Barbon’s Bar in New York has a nice atmosphere, if you don’t mind the fact that it’s packed with red-haired thugs. There’s a sexy singer in a blue dress named Electra; however, if you get too close to her, she will strip off her dress and attack you with a whip that sends out an electrical shock. (I guess that’s where she got her name.) If you manage to defeat her, you can go out into the alley behind the bar, where Barbon himself will rip off his shirt, revealing his bulging muscles, and then attack you. If you get hungry during the fight, you can break open one of the trash cans nearby for a big turkey dinner.
I’ve been there! But we needed reservations so we couldn’t actually go.
Video game?
I hope.
Streets of Rage apparently.
I don’t normally hang out in Chelsea.
You can try asking the hostess to call you when seats open up. That’s what we did when we didn’t have reservations, so we just grabbed some hot dogs and wandering the park for a bit until she called us.
Still there. You don’t go there for the drinks (and especially the food); you go there for the theme and decor, and also the way they humiliate first time visitors. Aside from the “main entrance” (a side door on an alley off the Riverwalk) there is also a sliding panel that enters into the Newsroom Pub and the phone booth that deposits you onto the Riverwalk. It’s not a place to go out to hang out casually; it’s a place that you take visiting friends and tourists to.
There are a number of back alley bars in Hollywood and downtown LA, but they come and go with the kind of frequency astonishing even for the city that reinvents itself every seven years.
Stranger
I once got invited to a secret (and presumably illegal) club (as in “clubbing”) in London - the bar staff were smoking spliffs etc. There were only 2 toilets and since they were both busy I ended up vomiting on the floor in a chill out space, where a few couples were lazily chatting. I didn’t get invited back.
The phenomenon of secret hipster bars has been around awhile. The topic comes up in the movie Swingers, and I know of one in Atlanta that’s been around since that time.
By the way, the sculpture in the OP is one of my all-time favorites, by the late Marshall Fredericks.
Thanks for the info on Marfreless; I’d heard of it, but never quite knew where it was.
The first thing in Houston that came to my mind on the O.P. was Valhalla, a bar in the basement of the chemistry building on Rice University. Dirt cheap beer prices and a really relaxed atmosphere.
La Carafe just feels like a secret bar, with the dark lighting, nooks and crannies, and especially the second bar upstairs. Possibly the most romantic bar in Houston.
Most of the other “secret” bars I’m aware of in Houston are after-hours type places, serving booze after the legal close of 2 A.M. Accordingly, they don’t last all that long.
Red Door would probably count—it’s entrance is a single Red Door, set in a floodlit exterior wall, but the velvet rope, line of people, and hosts with clipboards, kinda’ give the thing away.
I totally was believing you until you got the to part about the big turkey dinner. Hipsters don’t eat turkey dinners. (Except for ironic turkey dinners, of course.)
Wow, crazy, crazy times. Unless this is some kind of code?
I’ve been to all kinds of secret bars in Muslim countries. In Kabul in 2002, there was the Irish pub which got shut down when CNN did a story on it. In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, there were a couple of secret bars; one place served beer wrapped in cut up Coke cans, another place was a speak easy complete with a little sliding door they would look out before letting you in. At that bar, one time Sharia police climbed onto the roof of the house next door and raided the terrace bar by jumping down off the roof of the neighbors. It was a very “no one expects the Sharia poice moment.”
A similar thing happened to me in Dongguan in China, I was looking for some friends in a hotel ; I pressed the button for the 3rd floor and there was a bar with loads of skimpily dressed Chinese women. None of them spoke English. A man approached me and asked me which girl I would like, he said he would send her to my room. I left.
Those aren’t lounges, they’re whorehouses.
If you want to count those, there are innumerable “barber shops” in Taipei County and further out in the sticks that would fit that very broad bill.
Apparently the Australian Embassy in Kabul used to do a thriving side business as a bar, according to a reliable source of mine.
Tokyo Disneyland also has a Club 33 but it’s located in the World Bazaar (Main Street USA) part of the Park.
In addition to that, this Park and Tokyo DisneySea next door also have hidden sponsor lounges. Guests and VIP’s related to sponsors of certain facilities or attractions can use the hidden lounges that are often themed to the ride where it’s housed.
Lastly, one of the restaurants in Tokyo DisneySea, Magellan’s has a hidden dining area in the “wine cellar.”
There’s a nice website with information on Disneyland’s Club 33 at http://www.disneylandclub33.com
According to that site, the current wait time for membership is 14 years.
Now, there are all kinds of places that sell booze in Kabul, I kind of miss the prohibition days when it was more of an adventure to go out drinking.