Andy Masi and the art of staying out

A $300 bottle of vodka is an excellent way to start an argument. Andy Masi remembers the objections: the price, the dress code, the suggestion that a night inside a casino should require a different pair of shoes. He and Andrew Sasson were building Light at the Bellagio, and people thought the proposition was absurd. The bottle, of course, came with somewhere to sit and a particular kind of evening. That was the proposition they were selling. Years later, Masi would become interested in another customer: someone who wanted a good drink and enough room to have a conversation.

There is a pleasing complication in his career. Having helped develop the big Las Vegas night out, he began looking for the places that might fit between its larger attractions. A restaurant. A lounge. A bar where the group could settle in without making the evening feel like an expedition. Clique Hospitality grew around that interest.

The education at floor level

Before the hotel partnerships, there were empty bottles to collect from a Boston nightclub floor. Masi’s early hospitality work put him close to the unglamorous machinery of other people’s enjoyment. Someone has to clear up while everyone else is having a wonderful time. A nightclub looks different from that height.

The New York native worked in Boston’s club scene in the 1990s, then arrived in Las Vegas to open House of Blues at Mandalay Bay in 1999. He and Sasson co-founded The Light Group in 2001. The names that followed were brisk enough to fit on a cocktail napkin: Light, Mist, Fix, Jet, Stack, Bare. The business developed across casino hotels, combining restaurants, bars and nightlife.

A guest could eat, have a drink and continue into the night without leaving the property. For a hotel, those were connected opportunities. For a visitor, they were simply a convenient answer to the question of what to do next.

The price of a bottle

Light’s bottle-service pitch asked customers to buy into the room as much as the drink. Masi’s recollection of the resistance is wonderfully concrete: people objected to paying hundreds for vodka and to being turned away in sneakers, shorts or hats. Even pleasure, apparently, required a little administration.

“I think we really hit the market at the right time,” he said in 2018. That qualification matters. It gives the market a role in a story that could otherwise become a tale of individual foresight. Guests were willing to spend on a particular social setting. Masi and his partners supplied it, and the business expanded.

In December 2014, Morgans Hotel Group announced an agreement to sell The Light Group to Hakkasan at a $36 million enterprise value. The deal covered Morgans’ controlling interest and the remaining combined stake held by Sasson and Masi. A business built around nights out had acquired the paperwork of a corporate transaction.

Retirement, briefly

Masi took a short break. By 2015, he was back developing projects through Clique. Chef Brian Massie had continued running Hearthstone at Red Rock while Masi was away, and the two resumed working together. The restaurant gave his next chapter a practical starting point.

His interests were changing, too. Restaurants and lounges appealed to him personally. He could see demand for a bar where people could meet without committing to the whole nightclub production. Downtown Las Vegas offered examples. He wanted more of that choice on the Strip.

The early proposition for Clique lounge at the Cosmopolitan included cocktails made tableside, music, food and an informal welcome. The ambition had a distinctly human scale: give people somewhere they could sit down together. In a city practiced at making an entrance, there was business to be done in making people comfortable after they arrived.

Dinner is fieldwork

Developing Salute at Red Rock involved travel along the Amalfi Coast, sampling Southern Italian dishes and working out what might translate to Las Vegas. Masi and Station Casinos’ Frank Fertitta had crossed paths in Capri restaurants before working together. Their conversations about remembered meals helped shape the project.

It is an appealing form of research, though somebody eventually has to turn a remembered holiday dish into a menu that a kitchen can produce again tomorrow. The pleasure and the repetition belong to the same business.

Masi’s collaborations with chefs run through his career. At Kumi, he worked with Akira Back on Japanese food with a Korean-American influence. In San Diego, JoJo Ruiz became a partner at Lionfish, then continued with Masi on Serēa at Hotel del Coronado in 2019. The people making dinner deserve as much attention as the person arranging the room.

