DREW BARRYMORE is sipping from a £600 bottle of Napa Valley Opus One wine in Fix restaurant. Mickey Rourke is downing a £500 bottle of Grey Goose vodka and dancing with a Paris Hilton lookalike in Light nightclub. Spiderman star Tobey Maguire is betting $5,000 a hand at poker in the high rollers’ suite, next to Caramel bar.

It is Saturday night in Las Vegas and, for one man, the stakes could not be higher.

Andrew Sasson is pacing the floor, making sure that the stars’ night is “a blast”. In his pinstriped suit, Sasson looks like the hero of the latest Vegas crime caper. But this is not the follow-up to Mickey Blue Eyes. The man with the “Briddish” accent and tousled brown hair is a 35-year-old from Walton-on-Thames in Surrey.

Sasson runs the fast-expanding Las Vegas based Light Group, which has gone from being a one-man band to a £400m, 200-employee outfit in the past four years. It runs Light nightclub, Fix restaurant and Caramel bar in the Bellagio hotel, and Mist bar in the Treasure Island casino. And it is about to open a new club called Jet, a restaurant called Stack, and a lounge bar called Mink, all in the Mirage hotel. Next year Light will expand into the booming Vegas property market, with the first of four £100m apartment blocks.

Forbes magazine, America’s business bible, recently hailed Sasson as Sin City’s “up-and-comer ... who is on his way to the top”. Veteran Vegas casino boss, Steve Wynn, who has just opened the most expensive hotel in North America, the £1.5 billion Wynn Las Vegas, said Sasson was “very talented”.

Sasson may not yet be making a jackpot-sized fortune — his personal stake in Light is worth £50m, a modest sum in a city where casinos turn over billions — but he is feted because he is one of a select band of entrepreneurs who are transforming Vegas’s image.

The dusty desert town, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in May, is desperate to shed its seedy image and become the new American capital of upmarket chic. Every newspaper in town is full of ads for the kind of modern, fashionable hotels, bars, restaurants and entertainment you can find in New York or London.

Sasson kick-started the trend when he opened Light five years ago. The club continues to attract the new breed of young celebrities. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz are regulars. The masses follow in their wake.

British acts such as Sir Elton John may have been playing to sell-out crowds for years but, when it comes to business, Britons have lost out to American rivals in Las Vegas. When the casino giant London Clubs International tried to break into the market six years ago by opening the £900m Aladdin casino, the group lost its shirt, racking up debts of £100m.

How has Sasson made it big where others have failed? “I’ve been psycho for bars and clubs ever since I was 15 and, unlike a lot of Brits, I don’t look down my nose at Vegas,” he said. “I work 24 hours a day until I get my clubs and bars right.”

Sasson’s determination to succeed grows out of a classic misspent youth. Born in Surrey and expelled from school at 15, he moved to Spain, where he got a job in Benidorm, running a string of bars. After three years “getting drunk, chasing girls and turning into a total degenerate”, he returned to Britain where his father told him to get an education.

Sasson had recently seen the teen movie Porky’s. Impressed by scenes of American spring-break debauchery, he told his father he wanted to go to America. “My old man said that it was too expensive. I told him: ‘You start me off and I’ll take care of the rest.’ I don’t think he believed me, but he is very proud of me now.”

With £2,000 in his pocket, Sasson moved to Miami. He went to a community college, got a high-school diploma, and went on to take a marketing course. After college he started hanging out on South Beach, just as Miami was beginning to emerge as a fashionable tourist and clubbing area.