At a good bar, standard mixed drinks will range from about $5-$12. If there are exotic ingredients, the price can skyrocket.
Assume a tip of a buck a drink on top of the charged price, more if there’s a lot of work involved in making the drink.
At restaurants and concert venues in Los Angeles, if you order a beer it might range between $4 and $8 depending on size and brand.
For mixed drinks, $5 to $10. If you ask for name brand liquor (like a margarita made with Don Julio instead of 1800), it might be $10 to $15. If you ask for a double, the price usually doubles, so you can certainly pay $30 for a double + name brand margarita at a restaurant.
At the Forum, they charge $8 for a margarita, $10 for a Patron, double those for a double. That’s a mid-scale concert venue. At Sol y Luna in Tarzana, I paid $9 for a margarita, $12 for a Don Julio Cadillac, and if I got a double it would cost double that.
If you go to a bar in a college town, they may have some drinks at $2, or some $1 shots. Other drinks are about $6. Fancier drinks may cost more, but I don’t think it goes up to $25. And they may have $1-$2 beers, which are usually the local generic (Abita in LA, for example) or major brand. They may also have beer specials on other brands, depending on the night.
I know of what I paid, I never paid more than $6 for drinks and sometimes what I requested was paid by someone else, so I never knew the price.
Hmm… maybe I should start a poll on this, just to know where to go to get the cheapest buzz 
And to let this thread become non hijacked.
And I just did
Hence, ending this hijack.
To expand on pricing and bottle service:
A standard bottle (750 ml) has about a dozen drinks. If we assume $8/drink, that’s a total cost of $96 for the bottle’s worth of drinks.
Let’s say you pay $400 for bottle service; that works out to about $33/drink for something that’s going to be decidedly midrange-quality booze.
It could be argued that bottle service is a Veblen good.
New Orleans. The End (if you want world-class U.S. cities). The city runs off of alcohol like Saudi Arabia runs off of oil. I went to college there (Tulane) and drinking can be from the insanely cheap like $15 for a night at the cheap places to $50 for a night where you blackout after some world-class entertainment. That is it’s main industry and it does it well. You can do it for much higher or lower than that based on your preferences. Of course, there are also tons of smaller cities that you have never heard of that offer $1 drinks for a few hour period (Happy Hour) or specials that last the entire night. It isn’t hard to find them but New Orleans does it the best by far.
Which is equivalent to approx 4 to 5 dollar beers in the US since we typically add an approximately $ 1 tip per beer, so it’s that not all that different. Re your 15 to 25 for regular hard alcohol drinks in researching the topic your amazingly high prices on hard alcohol are apparently due to the huge government taxes on it
A 700ml bottle of “basic” spirits (Jim Beam, Johnnie Walker Red, Bundaberg Rum, or nondescript Vodka) holds about 21 Standard Drinks (ie, 21x 30ml serves). You’re looking at about $5-$6 per Basic Drink & Mixer in most places, so $21x$5 is $110 for a bottle of spirits available from any liquor store for $25-$30 or so.
“Bottle Service” would be considered against the Responsible Service of Alcohol legislation here, FWIW. Most places only let you have two drinks per patron on the bar at any given time, and all licensed premises are legally required to refuse service if the patron becomes unduly intoxicated or disorderly. It’s a bit hard to keep an eye on that sort of thing if the guy at the corner table has a bottle of Jim Beam to himself and is drinking it in unmeasured quantities (ie, freepouring it)…
I don’t think the point of bottle service is for one person to chug a bottle. It’s for a group of people to buy a bottle to make drinks.
Understood, but a standard unit of alcohol is smaller than the units that people actually drink when it comes to hard alcohol. If you go to a bar and ask for a shot of booze, you’ll generally get somewhere around 45-60ml. Is it different in Australia?
An jigger is used to measure out the alcohol in every mixed drink. So, you’re most likely getting about 44mls of booze every time.
Yes, it is. Alcohol here is served in measured amounts, beer in particular sized glasses, spirits from a “jigger” or shotglass which holds 30mls.
Bottled/canned/cask alcoholic drinks state the alcohol content and number of “standard drinks”, which is tied into how much you can drink and safely drive (two standard drinks in the first hour and one each hour thereafter for men, as a rough guide- our BAC is .05, FWIW.)
Wow, sucks to be you. How do they deal with mixed drinks that require a little of this, a little of that, and a splash of that other thing?
