Tao Group Hospitality
Tao Group Hospitality is an American restaurant and nightlife conglomerate founded in 2009 and headquartered in New York City. The group, whose roots can be traced to as early as 2000, presently owns and operates restaurants, nightclubs, dayclubs, private event venues, and food delivery services under 44 brands.
Tao can trace its roots to the partnerships of Jason Strauss and Noah Tepperberg's marketing firm Strategic Group, which also owned the Chelsea, Manhattan nightclub Marquee, with Marc Packer and Rich Wolf's Tao Asian Bistro, with who Strategic Group often hosted events. All four were partners in Tao's first location and nightclub outside of New York City, located at The Venetian in Las Vegas, which opened in 2005, incorporating as Tao Group Hospitality officially in 2009. In 2017, Tao sold 62.5% of their business to James L. Dolan through his Madison Square Garden Entertainment corporation for $181 million, which they would later sell to PokerStars founder Mark Scheinberg's Mohari Hospitality investment firm for $550 million in 2023, though not before acquiring the Hakkasan Group in 2021 and merging it into Tao, before splitting the Hakkasan brand off in 2025 alongside Yautacha, Ling Ling, and Sake No Hana.
The group also boasts lucrative revenue figures, with Tao Asian Bistro's Las Vegas location in particular frequently ranking as the highest grossing restaurant in the United States by revenue. In addition to Tao, Marquee, and Hakkasan, the Tao Group also owns and operates the restaurants Beauty & Essex, Lavo, and Cathédrale, and the nightclubs Omnia, Jewel, the Highlight Room, PHD Rooftop, and Little Sister Lounge.
History
Strategic Group (2003-2017)
Officially incorporated in 2009, the business that would later become Tao was started by Jason Strauss and Noah Tepperberg promoting parties and eventually spring break vacation and party packages between Boston University and the University of Miami, with these parties being dubbed as "Jason and Noah present". Strauss and Tepperberg would later expand their promotional services into Strategic Group, a PR, events, and marketing company which primarily gained business by offering all three services under one firm. The founders of the 58th-street restaurant Tao Asian Bistro, Marc Packer and Rich Wolf, had hired Strategic Group previously to throw events at Tao. In 2003, Strauss and Tepperberg, backed by Packer and Wolf, opened their first nightclub, Marquee, in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood at a former parking garage.Strauss and Tepperberg would later pair with Tao's original founders, Marc Packer and Rich Wolf, to open a Las Vegas location inside of the Venetian Hotel, including both a Tao restaurant and a nightclub in 2005. Per an interview with Hospitality Design in 2023, Tepperberg sees the success of Tao Las Vegas as credited to Tao becoming the first restaurant nightclub hybrid with a seamless transition between the two venues. By December 2010, Marquee would open a Las Vegas location as well which would include a dayclub pool party side. According to a 2012 interview with Eater, Strauss described the Marquee as a "mini-Coachella" happening on the roof of the Cosmopolitan hotel. Also in March of 2012, Marquee expanded to Australia, with a location inside of The Star, Sydney.
By 2011, Tao Las Vegas was described by The Atlantic as the most profitable restaurant in the United States, in addition to the highest grossing, with over $60 million per year in revenue. The key to its growth, according to the Bloomberg author Joel Stein, was credited to the nature of high spending in Vegas and its high revenue percentage of alcoholic beverages at 75% compared to 30% from other restaurants, though Stein elaborates the most on Tao's ability to marketing both to conventional audiences from the Venetian's convention center as well as to the celebrity and party crowds. That same year, Tao also hosted the grand opening of the Dream Downtown Hotel at the site of the former Maritime Hotel, and presently operates both the hotel's bar and two of its own nightclubs inside, PHD Rooftop and the Electric Room, in addition to the former steakhouse Marble Lane.
Across the early 2010s and continuing afterwards to the present day, the Tao Group would partner with the Moxy Hotel group to begin most of their new concepts. Moxy hotels in New York City are presently the home of numerous Tao concepts, such as the Magic Hour rooftop nightclub at the Times Square Moxy, the Fleur Room rooftop lounge at the Chelsea location, the Silver Lining Lounge jazz club and Loosie's nightclub both at Moxy's Lower East Side location, and the French restaurant Cathédrale inside of the East Village hotel. In 2014, Marquee Las Vegas also tested delivering bottles by drone.
Tao faced a class action lawsuit in 2015 filed by Abu Ashraf, a busser from 2000 to 2012, saying that he and other bussers were forced to split their tips with non-tipped workers while being paid below minimum wage, specifically workers at Tao who polished silverware and dishes plus those who stocked dishes, all without interacting with customers unlike servers and bussers. According to the suit, Tao changed the operations around 2012 so that polishers were paid above the hourly minimum wage and excluded the tip pool, though Ashraf's class action asked for the unpaid wages plus attorneys costs and damages for the employees the suit alleges were shorted by Tao. The next month, the suit was voluntarily dismissed without prejudice. A separate controversy involving tips at Tao preceded the 2015 class action by two years, where a tennis player listed the Tao Group as among many New York City restaurants that automatically added tips to bills, a practice prohibited by the city's laws for parties smaller than eight people.
