Showing 1-12 of 12 results
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Blend
Blend has been described as uberchic; it's certainly ubernew and - later on in the evening - uberbusy. Cocooned in an old colonial building on Fortaleza Street, this fashionable dining and nightlife spot belts out electronic music from its cavernous and moodily lit interior.
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Café Hijos de Borinquen
Gotta wedge your way in on weekend nights. DJs, acoustic guitars, sing-a-long sets and even a bit of patriotic fervor as the clock hand approaches midnight. And that's just the start. The so-named 'Sons of Borinquen' has been known to keep going until .
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Club Brava
A swinging club inside the El San Juan Hotel that frequently get breathless reviews from celeb spotters and all-night dance fanatics. The two-level interior is small, and the music a mix of dance, reggaeton and salsa and the atmosphere's electric and the people-watching possibilities in the lobby beforehand strangely voyeuristic. Dress up, bring your credit card and get ready to jive to what is touted as the best sound system in the Caribbean.
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Cocobongo
A Mexican-flavored restaurant/club with fine margaritas, this is a good place to catch live salsa and it rocks till late.
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El Chico Lounge
If you want to dance but discos aren't your style, then try El Chico. Professional dancers move among the crowd getting everyone in motion. Live music adds to the fun. Dressy attire required.
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Gallery Café
This café in the old city features jazz on Wednesday night, and funk, hip-hop, Latin jazz and techno Thursday to Saturday. Happy-hour specials run till on Friday. You get a well-dressed local yuppie gang here.
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Kudetá
In the snakes and ladders of San Juan nightlife, Kudetá (coup d'état - geddit?) is a precocious newcomer. It is also part of an emerging new trend: a Pan-Asian restaurant that metamorphoses after hours into a hip club with a hidden upstairs lounge where diners can disappear to dance off their Indonesian barbecued baby-back ribs and Cuba Libre-cured salmon roll salad. They've even invented their own furniture - the suede-covered Kudetá Collection.
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La Rumba
This is what you came to Puerto Rico for - a club so packed with people of all ethnicities and ages that it matters not if you are an expert twirler or a rank neophyte who can't even spell syncopation. It won't get busy until after , when the live bands start warming up, but soon enough the trickle of people through the door will turn into a torrent and you'll be caught up in a warm tropical crush of movement. Expect salsa, samba, reggaeton, rock and, of course, rumba music.
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Marriott Hotel Lobby
Salsa springs up in the unlikeliest of places, including in the lobby of this international hotel chain. But this is no standard tourist show. Indeed the authenticity and variety of the music here is something to behold - and people dance too (including the staff). Thursday through Saturday is salsa and meringue dancing, Wednesday is Nueva Trova with a Cuban influence, and Sunday through Tuesday is a live salsa sextet.
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Martini's Cabaret
A luminously lit discotheque and lounge that has booked headliners such as Whitney Houston and Jay Leno in its day - Martini's in Isla Verde's InterContinental is where you go for live music, dancing or the odd celeb surprise. There's more than a hint of Las Vegas in the surroundings - and the drink prices.
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Noise
And plenty of it - mainly of the hip-hop variety; salsa-searchers look elsewhere. Brave ladies get in free on Friday nights. There's a metal detector and airport style pat-down at the door. Enough said.
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Nuyorican Café
Now, this is more like it. If you came to Puerto Rico in search of authentic salsa music, the legend still lives on at the Nuyorican Café. San Juan's hottest nightspot is a congenial hub of live Latino sounds and hip-gyrating locals that easily emulates its famous New York namesake. Stuffed into an alley off Fortaleza, opposite a nameless drinking hole, you get everything from poetry readings to six-piece salsa bands that squish onto the stage here.
Showing 1-12 of 12 results