That’s a good question, to be honest. When I worked in bars and nightclubs it wasn’t usually an issue because almost no-one ever purchased them (too expensive).
There was, IIRC, a half-measure jigger that we’d use in those cases where someone did feel like paying $30 for a cocktail, and all the recipes used proper measures of alcohol (ie 1/2 shot Drink A with 1/2 shot Drink B and 1 shot Drink C). Non-alcoholic stuff could be “a splash of lime” or “pineapple juice to taste” etc, though.
I only deal with the stuff that’s already in bottles or cans or kegs or casks or what have you now and I don’t go clubbing, so I don’t really know how it’s being done for cocktails and the like these days if things have changed (which they may not have).
I should mention that all this stuff only applies to alcohol being served on licensed premises- it’s entirely legal for you to buy a bottle of Jack Daniels and sit on your verandah and drink the lot straight out of the bottle if you so choose.
This is what I love about the Straight Dope. In most forums, a thread like this would just result in futile speculation about the nature of such clubs, but here we have a guy come in and say, “I’ve been to one. It kinda sucks.” By the way, are you going to tell us *why *you were on the exclusive list?
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Interesting. Japan doesn’t appear to have any restrictions like that. Even the little hole-in-the-wall bars offer a bottle service, where they write your name on the bottle and keep it on the shelf for the next time you come in. It’s sort of their way of advertising, “These are our regulars”.
Cerowyn could probably tell you how much a bottle goes for, as he always seems to have one waiting whenever we get together.
It depends on the place. When I was in sales, I used to have bunch of them floating around there. Now I don’t entertain, most of them have expired. I’ve still got one there in a quiet jazz bar because they’re really cool and don’t care if I only show up once a year now.
The typical izakaya low-cost restaurant / drinking place can be as little as $50 for a bottle of shochu. I have a bottle of Scotch at the Jazz bar and it’s about $150. A Wild Turkey there would be $100, IIRC.
I wouldn’t say that I’ve been to a Really Exclusive Event - the “celebrities” at this one (that we were theoretically going to be in the same room as) included Pauly Shore and Kevin Federline, not Beyonce.
Basic story - my buddy’s bachelor party in LV. He knows the Kardashian/Jenner family, thus the link. I’ve had dinner with Bruce and Kris, they were very nice people.
Idle speculation time: I don’t imagine that it’d be a different club atmosphere if they are only letting the Very Famous Folks and Beautiful People in; the doormen probably filter out most of the sort of people who will hassle the VIPs and management + celeb “handlers” keep the rest at a distance so Kanye West can get his groove on without being crushed by a million autograph seekers & groupies. If you want to move in those circles you probably learn how to behave so you get in at the next club.
I feel a need to point out that the actual mechanics of his party with the celebrities at Pearl sounds exactly the same as the bachelor party I went to at Rain. In other words, pretty much anyone can have an “exclusive” party at one of these clubs. You just have to be willing to pay for it.
Kind of the way Rain is set up, they have this massive dance floor that probably holds about a thousand people. There are stairs leading up to a network of mezzanines and walkways that have little VIP sections overlooking the main dance floor. To get into the main dance floor you have to wait in the line with everyone where you will be subjected to the normal favoritism towards groups of hot girls, friends of the bouncers or management and so on. If you reserved a VIP section, you just go right in. You can go wherever you want, but the bouncers make sure only VIPs and their guests get to the VIP section.
It’s kind of nice because you have a place to relax and hang out, instead of standing in the mob of people on the dance floor. And you don’t have to wait for drinks.
I’m not sure how “exclusive” it is though. I mean I guess it is if you grew up with keg parties and then married and moved out to the suburbs after high school or college making $55k a year. I sort of take the whole thing for granted living in New York for the past several years. I end up going to a lot of corporate or alumni events, birthday parties and whatnot that are some variation on the VIP section in an upscale, overpriced club/lounge theme.
Maybe it’s different out in LA where everything revolves around the movie industry. But I sort of assumed that the “exclusive nightclub full of celebrities” thing was more a product of some club promoters hype than anything else. “Oh yeah, Jay-Z is here all the time and last week Shia Labouffe was drinking Crystal with his boys over there” and then you show up and it’s like 500 nobodies in “going out” shirts. Generally if a celebrity is at the club you are at, they are either in a private party in a VIP section where they don’t have to deal with you or sometimes they just happen to be there hanging out.