LAVO London

LAVO is Tao Group Hospitality's coastal-Italian restaurant and bar, occupying two floors of The BoTree hotel on the corner of Marylebone Lane and Henrietta Place. It opened in September 2023 as the European debut of a name the group has run in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Singapore, and as its first non-Asian restaurant in the UK. The interiors are by the Amsterdam studio Concrete, who set an olive tree at the centre of the ground floor beneath triple-height ceilings and skylights.

The ground floor is the lighter room: a terrazzo-floored bar, banquettes in warm rust tones, a hand-painted botanical ceiling and a fireside terrace reached through LAVO's own guest entrance. A woven-timber staircase drops to the lower ground, a warmer and more enclosed dining room hung with commissioned art and screened in latticework. The mood shifts with the hour, from daylight lunches to a livelier evening with resident DJs on Fridays and across weekend brunch.

The kitchen, led by Stefano Lorenzini under group culinary chief Ralph Scamardella, runs to handmade pasta, wholegrain pizza and the LAVO signatures that travelled from the US, among them a one-pound Wagyu meatball and a twenty-layer chocolate cake. For private events the restaurant hires by the floor or in full: the ground floor takes up to 92 seated, the whole venue up to 220 seated or 360 for a reception, with the bar and terrace available as a smaller private space.