It's the weekend and ... Oh hell, it's any night of the week, really, and you feel like stepping out. Time was in this town that your choices were dives like the Bond-Aire Club, pseudo-dives like the Double Down, or casino spots where you had to share your table with a coin bucket belonging to an old lady from Carlinville.
Those options are still available, but so is a cornucopia of clubs and meta-clubs. There are multi-story nightspots with aerialists and others approaching the square footage of football fields in size. Some have dancing girls straight from a coke-fueled Gidget movie, others offer views of the Strip from more than 1,020 feet up. Still others have multiple rooms with an equal number of music stylings and atmospheres—one-stop shops for booty shaking.
It's all a far cry from anything Frank Detra would have had in mind when he opened this town's first nightclub, the Pair O' Dice, in 1930. And then closed it. And then opened it again. (Frankie had a habit of offering gambling and liquor when they were illegal, leading to frequent shutdowns until the club was sold to Guy McAfee, head of Las Vegas Metro's vice squad.)
Where watering holes were more often seen by the casinos as alcoholic oases in which patrons could catch their breath and wet their lips before heading back out to the tables and slots, by the 1990s, the properties began to realize that an attractive nightlife venue could stand as an actual attraction. People might, just maybe, go to a casino for the club and then stay to gamble. There was even word filtering in from other cities that there were actually some nightclubs that even made money ... just ... on ... their ... own! And the people who went to such places were young. With disposable income.
The MGM Grand was the first to recognize the win-win formula, importing good juju in the form of a disco ball from New York City and opening Studio 54 on New Year's Eve, 1993, with none other than Mrs. James Brolin—Barbra Streisand—as christening agent.
Yes, you read that correctly: hip, new dance club; the woman famous for singing "People who need people are the luckiest people in the world." Eventually, the Strip would figure out that Babs isn't exactly catnip for the younger set (at least not for the straight younger set) and choose ... Mariah Carey to open Pure at Casears. Hey, they're getting closer to the mark.
Regardless of who was hoisting the symbolic first glass of champagne, Studio 54 proved to be a success, and it wasn't long before just about every property was building some sort of room with speakers, a dance floor and a bar. Made more conscious of the nightlife world, it was simply a matter of time before someone noticed a trend in Europe and some major North American cities. No, it wasn't lounges. Vegas had plenty of those.
It was bottle service.
The concept of a bar roping off all their tables and chairs, and only allowing those who pay inflated prices for a bottle of liquor to sit down was a surprise hit during a time when most people were professing a newfound desire for the simple life after the excesses of the '80s.
With Rolexes becoming passe and Mercedes hood ornaments being stolen every time you turned around, having a status symbol that was indoors and protected by bouncers just made sense. Plus, you could enjoy it with your friends.
It took some time—seven years, to be exact—before the first bottle-service lounge opened its doors in Vegas. It was the Venetian and Jack's Velvet Lounge and the neighboring Venus that broke the bottle barrier. That pair, along with C2K and the V-Bar once had the Venetian being described as a club kid's dream by some. That dream wasn't strong enough to survive intact, and doubtless a lot of locals balked at the idea of a velvet rope stretched across their Velvet Lounge. After all, this was a bar inside of the WB Stage 16 restaurant, for chrissakes. The WB restaurant!
It would take a few more years until someplace in Las Vegas got the lounge concept right, and again it was the MGM Grand leading the charge. The space was called Tabú and it was the industry leader when it opened in 2003, and it still is. Worldwide. So much so that a new term was coined. This wasn't just a lounge. This was an ultralounge.
(Yes, ultralounge has become a common enough noun in Las Vegas parlance that it's one word—at least here at the Weekly.)
Like so much of the new Las Vegas, as different from the old Vegas as Steve Wynn is from Bugsy Siegel, this ultralounge was everything that other bottle-service lounges were, but more and better. Seven million dollars was poured into its design and construction, carving a chunk out of the casino floor, within a garnish toss of MGM's regular lounge, Zuri.
The concept, like the amount of cash spent, was typically Vegas, too. Going to Tabú was not meant to be similar to going to your chichi lounge back home. It was to be entertainment, an experience. Strolling through the Forum Shops, you see the same Gap and Banana Republic stores as you do in any other shopping mall in North America. But the experience is bigger. It becomes a constant state of consumerist frisson—enjoyable even if nothing is purchased. Tabú was designed with the same goal in mind, though of course they prefer it if you do buy a cocktail or two.
The child of MGM Grand's president, Gamal Aziz, designer and architect Jeffrey Beers and a former Cirque du Soleil executive producer, Roger Parent, the ultralounge boasts three distinct rooms, animated murals, and reactive technology that allows guests to affect the image-projection effects that grace the bar and tables. Add to that the more visceral pleasure of being surrounded by physically stunning staff who double as fashion models every Wednesday night.
As Beers said in a statement at the opening, "While elements of desire and intrigue are present throughout, the environment allows guests to make their own interpretation of the space and hopefully takes them to a place that they have never been before."
Just two short years later, it's easy to forget what an impact Tabú has had on the Las Vegas nightlife world, especially in a city where the collective memory is imploded every few months to make room for new and improved memories. A year after its opening, it picked up awards for Best Lounge and Best Visuals at the Club Systems International World Club Awards at the Winter Music Conference in Miami.
Hot on Tabú's heels were Risque at Paris and the Ghostbar at the Palms, and today Vegas is the mecca of ultralounges, with Curve at the Aladdin, the Foundation Room at Mandalay Bay, Plush at the JW Marriott and the latest two at the Rio: I-Bar and Flirt. And while each one has its own charms and appeal, all of them are fighting to reach and beat the bar that the MGM Grand has set.