SpaghettiOs Get a Glow-Up at the Voltaggio Brothers’ MGM Steakhouse

Way back in 2016, Top Chef stars Bryan and Michael Voltaggio teamed up on their first joint project: a steakhouse to christen the then-shiny new MGM National Harbor. While other big-name chefs like José Andrés and Marcus Samuelsson have come and gone at the Maryland casino, the Voltaggios remain.

“We want to reintroduce the fact that we’re still here, but more importantly, that we’re not just here and complacent — we’re making aggressive changes and evolving the restaurant,” Michael Voltaggio tells Eater.

Living room-styled Voltaggio Brothers Steak House is meant to mimic their nearby childhood home Frederick, Md., complete with bookshelves, displayed china, and family photos (101 MGM National Avenue, Oxon Hill, Maryland). “Outside of the fact that it still looks the same, it’s very much not,” says Bryan.

A series of nostalgic dish drops with cheffed-up touches landed on the menu in May. That includes Voltaggio O’s, a play on the old-school canned classic they ate as kids. The grown-up version combines hand-rolled anellini pasta with a spicy arrabbiata tomato sauce emulsified with brown butter.

“It’s not processed anything — it’s a thoughtful, fresh, put-together dish. And if we tricked you into thinking we were only serving SpaghettiOs, then we did our job,” says Bryan.

Voltaggio Brothers Steak House

Before-school breakfast classics act as menu muses, too. The Pop-Tart, a pantry staple that rose to fame in their early teens, gets the Marylander treatment at MGM as a flaky, homemade treat stuffed with blue crab. A bowl of pull-apart doughnuts sprinkled with everything bagel seasoning comes with a nighttime schmear in the form of a smoked trout dip that calls upon a small southwest Virginia fishery.

A new-school answer to beef and broccoli features slow-braised oxtail and broccoli rabe ragu, rye gnocchetti, and wood-roasted bone marrow. Spooning it atop the pasta produces an “unctuous, rich” dish, says Bryan.

“At the end of the day, it’s still a steakhouse — beautiful cuts of meat, grilled over wood and seasoned properly,” says Bryan. “Where we’re having fun [now] is in the other dishes.”

Some of its steakhouse staff have worked there since day one, which says a lot for any 8-year-old restaurant — let alone one attached to a hotel casino. Loyal locals regularly flock from Alexandria, D.C., and all the way up to Rockville for everything from anniversaries to just a simple night out. An all-new cocktail list returns to the classics with a well-executed gimlet, Manhattan, and Hurricane.

“We’re going back to genuinely caring about every single person that walks through the door, which is sort of a lost art right now,” says Bryan.

The siblings downsized their coast-to-coast footprints in recent years, coming out of the pandemic with a fresh slate to start anew. They parted ways with the Conrad hotel’s Estuary in D.C., and Bryan shed Range and Lunchbox in Chevy Chase, Aggio in Ashburn, Virginia, and Family Meal in Frederick, Maryland, where he now runs mid-Atlantic favorite Thatcher & Rye. In southern California, where Michael lives, sandwich shop Strfsh and Ink.Well also shuttered.

In early 2023, the brothers came back guns blazing with the new Vulcania in Mammoth Lakes, a hip ski town situated a five-hour drive from LA. “There’s unique little markets like Mammoth that want something more,” he says. The Italian-American addition is now one of their best-performing restaurants — and serves a version of its Voltaggi O’s.

“We thought, why can’t we bring some of that back here to this restaurant? How do we not have this dish in our ‘house’?” says Michael.

At MGM National Harbor, they tweak the California-born Voltaggi O’s recipe with a chicken meatball. “For people who don’t eat pork or beef but love chicken Parm,” says Bryan.

Voltaggio Brothers Steak House

The brothers’ big break came on Top Chef: Las Vegas Season 6, when Michael was declared the winner over his runner-up sibling. “The first thing we did after we finished doing that show was we went straight back to work,” says Michael. “Now, at the age of 48, I still want to be the best line cook in our kitchens – I will work any station for the team.”

Fifteen years after that Top Chef season aired, the duo serendipitously returned to the Sin City strip last May to open Retro by Voltaggio as a year-long residency inside Mandalay Bay. The neon-lit replacement to Charlie Palmer’s Aureole added technique and whimsy to childhood throwbacks like pizza rolls and pot roast.

Michael maintains a starring reality TV role on Food Network’s Bobby’s Triple Threat, in which host Bobby Flay invites chefs to compete in culinary rounds against his handpicked “titans”: Michael, Brooke Williamson, and Tiffany Derry.

“Getting to work with [Bobby] is really getting to see you be both — a chef who’s [also] on TV,” says Michael. “That man cooks — he cooks all the time. He’s still opening restaurants.”

Photo by Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

As are the Voltaggios, who have a combined 60 years of culinary experience between the two. Despite being based in LA, Michael frequently makes the cross-country trip to show up at their joint steakhouse.

“Bryan and I are cooking together more now than we ever have,” says Michael, adding they talk and text every day. “Maybe it’s not in the same place all the time, but it’s ‘some place’ all the time.”

They eventually plan to have a permanent place in Vegas aligned with MGM Resorts. They’re also partners with Live Nation and have 47 locations nationwide, with the closest being Volt Burger at Jiffy Lube Live.

“We’re still the chefs in our restaurant cooking the food,” says Bryan. “We’ve continued to push and evolve and refine. And I think that that’s why we’re still here.”