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After Dark
Zuri Bar, MGM Grand
7
WORD OF MOUTH
“We always begin a night out in Vegas at Red Square. You can get
a Key Lime Pie Martini, with graham cracker crust on the rim, or a
Chernobyl (guaranteed to cause a meltdown!) for under $10.”
—Here_today_gone2Maui
“Ghost Bar is pretty overrated in my opinion. The view from outside
is great, but the drinks are super expensive.”
—jcolem2
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After Dark
AFTE R D ARK
PL AN NE R
Raves & Faves
Finding Out What’s Going On
Best place to channel the Rat
Pack: Peppermill’s Fireside
Lounge, with its lethal Scorpion cocktail.
With the number of nightlife options in Las Vegas, it’s not
hard to be overwhelmed. These local publications can
steer you in the right direction and help you plan your ultimate Vegas night out. Remember that party schedules—as
well as the popularity of any one spot—can change overnight, so the best way of keeping current is to consult these
publications.
Best outdoor patio: With Strip
views, cabanas, private tables, a
deejay, and a dance floor, PURE
at Caesars Palace is the perfect
way to spend a night under the
stars. Those without a fear of
heights might also try Mix at
Mandalay Bay’s THEhotel and
Moon at the Palms.
Best antidote to the Strip: For
an alternative scene, the nofrills rocker pub Double Down
Saloon rules, although up-andcomers like Art Bar, Beauty Bar,
and the Artisan Lounge are giving it a run for its money.
Best burlesque joint: A sultry
three-piece jazz combo provides the jams for sexy burlesque performances at Ivan
Kane’s Forty Deuce.
Best legal high: The “hookahs”
at Paymon’s Mediterranean
Café and Hookah Lounge.
Best happy hour noshing:
The affordable tapas and sangria at Firefly on Paradise.
Best nonstop party: Seamless turns on a dime from elegant strip club to all-night dance
party, especially on the weekends and at Monday’s Industry
Night at Forty Deuce.
The Las Vegas Advisor (E 3687 S. Procyon Ave., Las
Vegas89103 P 800/244–2224) is available at its
office for $5 per issue or $50 per year; this monthly newsletter is invaluable for its information on Las Vegas dining,
entertainment, gambling promotions, comps, and news.
If you’re here for a short visit, pick up free copies of Today
in Las Vegas and What’s On in Las Vegas at hotels and
gift shops.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the city’s daily newspaper,
publishes a tabloid pullout section each Friday called
“Neon.” It provides entertainment features and reviews,
and showroom and lounge listings with complete time and
price information. The “Neon” section is sold separately
for a quarter in some news boxes along the resort corridor. The Review-Journal maintains a Web site (w www.
reviewjournal.com) where show listings are updated each
week. The Las Vegas Sun, once a competing daily, is now
a section inside the Review-Journal but maintains its own
editorial staff and Web site, w www.lasvegassun.com.
Two excellent alternative weekly newspapers are distributed at retail stores and coffee shops around town and
maintain comprehensive Web sites. Las Vegas Weekly
(w www.lasvegasweekly.com) and Las Vegas City Life
(w www.lasvegascitylife.com) offer some timely and incisive reflections on the nightclub scene and music outside
the realm of the casinos.
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After Dark Planner > 227
How to Get In
Avoiding the Scams
Nobody comes to Las Vegas to wait in line. So how exactly
do you get past those velvet ropes? Short of personally
knowing the brutal-looking bouncers and serious-looking
women holding clipboards that guard the doors, here are
a few pointers.
There are a couple of scams
to keep in mind. First, nearly
every tourist—and even many
locals—uses taxis to get around
at night. (Forget the perils of
driving after knocking back a
few drinks—just finding parking can make your head spin.)
Some cabbies enjoy a sort of
symbiotic relationship with club
owners. If you ask your driver
to take you to “the hottest club
in town,” chances are you’ll end
up at a club where the manager
will pay the driver a kickback.
The place might be hot, but
chances are better that it will
be not. This system seems to
be especially true with nude
strip clubs, where the lack of
a liquor license makes managers even more anxious to pack
the place.
First, know that even though this is a 24-hour town, lines
start forming around 10. If you’re not on a list, get there
early and dress the part—which is to say, don’t expect
to go straight from the pool to the club. Vegas bars and
clubs have pretty strict dress codes, so leave those T-shirts,
baseball caps, and ripped jeans in your hotel room (unless
you’re headed to the Art Bar or some other hipster haven).
