MILA opened on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach in January 2020, six weeks before the pandemic shutdown. Five years later, the restaurant has been ranked the highest-grossing independent restaurant in the United States by Restaurant Business Online and PROFILE Miami (December 2024 reporting). The room — MediterrAsian on the menu, rooftop lounge above, sushi counter at the back — does its number through a combination of all-day covers, a private-client list that books months ahead and a bar programme that runs late. The empire that has been built around it is the more interesting story.
The corporate spine is Riviera Dining Group, founded by Joao Bigotte and operating across Miami Beach, the Miami River, Brickell and Winter Park, Florida. In December 2021, Mark Scheinberg's Mohari Hospitality — the global investment vehicle Scheinberg established in 2017 after the 2014 sale of PokerStars — took a significant minority stake to fund the expansion (Mohari Hospitality press release, 2 December 2021). It was Mohari's first direct investment in the F&B category. The capital was used to develop the next generation of concepts and to professionalise the operating platform — kitchen, beverage, design, private-client and reservations all sit on a shared back-office stack.
The 2026 openings are the test of the platform. Casa Neos opened on the Miami River in late 2024 as the group's largest room to date — approximately 35,000 square feet across 400 seats, a French-Mediterranean menu with Ibiza and Mykonos accents, and a waterfront footprint that the trade press has consistently described as the most ambitious independent restaurant build in South Florida in a decade. Claudie, an homage to the South of France, opened in Brickell in early 2025 (PR Newswire, RDG release dated 4 February 2025). AVA, the group's existing Winter Park concept, and MM, the more casual Winter Park sibling, complete the current portfolio. The pipeline has been described in the trade press as actively considering hospitality (members' floor, club, hotel-adjacent rooms) rather than further pure restaurant inventory.
The strategic question that the model now faces is whether the MILA original — which carries the group's reputation and a meaningful share of its profit — can be successfully extended into a multi-city brand without losing the Miami Beach scarcity premium that makes the original work. MILA Saudi Arabia was confirmed in late 2024 as a planned opening in collaboration with Saudi hospitality groups. A second MILA on the European Mediterranean has been the subject of repeated trade-press speculation through 2025. Both moves would convert MILA from a restaurant into a brand — a transition that, in the hospitality category, has historically rewarded the operators who hold the line on opening pace (Cipriani's roughly twenty cities over forty years, Major Food Group's deliberate cluster approach in Miami and New York) and punished those who try to scale faster than the chef and beverage talent can keep up.
The financing structure that Mohari brought to the platform is the second strategic asset. Scheinberg's vehicle takes long-dated minority positions on a hospitality-focused mandate, and the Mohari portfolio includes investments in W South Beach, Casa Tua's expansion, the Standard Hotels and other UHNW-facing hospitality businesses. The implicit valuation work the Mohari capital has done on RDG is not public, but the operating model — restaurant + private-client + selective international expansion + adjacent hospitality — is now the case study the family-office investor reads when considering an F&B platform investment in the trophy-restaurant category.
The Miami context is the part that should interest the broader UHNW reader. South Florida between 2020 and 2025 absorbed the largest wealth migration the city has recorded in modern times: Citadel's headquarters relocation, the hedge-fund expansions detailed in the Beesy essay on Brickell, the influx of New York and California principals through Indian Creek, Star Island and the Edgewater towers. The dining infrastructure has had to keep up. MILA was the room that proved that South Beach could support a $200-per-cover, all-night, table-priority operation at the same density and consistency that New York or Paris would have demanded. Casa Neos and Claudie are the rooms that prove the model is repeatable. The next opening — and the geography it lands in — will tell the market whether Riviera Dining Group is going to be the Miami answer to the Major Food Group consolidation, or whether the platform has more international ambition than the home market has appetite for.
The 2026 calendar will resolve the question.
— Camille Vedy
