Las Vegas Weekly

August 18, 2009 · 8 AM

For the best people watching, drop the club and pick up a bar

By Robin Leach

Esteemed Las Vegas nightlife gurus Robin Leach and Xania Woodman.

Photo: TVT

While Mr. Vegas DeLuxe Robin Leach is on vacation and attempting to work as little as possible from afar, Vegas DeLuxe will be featuring celebrity guest columnists for the first half of this month until Robin’s return. If you’re knowledgeable about Las Vegas, the names should be familiar. Today is our last guest, nightlife queen and Las Vegas Weekly colleague Xania Woodman, as Robin returns to work tomorrow. Xania shares with Vegas DeLuxe readers her favorite bars for people watching.

By Xania Woodman

It’s cheap and it comes with booze. The bar is almost always open somewhere in Las Vegas, and it usually has seats planted right in front of the action. A bar stool generally costs less than the nightclubs’ pricey VIP real estate, and the bartender is usually more entertaining and talkative than your average cocktail server.

So how can it be that so many people are still willing to sell plasma to be able to afford that all-important 1.5L of Grey Goose and the six square feet of VIP space it yields when they come to Las Vegas? It’s crazier still if they live here. Of course, I’ve lived here more than eight years, so I can never again put my head onto a tourist’s shoulders -- unless of course he asks me to.

The allure of the VIP treatment has been suitably mass marketed of late to be synonymous with limo service, a large dinner with 25 of your closest college dorm buddies, bottle service at a club you would never be able to get into without it and, finally, a lap dance from a girl who, unbeknownst to you, is trying to remember whether she has a PTA meeting the next afternoon.

Being the opinionated type, I’ll offer an alternative: Bar patrons make the best entertainment. Therefore behold, in no particular order (because it changes from day to day anyway), a few of my favorite bars for people watching:

1. Petrossian Bar, Bellagio

Researching my next Vegas magazine column on bourbon cocktails, I took a place at the Petrossian lobby bar and ordered a Doubledown and Run for the Roses. Alternating between the two while deciding which one I should feature in October’s Causing a Stir, I chatted up bartenders Tony and Darren. Whether you can tell a Woodford Reserve from a Woodford Reserve Bellagio Personal Selection by aroma alone, most savvy bartenders these days are on the mixology and spirits bandwagons and will be happy to talk shop with you. At the very least, they’ll have the opportunity to up-sell you into a new price category and therefore a higher tip for themselves. Mid-cocktail, a leggy blonde of Eastern European decent and questionable motives slinked in. All chat ceased as she hiked up her already thigh-skimming white tube dress. It wasn’t clear whether she wanted a mango martini or a peach martini, but she loved what Darren gave her. A roomful of gazes followed her pixie head as it bent toward each sip, and we wondered the obvious. Working girl? Mail-order bride? Russian mafia arm candy? If someone in the bar had the answer, he kept it to himself. All eyes followed as she alighted from her stool, tugged down at the dress and mobilized her crane-like legs to slink back out. A moment of silence for the bar’s loss of her. Then a harrumph from the bartenders as they examined the place her tip should have occupied, had she bothered to leave one.

2. Downtown Cocktail Room, 111 Las Vegas Blvd.

This past Friday night being First Friday, one expects downtown bars to be awash with post-art fest hipsters and the like. So I avoided it altogether. But Saturday night was a DCR from another dimension: the dark, intimate haven for artists, musicians, writers and the people who sleep with them bursting at the seams with an attractive nightclub crowd. I watched in utter confusion as (all too few) girls in ultra-short party dresses weaved their way around the bulging biceps of what amounted to two roomfuls of metrosexual men in Seven for All Mankind jeans and Guess paisley button-downs. While the bar was certainly enjoying the business, I thought the bartenders were going to gag with every order: SoCo and lime, Red Headed Slut, light beer. This war of the worlds continued as I in my black satin gloves sipped my gin cocktail from an old fashioned coupe looking the vodka Red Bull drinkers up and down. They panned me, as well, but we kept to ourselves. After all, I had the last barstool.