Arguing that your sneakers were made by Hugo Boss probably won’t help, either. At most of the trendier spots, skin is
in—this is Vegas, after all. And needless to say, the universal rule of big-city nightlife also applies in Vegas: groups of
guys almost always have a harder time getting in without
a few women in the mix. If your group is gender impaired,
consider politely asking some unaccompanied women to
temporarily join you, perhaps in exchange for some drinks
once you’re all inside. Too shy, you say? If there was ever a
place to check your shyness at the airport, it’s Vegas.
Most spots have two lines: a VIP line and a regular line.
You can usually get in the VIP line if you’re on the guest list
or have reserved a table with bottle service. You can either
ask your hotel concierge for help contacting a club to get
on a guest list, or contact the club directly. Some Web sites
such as w www.vegas.com sell passes they guarantee will
get you past the crush, but save your money for the door—
better to slip the bouncer $20 per person than hope they’ll
acknowledge the Internet ticket you’ve bought for the same
amount. If you have a few people in your group, it might
be worth it to splurge on a table reservation: without one, a
group of five could easily spend $20 each getting in good
with the bouncers, plus $20 each for the cover charge, and
then there’s always the expensive drinks.
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Another scam involves the
“celebrity buzz” around certain
hotspots—for example, “Last
weekend Paris Hilton was making out with a busboy at Jet!”
Although this might cause a
stampede to the club in question, a celebrity’s presence
there—or anywhere, for that
matter—is very likely thanks to
the cool fifty grand (or upward)
that clubs are said to pay for
such visitations.
Even if you’re not staying at
a given club’s resort, ask the
concierge for a VIP admission
pass. If you do it right, you have
a better chance of scoring free
or VIP entry.
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After Dark
Updated by
Gary Lippman
LAS VEGAS’S NIGHTLIFE HAS NEVER been hotter, spicier, or, for that
matter, more competitive. Fueled by the “What happens in Vegas, stays
in Vegas” advertisements (read: “All your sins here expunged completely once you pay your credit card bill”), nightlife impresarios on the
Strip are dipping into their vast pockets in order to create over-the-top
experiences where party-mad Visigoths—plus, well, you and me—can
live out some wild fantasies. The number of high-profile nightclubs,
trendy lounges, and sizzling strip bars continues to grow, each attempting to trump the other in order to attract not just high rollers, but Alist celebrities and the publicity that surrounds them. Gambling? Why
bother when you can lounge beside the pool by day and bellow at the
moon by night while dancing half-clad at a club until noon the following day (when it’s back into the pool you go)?
In the late 1990s, once the Vegas mandarins decided that the “family experience” just wasn’t happening, Sin City nightlife got truly sinful again, drawing raves from clubbers worldwide. A wave of large
dance clubs, such as the Luxor’s Ra, opened their doors, followed by
a trendy batch of cozier ultralounges—lounges with dance floors—like
the MGM Grand’s Tabú.
The game of one-upmanship has continued—recent additions that have
kept the city hopping include the would-be-amazing-even-without-thenudity Men’s Club and the Palms’ sensational two-fer of Moon and
the Playboy Lounge. What’s more, bawdy ’50s-era burlesque lounges
are continuing their comeback with a gaggle of clubs, including Ivan
Kane’s bump-and-grind Forty Deuce at Mandalay Bay and the ultrapopular Pussycat Dolls Lounge at Caesars, now dedicated to the art
of striptease.
Few cities on earth match Vegas in its dedication to upping the nightlife
ante. So with all these choices, no one—not even the Visigoths—have
an excuse for not having fun, whether it’s at a chic lounge, a dance
club, or even a strip joint.
BARS & LOUNGES
CASINO-RESORT HOT SPOTS
The lounges of the Las Vegas casino-hotels were once places where
such headliners as Frank, Dean, and the gang would go after their
shows, taking a seat in the audience to laugh at the comedy antics of
Shecky Greene or Don Rickles. Now the lounges have been mostly
reduced to small bars within the casino where bands play Top 40 hits
in front of people pie-eyed from the slots. Virtually every casino has
such a spot; all you need to do is buy a drink or two, and you can listen
to the music all night long. A few lounges—the Las Vegas Hilton and
Boardwalk among them—have computerized lighting and larger dance
floors, making them as much a small dance club as a live music club.
Some of the nicest are at the Stratosphere, Mandalay Bay, the Mirage,
the Wynn, and the Orleans.
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Buy Now!