A wall you could fly from

Small details have never excluded a large theatrical gesture. At Light in Mandalay Bay, the collaboration with Cirque du Soleil included an Acrowall behind the DJ booth, a surface performers could bounce and jump from. The nightclub itself became part of the apparatus of the show.

Kumi’s design worked at a different register: Japanese carpentry references, a black ceiling with gold calligraphy and a commissioned cherry-blossom photograph in the rotunda. Masi could describe the specific things a guest would see. The designs gave each venue its own visual vocabulary.

That helps explain the range of collaborators around him. A chef, a designer and an entertainment company bring different skills to the same evening. Someone still has to consider how the pieces will meet when the doors open. The customer encounters the finished room all at once.

“It stopped being about me a long time ago.”

Andy Masi, 2021

Through the janitor’s door

The Barbershop Cuts & Cocktails takes a joke and gives it a floor plan. At the Cosmopolitan, guests encounter a functioning barbershop. Behind a janitor’s door sits the cocktail lounge. A sensible errand has acquired a suspiciously enjoyable extension.

Masi developed the project with nightlife partners Ryan Labbe and Jason Craig. When it opened in March 2019, the hidden room included a wooden bar originating in nineteenth-century Kentucky, crystal chandeliers and seating arranged around an entertainment space. Whisky had a substantial presence on the drinks list. Gavin Rossdale’s Bush performed for the opening festivities.

The entrance supplies a small discovery before anyone orders. Then the ordinary demands of hospitality resume: a drink, a seat, music, company. A secret door can earn the first visit. The evening on the other side has to do the rest.

One hotel, three different moods

At Pendry San Diego, which opened in 2017, Clique took on Lionfish, Oxford Social Club and The Pool House. That combination offered dinner, nightlife and an open-air rooftop setting within one hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter.

Oxford’s plush furnishings and banquettes suggested a residential gathering. The Pool House made use of its outdoor position. Lionfish gave Ruiz a place for seasonal coastal cooking. The different rooms could appeal to the same person at different hours, without asking every guest to want the same night.

Masi also kept returning to designers who understood his approach, including Studio Munge and Celano Design Studio. Familiar collaborators could work on unfamiliar settings. In Chicago, Venteux brought a French brasserie, café and shellfish bar into Pendry’s hotel in the Carbide & Carbon Building. The city and the building offered a different starting point.

More choice on the menu

Proper Eats at ARIA expanded the format again. The food hall opened in December 2022, occupying 24,000 square feet with a dozen food and drink options. A guest could choose a quick meal rather than make the evening revolve around a restaurant booking.

Among the opening concepts were Seoul Bird, Wexler’s Deli, Egghead and Temaki. Judy Joo had been looking for a US opportunity for Seoul Bird when Masi approached her about the project. His role included assembling other people’s established ideas alongside Clique’s own.

The varied menus make the social calculation easier for a group with several appetites. Choosing where to eat can consume an impressive portion of the available time to eat. A food hall puts some of those negotiations within walking distance of one another.

The next gathering

By February 2025, Masi was on Amaya’s floor at the Cosmopolitan, talking with guests. One subject was a meal during a Lima layover that had inspired a scallop dish on chef Jason McLeod’s menu. The travel notebook was still finding its way to the table.

The 2026 projects extend his interest in shared occasions. MGM announced Tailgate Beach Club at Mandalay Bay with more than 125 feet of LED screens and a planned May opening. At Caesars Republic Lake Tahoe, Clique’s announced Tessie’s Cocktails & Chords drew its name from the lake’s mythical creature and paired cocktails with live music.

Farther away, Crown Melbourne currently lists Amaya Modern Mexican and Barbershop Cuts & Cocktails for early 2028. A riverfront restaurant and a hidden lounge will take familiar ideas into another city. Their future guests will bring their own expectations.

That is the enduring problem in Masi’s work. The room can be planned; the company people bring into it remains gloriously unpredictable. Somewhere between the two, an evening takes shape. He has spent decades arranging the chairs, the menus and the music for that moment. Then someone asks for another drink, and everyone decides to stay.