(Bloomberg) -- Tao Group Hospitality, an international dining and nightlife brand that is a favorite of Wall Street, is bringing one of its most popular restaurants to London. The UK’s first outpost of Lavo Ristorante will debut in the BoTree hotel when it opens on the Mayfair-Marylebone border in late summer.

Lavo will anchor the food and beverage offerings at the BoTree, in a two-level restaurant with a dolce vita vibe and a Southern Italian menu. Tao will also develop a rooftop bar, a ground-floor lounge and a live music club downstairs in the hotel. 

“We had been looking to bring Lavo to the UK for a while,” says Noah Tepperberg, the Tao Group Hospitality’s co-founder and co-chief executive officer, who made his name in the hospitality business in 2003 with the opening of Marquee nightclub in New York. London will be the sixth location for the Lavo brand after New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego and Singapore.

The opening will come on the heels of a burst of spending by Americans in the UK; they’ve been outspending pretty much everyone in London. “A lot of the hotel base will be US travelers,” Tepperberg says. “That’s why it makes so much sense.”

The Lavo menu will feature crowd-pleasing dishes like tagliatelle al limone with butter and caviar, wagyu beef meatballs with whipped ricotta, and whole-grain crusted pizzas, as well as salt-baked sea bass. The restaurant will be spread out between the lower level and ground floor where it will be fronted by a glass wall with plenty of natural light; it will also have an indoor-outdoor bar. “This style of cuisine, the way the menu reads, it works well for a luxury hotel: light dishes, salads, pastas for lunch and dinner,” Tepperberg says. 

Tao has been on an expansion tear lately. At around the same time as Lavo opens in London, the group will launch Casadonna in Miami, adding to more than 80 locations across the globe. The company, which was recently purchased by Mohari Investment Firm in a deal valued at around $550 million, licenses its brands to many locations while taking on their own projects at others.

The restaurants at the BoTree mark a major push into London for Tao, which already operates Yauatcha, the popular Cantonese dim-sum restaurant, and the Michelin-starred Hakkasan in the UK capital.

The nine-story BoTree hotel will have 199 rooms that start at £500 ($622) a night; its sister London properties include The Guardsman (named for its proximity to Buckingham Palace) and Middle Eight in Covent Garden.

Tao will oversee the room service and has plans for a bespoke in-room cocktail program. Each floor will have a dedicated “host” to ensure, among other things, that food and drinks are delivered speedily, says Rishi Sachdev, founder of the BoTree and a former derivatives trader for Lehman Brothers.

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.