■ Olive Garden plans to open a restaurant at Showcase mall.

Restaurant to move into Showcase mall

A newly built section of Showcase mall on the Strip is getting a new tenant.

Olive Garden plans to open a restaurant in the resort-corridor retail hub known for its facade featuring a giant Coke bottle and M&M’S, Clark County records show.

Records indicate that the restaurant will span 12,564 square feet and that contractors were planning at least $3.75 million worth of construction work.

Representatives for Olive Garden and its parent company, Darden Restaurants, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Efforts to speak with landlord Gindi Capital also were not successful.

Olive Garden is set to move into a new section of Showcase that has two tenants — retail chains Target and Burlington — and occupies the footprint of the now-demolished Smith & Wollensky building.

Owners of Showcase, on Las Vegas Boulevard just north of Tropicana Avenue, bought the steakhouse building for $59.5 million in 2017 and received Clark County approval months later to replace it with a four-story, 145,000-square-foot expansion project.

Target opened its roughly 20,000-square-foot store in August. A Burlington representative could not be reached for comment Wednesday to find out when its Showcase store opened.

Olive Garden has plans for the

Strip at a volatile time in Las Vegas. The still-raging coronavirus outbreak has kept people home and away from crowds, devastating the tourism industry, the bedrock of Southern Nevada’s casino-heavy economy.

Around 16.3 million people visited Las Vegas this year through October, down 54.2 percent from the same 10-month stretch last year, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported.