Stephanie “Mama Tess” Richter, co-owner of the historic Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings, has opened a new restaurant of her own in the Las Vegas suburb of Southern Highlands. Mama Tess's Artisan Kitchen serves soups, salads, sandwiches, burgers, house desserts and milkshakes, with signature dishes that first debuted at the century-old desert bar Richter co-owns roughly 40 miles southwest of the Strip.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the new eatery sits at 11350 Southern Highlands Parkway, Suite 125, and its menu is built around dishes Richter has long made at home for family and friends. Richter is a co-owner of the Pioneer Saloon alongside her husband, Stephen “Old Man Liver” Staats, who is also her co-proprietor there. She told the paper she wanted to create an inviting menu and ambiance in a place she herself would like to visit.
The restaurant will hold a grand opening open house from noon to 6 p.m. Saturday, offering free samples of its signature dishes. Regular hours will run 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, according to the same report. Diners can also follow the business's social media account, @mamatessartisankitchen, on Facebook and Instagram, or visit its website at mamatess.com.
From a 200-Person Desert Town to a Booming Suburb
The move brings Richter's cooking out of one of the more unusual settings in Southern Nevada. The Pioneer Saloon is a historic 113-year-old bar in the desert, and Goodsprings itself once had nearly 800 residents and nine saloons during its lead and zinc mining boom around 1916, a population that has since contracted to around 200 year-round residents, per the Las Vegas Sun. Staats, a musician and entrepreneur, bought the Pioneer Saloon from 15-year owner Noel Sheckells in the summer of 2021 for $1.5 million, the outlet reported.
Southern Highlands could not be more different. The community is a 2,200-plus-acre master-planned development in southwest Las Vegas that Olympia Group has built out since 1997, now containing more than 6,500 homes across multiple residential enclaves anchored by the private Southern Highlands Golf Club, according to the Nevada Real Estate Group. Las Vegas commercial licensing records list Buttered Popcorn LLC, tied to Staats's production company, as the operating entity behind the new kitchen at its Southern Highlands Parkway address, per Inside Las Vegas.
A Saloon Steeped in Nevada Lore
The Pioneer Saloon that shaped Richter's menu is no ordinary roadhouse. Built in 1913 by Clark County Commissioner George Fayle, it was constructed with prefabricated stamped-tin walls and ceilings manufactured by Sears, Roebuck & Co., making it one of the last remaining tin structures of its kind in the country, according to Travel Nevada. Its bar, an 1860s cherrywood piece made by the Brunswick Company in Maine, was shipped around Cape Horn to San Francisco before eventually reaching Nevada mining towns, City Lifestyle reports.
The saloon's tin walls still bear three visible bullet holes from a 1915 card-game shootout in which poker dealer Joe Armstrong shot and killed an out-of-work miner named Paul Coski over alleged cheating, according to the Pioneer Saloon's own account of its history. In January 1942, Hollywood actor Clark Gable reportedly spent three days waiting at the saloon for news after a plane crash on nearby Mount Potosi killed his wife, actress Carole Lombard, per Vegas Off Road Tours. The bar also served as the real-world model for the Prospector Saloon in the 2010 video game Fallout: New Vegas, and now hosts an annual Fallout Fan Celebration drawing roughly 6,000 to 8,000 visitors to Goodsprings, the Las Vegas Review-Journal has reported separately.
Part of a Bigger Push Under the Saloon's Owners
The new kitchen arrives just weeks after the Pioneer Saloon's ownership team launched a five-day Country Music Showcase in free country showcase in Goodsprings, partnering with Buttered Popcorn Entertainment and Artists Addiction Records to collect original song submissions through the rest of 2026 for a compilation album spotlighting saloon performers, Hoodline previously reported. Taken together, the moves show Richter and Staats extending their brand from a remote desert bar into both the regional music scene and, now, a suburban strip-mall kitchen aimed at families in one of southwest Las Vegas's fastest-growing communities.
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