Sand Dollar Downtown to Close at Plaza Casino

By Scott Roeben, on November 27 2025
2 min read 0 comments
Downtown Las Vegas Las Vegas Las Vegas Bars

Sand Dollar Downtown is closing at Plaza casino. The rumored date: Dec. 13, 2025.

Sand Dollar Downtown opened on May 26, 2022, the sister venue of the original Sand Dollar Lounge on Spring Mountain that opened in 1976.

As with so many things downtown, Sand Dollar Downtown was too loud. The pizza was awesome, however. The closing date hasn’t been confirmed, but Plaza has another concept lined up for the space, we’re told. They aren’t ready to announce it yet.

We told you not to get too emotionally attached to things. You don’t listen.

We first got wind of the closure very late at night. In the world of scoop, you snooze, you lose.

There were signs Sand Dollar was struggling because the hotel added casino-facing windows to provide better visibility to casino guests.

Back in July 2025, we heard the venue had canceled all its shows due to lack of demand.

We’ve mostly enjoyed Sand Dollar. The video poker bar was solid and there were pool tables.

The pizza was brought over from Pop-Up Pizza. Until recently, you could only get that particular pizza inside Sand Dollar (some of the best in Vegas), but now you can get it at the Pop-Up Pizza counter, mostly due to our endless complaining on Twitter.

When Sand Dollar was announced, the news release included the following: “The Sand Dollar co-owners Nathan Grates and Anthony Jamison worked with the Plaza to create the downtown craft cocktail and music venue that will serve pizza from the Plaza’s nationally recognized and award-winning Pop-Up Pizza. Accessible from the casino floor, the venue will also change the face of the downtown corridor with a second, new glittering entrance on Main Street.”

Sand Dollar didn’t really change the face of anything, but it was a cool place to hang out and drink and gamble, as long as you could endure the weird, often grating music being blasted throughout the place whenever there wasn’t a band onstage.

Anyway, we’re bummed. But not too surprised.

Closure rumors have been floating around since June 2025 (we should know, they were our rumors). We received a smack-down about these rumors on Plaza’s Corner of Main Street podcast. Listen to the segment that starts at about 13:30 in the video below.

If you’re not into listening to things, we’ll cut to the chase. Plaza CEO Jonathan Jossel: “It’s not closing.” Hey, things change, but ignore our sources at your peril.

What went wrong?

There’s a lot of live music downtown, especially on Fremont Street. The difference is all the live music on Fremont Street is free.

Not to sound insensitive, but dibs.

While Plaza won’t confirm what’s next, you’ll hear when we do.

For now, we’ll just float an idea. Bring back Miss Behave’s “Mavericks” (smaller room, fewer financial challenges), let Pop-Up do the food, turn down the music (preferably ’80s synth pop), pool and video poker, make the Champagne ATM a thing. Boom.

We have great business instincts for someone who has never run a business.

Sand Dollar Downtown will be missed.