MSG investment (2017–2023)
In 2017, former Cablevision CEO James L. Dolan, whose family controlled the Madison Square Garden Entertainment, purchased a 62.5% stake in the Tao Group for $181 million USD in 2017; Wolf, Packer, Strauss and Tepperberg would keep a 37.5% remaining stake as well as run day-to-day operations for the group. Tao had previously been the target of other potential offers and discussions, including a potential buyout from the Hakkasan Group, which Tao itself would later acquire in 2021.Tao would later launch a partnership with Las Vegas Sands to open concepts inside of the Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore. In April 2019, Tao opened Singapore's largest nightclub – an offshoot of Marquee – which included an indoor ferris wheel and a three-story slide. The group had earlier expanded their LAVO Italian concept to the rooftop of Marina Bay Sands in 2017, and concurrent with the opening of Marquee Singapore, Tao also opened and operated a Singapore location of its Avenue speakeasy first started in New York and a new Japanese concept named Koma.
Back in Las Vegas, Tao would begin collaborating with Station Casinos through its public holding company Red Rock Resorts to open restaurants at Palms Casino Resort, though this agreement would be terminated in 2018. While details were confidential, both companies confirmed that no payment would be required on either's side; in covering the deal's termination, Scott Roeben from Vital Vegas would suggest that MSG's acquisition would drive off-strip competition and stifle plans for their new Sphere venue, which was undergoing the initial planning and constriction stages at that time.
In 2021, Tao announced plans for its first hotel, located in Orlando, Florida near the Walt Disney World resort. The hotel, part of a collaboration between real estate developer Unicorp at their new development named O-Town West, will feature a Rockwell-designed Tao restaurant as well as a rooftop experience. Construction on the hotel began in 2024, with expected opening in 2025.
2021 also saw Tao enter into an agreement to acquire Alan Yau's Hakkasan Group, which put not only the namesake Cantonese restaurant under Tao ownership and operation but also three Las Vegas nightclubs and numerous other restaurants, including Yauatcha, Omina, Jewel, Casa Calavera, and Ling Ling. As Tao's chief competitor in Vegas, Strauss saw the opportunity come as of a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic, and given the high amount of "synergy" between the two groups, Strauss described the acquisition of Hakkasan as a "one plus one equals three, right of the bat".
Mohari ownership (2023–)
With MSG Entertainment building the Sphere in Las Vegas which would open in 2023, to help finance its construction, MSG sold off its 66.9% ownership in the Tao Group to Mohari Hospitality, a firm dominated by Mark Scheinberg. The deal, which was hinted at as early as January of that year, was announced the following April, with Mohairi buying MSG's stake in Tao for $550 million USD. Mohari prior to the acquisition was primarily known for luxury hotel investments like the Four Seasons Hotels location in Madrid.After the October 7 attacks, Strauss and Tepperberg hosted a November fundraiser for the Israeli emergency services provider United Hatzalah at the Los Angeles location of Lavo Ristorante, and shortly before at Al Coro, a recently bought restaurant prior to its transformation into Crane Club. The Los Angeles fundraiser, organized in partnership with Jason Pomeranc, noted Danny Abeckaser, Elon Gold, and many other hospitality group owners and partners as guests, and raised $1 million for United Hatzalah.
Under Mohari ownership, Tao announced a partnership in 2024 with OKO Group to develop a rooftop Mediterranean members only restaurant in Miami's Brickell district. Previously in Miami in 2023, Tao opened a joint venture with David Grutman's Groot Hospitality named Casadonna, a waterfront Italian restaurant that first opened in 2023. In August 2025, however, magazine The Real Deal reported that Tao and OKO had parted ways on the venture, though OKO would still open a restaurant and service club now independent of Tao.
Also in Miami, Tao collaborated with the 2025 edition of Ultra Music Festival to operate their VIP sections, though received considerable attention for offering a $425,000 bottle service package titled "Fuck You Money", which offered 200 bottles of Pharrell William's own Moet & Chandon Nectar Imperial Rosé,100 bottles of Dom Perignon Brut Luminous and 100 Dom Perignon Rosé Luminous.
In 2025, the Tao Group and MGM Resorts International partnered with Kygo's Palm Tree Crew to rebrand the dayclub Wet Republic into the Palm Tree Beach Club, with Tao handling operations. The 3,000-guest venue will span 60,000 square feet in area, with Strauss promoting the rebranded pool party as a cross between Palm Springs and Beverly Hills. That same year, the club would separately ink a deal with the Australian fashion brand Outcast Clothing to supply Tao venues with uniforms for one year. Part of the deal also included Tao working with its festival partners to offer Outcast-branded VIP tables at music festivals such as Coachella, Ultra, and Electric Daisy Carnival. Tao also renovated Marquee New York and Marquee Las Vegas during the summer and opening a Marquee seasonal popup at 30 Hudson Yards' rooftop observation deck, while closing French concept Cathedrale's location at the Aria in Las Vegas and dropping prices at the London locations for Hakkasan and Yautacha.