On Saturday night I went to The Playboy Club in Old Park Lane with my son…..I’m not sure which part of that statement is more disturbing. Even when I was booking the taxi it was blatantly obvious I wasn’t comfortable with the whole concept:-
” Hi, can I have a taxi please to take me in to Central London, Ummm, I’m not sure of the postcode though, it’s right next to The Playboy Club”.
“What is the name of the venue right next to The PlayBoy Club?” she asked me
Silence.
“Um, actually it is The Playboy Club – I just didn’t want to tell you that” I told her….
Every once in a while I take my son out with one of his best friends and his mother – she has a fabulous job and therefore has access to all sorts of places and was recently invited to become an Ambassador of The Playboy Club – something my children are now desperate for me to be….So that is where she suggested we take the boys.
Of course, when you have twenty year old male children that you want to spend the evening with, sometimes you have to accept that turning down an invitation like that so that we could go to Nando’s together wasn’t going to go down well. Certainly as I was growing up I wouldn’t have dreamt of entering such a place – I was a HUGE feminist. In the past I might have been there to protest – with a sign. But now? Well. I’m old. Things change. The boys really really wanted to go (obviously) and I’d heard about it before and it sounded like a lot of fun and the girls there all looked happy and gorgeous enough in their little corsets and fluffy tails, so I decided that who am I to be the party pooper? Is that wrong?
Anyway, I was intrigued. Hugh Hefner’s gambling establishment closed in the 1980s, when Bunnies already appeared passe. The new incarnation, which has been open just over a year, seeks to evoke the glamour of the original, which drew celebrities when it was founded in 1966.
The best thing about it (for me – don’t ask my son) was the food. Spectacular. They have a Korean female
Chef called Judy Joo, a Columbia graduate who worked for Morgan Stanley in New York and San Francisco before training to become a chef at the French Culinary Institute in New York. Her dishes were imaginative and yet remained comfortingly familiar. The boys had steak, I had seabass and my friend had a burger. I have photos to upload in due course when my iphoto library is working again.
The club is on two floors. At ground level is Salvatore’s, a bar hosted by Salvatore Calabrese, one of the big names in European cocktails. They have an amazing cocktail list and were delicious.
Next door is the Cottontail Lounge, a burlesque style red velvet room with a teeny stage that had Grace Jones and Professor Green playing recently. Great space for a party…(another photo to follow)
Upstairs is the casino and the restaurant and a very cool smoking terrace complete with roaring fire and flat screen TV. They even have a barber shop next door to the restaurant. You can sit eating your meal and watching the girls at the casino. They boys were itching to have a go at the roulette table – I gave them the bare minimum. They were back within two minutes, you need a lot more than that so have some fun – they watched grown men not even flinch when losing £1,000 at a time.
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