Jared Boles: "The guest experience cannot outweigh the employee experience”
This is the first concept that Tao Group Hospitality has brought to the UK since merging with Hakkasan Group. Why did you choose LAVO?
LAVO is a flagship concept for Tao Group Hospitality and we believe that the London market is ripe for high-quality coastal Italian cuisine. The brand also chimes with the environment at The BoTree hotel (which is just off Oxford Street in Marylebone). The space is bright and airy with high ceilings. We are currently putting the finishing touches to the restaurant, trialling recipes and training the team. We are expecting to launch mid-month.
What arrangement do you have with the hotel?
The BoTree are our partners. We are managing all the F&B in the hotel, including room service and The BoTree Bar. We intend for the latter to be much more than a place for hotel guests to drink. We have developed a bespoke cocktail list, a limited-but-premium food offer and a live music programme. We like having multiple F&B concepts within a single location because it allows our brands to work together symbiotically.
Tell us about the LAVO concept in more detail
LAVO launched in Las Vegas in 2008. London will be our sixth restaurant under the brand. Las Vegas is obviously a very specific market so the original LAVO has a party element that subsequent iterations don’t have. The brand has evolved and – quite frankly – grown up since it started out. The LAVO concept is more of a guiding light than a rulebook, we like to tailor our offerings to the market we’re in. The most direct comparison is probably the recently opened LAVO in West Hollywood, which is very premium and has a focus on high-end local ingredients.
What’s going to be on the menu in London?
Our dishes will include tagliatelle al limone with marjoram, sweet butter and Kaluga caviar (pictured below); wagyu meatball topped with whipped ricotta; salt-baked Mediterranean sea bass; and a 20-layer chocolate cake. We will also offer a selection of single-source flour pizzas. Some of the dishes are new creations while other are takes on LAVO classics. We have had to carefully tweak a lot of our recipes because kitchens in London are not the same as those in Las Vegas and LA. The difference in humidity affects how the bread rises, for example. There's been a lot of testing and retesting, which has not been great for my gut.
How long have you been with Tao Group Hospitality?
Over 20 years. I started on the floor at Tao (the influential New York restaurant that laid the foundations for the group) in the early 2000s. There’s a big parallel between Tao and Hakkasan. The two restaurants launched at similar times (Hakkasan opened in 2001), smashed all expectations and shook up the restaurant market. At the time, most premium restaurants were quite stuffy. But both Tao and Hakkasan had DJs and attracted an energetic crowd. In 2005, I moved to Las Vegas to help open a Tao there. That site turned out to the highest grossing restaurant the US had ever seen and allowed Tao Group Hospitality to expand quickly. We have a number of brands in both the restaurant and nightlife sector including Marquee, Avenue and Beauty & Essex.
How did you come to be in the UK?
I opened lots of restaurants for Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss (the group’s founder and co-CEOs). When the merger with Hakkasan Group happened in 2021 I was lucky enough to be asked to come to London and help wrap our arms around the legacy Hakkasan Group team to impart our ethos and share best practice on both sides of the pond. The brands here have been extremely successful and are very good at what they do.
What are your wider plans for London?
London is now a global culinary destination. It would be foolish for us not to focus on it especially as we have a strong foothold already. We are actively looking for opportunities in terms of both partnerships with hotels and bricks-and-mortar projects.
Business must be good…
The luxury market in London is stronger than most other markets currently. It’s therefore not surprising that there has been a big influx of premium brands from all over the world. We view this as a good thing. The more London is put on the global culinary map, the better it is for us.
What are the key challenges in London?
It’s no secret that hospitality was hit tremendously hard during the pandemic. And we’re still facing a lot of challenges now, not least rising costs and a shallow labour pool. In all the markets we operate in, our strategy has been to focus on the product we offer and look after the staff we do have as well as we possibly can. The guest experience cannot outweigh the employee experience. This is because the employee experience has such a big impact on the guest experience. We need to extend the same level of hospitality to our team members as we do our guests.
