Miami Night Vice

Article by: Adam Karlin, April 2008

I walked up to the man, nervous, my fingers ready to clench. He was big - ham-hock neck, tree-trunk arms. He looked me up and down.

'Thanks for being patient, man,' he said and lifted the red rope.

Huh? A bouncer acting all polite? Here I am updating the nightlife section for Lonely Planet's next Miami city guide and, as a single male, I was expecting to be totally shut out from South Beach's infamously selective clubbing scene. But in three weeks of beer and whiskey drunk all over Greater Miami, the evening fun here defied most of my expectations. Although it has met a few of them, too.

Take the price to party. To get into Privé (136 Collins Ave; tel: 305 531 5535), where this story begins, costs $20, which is a pretty standard door charge here, especially for Miami and Miami Beach's supposedly 'hottest' megaclubs (personally I couldn't figure out what all the fuss was about). Privé and its sister clubs, Mansion and Opium Garden, form a nightlife triumvirate dubbed The Opium Group, which are collectively sold as the greatest clubbing experience ever, where Jay-Z serves the Moet and life is basically a hip-hop video, starring you.

The reality? A bunch of girls in a cordoned-off 'VIP' area (there is always a VIP area in Miami), a limp, late-90s hip-hop soundtrack and Eurotrash buying triple-digit bottles of booze for the privilege of sitting down. This is known as 'bottle service': you order an overpriced bottle of liquor and get to sit at a table while the other proles knock their knees. I stayed for about an hour and left, wanting my $20 back. There were no celebrities here, just tourists looking for them or playing one for the night.

Take a working jet engine, throw a toaster through it, and you have some idea of the sound experience.

Up the road, the line for Mansion was curving around the block, but across the street Automatic Slim's (1216 Washington Ave; tel: 305 695 0795) was hopping. A few tourists had told me Slim's was the best rock bar in Miami, which sounded worth a shot. Well, take a working jet engine, throw a toaster through it, and you have some idea of the sound experience. I wandered to the back of the bar, past female bartenders strutting on the countertop and pouring shots out of holster-slung bottles of tequila, and found you could add 'get shoved by an angry dude in a biker shirt' to the whole 'toaster-through-a-jet-engine' experience. But this was no real dive; it was a marketing consultant's idea of what a dive should be. The Coyote Ugly bartenders and the deliberately loud music made it the rock-lite of Miami.

The next night, I headed into the city of Miami itself. Tourists rarely cross the A1A causeway into town for fun and it's only the particularly brave ones who make it to the seedy line between Overtown - one of Miami's poorer neighbourhoods - and the condo-studded frontier of gentrification; yet this is where you'll find some of Miami's best nightlife.

I started off in Churchill's (5501 NE 2nd Ave; tel: 305 757 1807) on the border of Little Haiti, a gloriously grotty Brit pub that was everything Automatic Slim's had tried (and failed) to be. Outside, Haitian men helped people park their cars for tips, yelling 'Atansyonì!' ('Watch out!') at oncoming drivers. Inside, a punk band was gearing up for a set advertised at Sweat Records (tel: 305 342 0953) next door. Sweat is almost a parody of an indie music store: cartoony purple couch, skinny guys arguing over obscure LPs, and random Japanese toys for sale.

A pint in Churchill's fuelled me on to the White Room (1306 North Miami Ave; tel: 305 995 5050) for Poplife; all the pretty hipsters flock to this party on the weekends. Poplife's spiel is that it promotes a music subculture for folks with a shared design-aesthetic-lifestyle-philosophy, while exploring the potential for blah blah blah. As far as I could tell, it was a place for really hot hipsters to get drunk and dance with other really hot hipsters. And hey, I'm all about that. You go, Poplife.

This week's party went off in Lawrence of Arabia-style gossamer tents curving around the exposed-industrial main stage, flanked by plenty of Banksy-esque graffiti and the requisite inexplicable cowboy movie playing on an open-air projector. The feel was more London than Miami - except, of course, the weather was great. The White Room's clientele was composed of folks who, in most American cities, would be deemed dive-drinking rockers; here, they were transformed into a beautiful mass of hipster cuteness, way more glam than their counterparts in New York or Boston.

By 10pm you can't tell a concierge station from a go-go bar.

A week later I went back to Miami Beach to hang out in some hotel lounges, the new clubs of the season. On almost any given evening, front desks hire DJs for their lobbies and pool areas, and by 10pm you can't tell a concierge station from a go-go bar. I sipped (and I mean sipped, because at that price I was making the sucker last) a $14 whiskey-and-soda around the pool of the Delano Hotel (1685 Collins Ave; tel: 305 674 6400), while models chillaxed at a table hovering over a pool and people with lots of money gazed at flat-screens built into Bedouin-style cabana huts. I thought, I have never seen so many hot people, in one place, ever. Until I got into the Florida Room, the Delano's on-site club.

The Florida Room was pretty impressive: dark, intimate, warm, the same as Privé in many ways, except there were less tourists and more models and fashionistas breaking down the door. Great if you're into that sort of thing, but I have issues with shelling out a week's salary for a bottle of Grey Goose (heads up: reservations or bottle service guests only at the Florida Room, and at a lot of other clubs, after a certain hour - usually 11pm or midnight).

And now: it's two in the morning. I'm tired, but there're still bars to review. So I head to what is easily my favorite Miami spot: Buck 15 (707 Lincoln Ln; tel: 305 538 3815). B15 is located in a loft above a Chinese restaurant and manages to meld graffiti chic with cast-off toys from owner Jenny Yip, consistently awesome DJs (Did they just mix 'Your Love' by the Outfield into 'Low' by Flo-Rida?), free entry (very important), and a good mix of the hip, the drunk and the folks who don't care - all into one good shot of nightlife fun. I'm not on the list, and I don't have to be to enjoy myself here, and that's the South Beach I'm searching for when the sun goes down.