be forthcoming soon, at which time the Las Vegas Review-Journal will “break” the story.

There’s more Plaza news to come, so stay tuned.