Who

With partner Noah Tepperberg, Jason Strauss manages the nightspots Marquee, Avenue, Tao (in NYC and Las Vegas), and Lavo, which is located in Vegas' Palazzo Hotel. Strauss spends most of his time in Las Vegas these days overseeing the company's Sin City outposts, but he remains one of New York's foremost nightlife impresarios.

Backstory

Manhattan-raised Strauss attended Riverdale and supposedly met Noah Tepperberg when he refused to let the Stuyvesant student into a party he was hosting. (He says he eventually relented.) The two first started working together as college students, promoting parties in the city when they were home on vacation. After graduating from Boston University, Strauss returned to New York and turned to promoting full-time, teaming up with Tepperberg to host events in Manhattan and the Hamptons. In 2001, they founded the Strategic Group to give their promoting and event production efforts a name. Two years later, they opened Marquee, converting a 7,500-square-foot former taxi garage in far west Chelsea into one of the city's most high profile hotspots, attracting a steady stream of boldfaced names and the attendant namechecks in Page Six.

Of note

Tepperberg and Strauss have their hands in several venues these days. There's Marquee, of course, which continues to make a mint even though the celeb quotient isn't what it was. They're also partners in the circus-like Tao in Midtown, and partnered with Tao's majority owners, Marc Packer and Richard Wolf, to open an Ilan Waisbrod-designed outpost of the restaurant-club at the Venetian in Las Vegas. In September 2008, Strauss and Tepperberg launched another Vegas venue, a restaurant/nightclub called Lavo located in the Palazzo Hotel. They opened their most recent venue in 2009, the gastropub Avenue in Chelsea.

Strauss now spends most of his time in Vegas, where he oversees Tao (the top grossing restaurant/club in the U.S. in 2008 for a second year in a row) and Lavo. Tepperberg oversees the biz from the firm's New York office.

Personal

Strauss is single. (One of his many ex-girlfriends is Rachel Uchitel, the woman alleged to have had an affair with Tiger Woods.) In New York, he lives in a condo at 260 Park Avenue South that he purchased for $1.7 million in 2006.

For the record

Invitations to Strauss's 30th birthday party in 2004 read: "In 1974, after many years of fighting an unjust war in Vietnam, the United States finally decided to pull out! That same year, thankfully, Richard Strauss did not!"