Drink Your Whiskey, Drink Your Grain, Bottoms Up And You Don’t Feel Pain

Is bottle service a concrete example of economic sclerosis, symptom of cultural decay or simple douchebaggery? Probably all of the above:

The scene on Chrystie couldn’t be more different than the one that happens every weekend on the stretch of West 27th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Club Row, as it’s called, resembles a better-dressed version of Mardi Gras. Girls with flat-ironed flaxen hair, wearing glittery tops and tight jeans, totter on their high heels from one velvet rope to another. The clubs all have exotic, glamorous names — Cain, Marquee, Bungalow 8, Pink Elephant — and offer the promise of opulence and intrigue once inside. The reality is far less interesting. Inside, the clone-like crowds come to party the only way they know how — the way they learned from watching hip-hop videos. They stand on the little booths and shake and shimmy, hoisting bottles of vodka — priced 1,000 percent over what you’d pay in a store — over their heads. As some Jay-Z song plays over the speakers, for a minute, they are Bling. They feel fabulous. And then they order another $300 round.

Bottle service gained popularity in the early ’90s as a complimentary service offered to VIPs and moneyed clientele. Sevigny remembers when the O Bar, a long-closed club, started offering the service in a way that seemed more quaint than snobbish: A patron could buy a bottle, and if he or she didn’t finish it, they’d hold it behind the bar. Bottle service today, though, entails a customer buying a normal bottle of liquor — vodka or champagne, usually — for $150 to $500 (if not more), served with a mélange of mixers and a booth to sit in for the duration of the night. Once this was a rare luxury, even somewhat practical. When a club was too crowded, or a patron too famous, it was a way to keep the star relatively secluded and sated. In the ’90s, at the Tunnel’s Green Room, “once in a while a European would come in and buy a bottle,” says longtime nightlife veteran Steven Lewis. “It was done, but very rarely. There wasn’t really a program of bottle service.” But as the ’90s wore on, the quirky club-kid world faded and the real estate market exploded, making bottle service not just trendy, but almost necessary to stay in business. Lewis, with his partners Mark Baker and Jeffrey Jah, brought bottle service over to the now defunct Life, on Sullivan Street. “Rents are 300 percent more expensive” Jah, a co-owner of Lotus, says. “Insurance can be up to half a million a year.” Meanwhile, drink prices and cover charges stayed mostly the same. Something had to give.

As club owners quickly figured out, everyone wanted to be a VIP, or at least feel like one. Bottle service was an easy and very financially sound means of achieving mutual happiness for both the club and the clientele. A 38-table club like Marquee, selling bottles at $350 a pop, can rake in $20,000 a night minimum, and that’s not counting bar sales or cover charges.

But while clubs were flush and clients were drunk, the results of the bottle service boom were showing on nightlife, which now had all the excitement and pizzazz of a corporate party thrown in a hotel conference room. “Bottle service only makes sense for six to eight people in a crowded room and you don’t want to wait,” says Jah, who estimates that 30 percent of his profits are due to the trend. Nonetheless, he says the current all-bottle model has “gone too far.”

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