Home Is Where The Crowds Are

It became clear last night that D.C. is in Hip Nightspot Starvation Mode. A friend of mine and I got quiet little emails yesterday afternoon advertising a last-minute soft opening party for Home (http://www.homenightclub.net/), a club in the newly-fashionable Gallery Place/MCI Center neighborhood, and RSVP'd, expecting to be able to slip right in for free and dance the night away with the very few other people who got on the ball and responded. After all, it was Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, and people were out of town.

Home had tried to open a couple of weeks ago, but some unspecified code problems forced them to hold off on the grand opening soiree. That has been rescheduled for Thursday, December 5, so it's not too late to get on their mailing list. However, according to the emails that went out yesterday, since the club was already ready to go, they decided to have these soft opening parties tonight and tomorrow night. Guest list only, no cover before midnight. No problem.

So my friend and I coordinated our invitation-specified "contemporary chic" outfits by phone, got in our cars on opposite sides of town and headed for 911 F Street NW, the location of the club.

I arrived in the neighborhood first, and quickly realized there was a problem. Cops everywhere. Streets closed. Valets running for their lives. Soft opening? Well, apparently not so soft that the club owners weren't able to bring in the Metropolitan Police Department to help them shut down an entire city block for their valet parking area. Traffic was a tangled nightmare and the line of people shivering in the cold and waiting to get in stretched two blocks.

I called my friend. "There is no way we're ever going to get in there."

"What's our alternate plan?" she asked. She was still 10 to 12 blocks away, so I had a little bit of time to explore the neighborhood and come up with the next club of choice. But it was clear that the other clubs in the area were experiencing a spillover effect. People who gave up on getting into Home's "soft" opening were standing in long lines at the door of Insomnia, the other big club in the area.

Home is one of those clubs with the bed concept, where you can reserve a bed, which gets you and 7 of your friends in with free admission, but requires a $500 bar minimum for the privilege of everyone lounging instead of dancing. Reserving a table requires a $300 bar minimum. Nothing like paying for sitting down. This is clearly a consumer-driven market—all those people wouldn't have been standing in the street if they didn't want to be there. And we would have been happy to go and check it out if there had been less hassle involved.

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