by Mon R. on I'm sure when it comes to clubs one can usually rate it very badly or very poorly. In my experience it did not go well as the response of the music played was mixed. There was a few old school songs and not that many current radio hits; it was mostly hip hop and urban. The service at the bar was terrible and the server charged a gratuity tax of 20% on top of taxed drinks and the tax on the gratuity tax itself! Ridiculous! The bar was not busy but very shady. Be cautious! Also, the night I went had a preshow to a performance by some r&b artist. Judging on the crowd, they were not fairly entertained and fell quiet... not like a silence that occurs when one is in awe but more like a silence from expecting more or boredom.
by Marilynn Torivio on The Blue Note is to Jazz what BB King's is to Classic Rock. Which is to say it suckers tourists into paying far too much to hear some old dude play the same song he's been playing since 1961, all so the tourists can say, "Hell yeah, man, I saw McCoy fucking Tyner groove out for about 45 minutes one night in New York City." Substitute "Chuck Berry" and you've got BB King's. Except the crowd at the Blue Note is somehow worse than at BB King's, because at least with the latter there are no illusions about the appeal, and the crowd is just unpretentious midwestern dudes happy to be seeing Chuck Berry on their trip to Times Square rather than the Lion King their wives dragged them to last night. No, the Blue Note is PACKED with the type of dude who smoked a little reefer in college and took a jazz appreciation class, only now that he's put on about 35 pounds and his portfolio has lost six figures in the last six months, he tries to retain some of that street cred by nodding his head to a musician who has not added anything relevant to the canon since JFK was in the big house.
by Aiko Chadbourn on I went to a birthday party at Antik last night...we arrived at 10:30 and were the only people in the upstairs lounge area. The waitress asked us what we wanted to drink, but said our hosts were going to be getting bottles shortly. We ordered drinks ($12/vodka soda). The room is quite dark, with pretty red wallpaper and very lounge-like. Once the place became extremely packed, they opened up the bar on the left side, which I didn't even know existed and the waitress was no longer serving individual drinks--only bottles. I went into that room with a friend to get a drink, and it had a completely different vibe. Bright lights and completely out of place compared to the rest of the place. Apparently people were having a hard time getting in, standing in line, unless they knew whose birthday party it was. By the end of the night, it was extremely packed, and a big fight broke out. I'm not the biggest fan of this place--I thik it's trying a bit too hard to be scene-y but isn't really working in my opinion.