3. Noir Bar, Luxor

Standing before bartender Trevor Thorpe on his last Saturday night shift before departing for San Diego’s tony Keating Hotel, I bristled at what Noir has become while at the same time remarking what hasn’t changed a bit. Cocktails-wise, Noir is as great as ever, with the exception of course of Thorpe’s exit. But crowd-wise, the tiny bar stowed beneath LAX’s entry bridge has quickly gone from Vegas’ best-kept secret to its secret shame. Whereas Noir’s frosted, sliding glass doors were once open only to those who had the wherewithal to call ahead for a ressie, and to those connected enough to walk up, times they are a changin’. Noir has made the biggest 180-degree change I’ve witnessed since the economy started doing its impression of a tapped keg. Thrown wide open are those doors, the casino entrance and the ones to LAX and its tourist patrons, filling the exquisite leather couches with crowds decidedly less exquisite than the high-end celebrity clientele who once danced upon them until dawn. Thursdays, Noir dives even deeper with plastic cups and all. I cry, I bitch, but somehow I keep coming back each week to watch the spectacle.

4. Sidebar, 201 N. 3rd St. at Ogden

It’s the biggest wild card; I never know when I am Sidebar-bound what sort of crowd awaits me. Will the bar be overrun by patrons of the adjoining restaurant, filled with a smart and sophisticated pre- or post-dinner crowd? Or maybe Hogs & Heifers will spill over, filling the tiny poker/cocktail bar with leather vests and flying colors. Or maybe it will be quiet, and I’ll have bartender Jerry Vargas all to myself so I can pick his brain and sample whatever cocktails he’s been tinkering with. Before Jerry, there was another bartender there I loved dearly. Erica from Alaska. She could make a Creamsicle cocktail so authentic, I once exclaimed, that I could actually taste the wooden popsicle stick! “It’s all in the vanilla extract,” she said, showing me a few of the extracts she had tried. I sipped again and was instantly 12 years old and sitting on the curb outside my house savoring the last little drops of orange and cream on the stick. Great mixologists know how to make thinking drinks.

5. Don’t Tell Mama, 517 Fremont St.

My first visit kind of sealed this bar’s fate in my eyes, but plenty of my friends swear by it, so who am I to deny another woman’s right to booze? Still just soft opening, and on literally the bar’s first or second night of operation overall, I perused the cocktail menu and was thrilled to find throwback standards straight out of my Bartending 101 manual like the Godfather and the Negroni. And for just $8! I ordered the latter. “And what’s in that?” asked the aged barman with a thick Southern twang. Gin, Campari and sweet vermouth in equal parts with an orange rind, I told him simply enough. He poured a glass of OJ and inquired which gin I preferred. I shook my head, and we started over. Gin, Campari and sweet vermouth in equal parts with an orange rind, I repeated. “How about this -- I’ll pass my hand over the liquor bottles and when I get to one of those, you say so, OK?” He admitted he wasn’t even a bartender, but rather a server filling in while the real bartender took her turn at the piano bar’s mic. So we played this game until a few minutes later I had something resembling a Negroni in my hand. It was certainly not the best I’ve had, but I’ll also never forget it. I hear things are vastly improved since then.

Honorable mention:

Firefly II, The Plaza

Now open nightly, it will be interesting to see what denizens populate the second installation of the locals favorite watering hole and late night dining and date spot. The lounge is much larger and more inviting, not to mention convenient to the Fremont East District bars. Free, dedicated valet and great, affordable tapas don’t hurt, either.

Square Apple, East Sahara

A bit of old New York and old Vegas all wrapped up into one dark, sparsely populated and well-broken-in package. You never know who might be in the audience and ready to jump on the mic with the night’s entertainers.

Beauty Bar, Fremont East District

This place has to get extra points for being the dirtiest of all the bars mentioned up to this point (and after) and still managing to attract the most diverse crowd. From hipsters to punks to tourists and karaoke junkies, each band brings a new spice to the rack. The neighboring Griffin offers the same but by firelight.

Rojo Lounge, Palms Place

Possessing a far better menu than any lobby bar should, Rojo Lounge is like a tiny little nook I’m grateful to have available when I need to drink and recline on a leather couch without being hassled by a VIP host or cocktail server. Beautiful, knowledgeable female bartenders mix up mighty good cocktails that are classic and adventurous. The crowd is a mix of hotel guests, condo residents and partying locals.

Rhumbar, The Mirage

With precious little decoration to speak of, except for maybe the cock boxes overhead, Rhumbar places all its attention on the drinks, the bartenders, the rum and you, the patron. I like a place with its priorities in order.

Fleur de Lys, Mandalay Bay

With a bar so small, one might think people watching wouldn’t be a possibility. But somehow it works. From one of a handful of seats in the dark, narrow restaurant bar, bartender Becky Anhert somehow juggles making all the drinks for the restaurant while spouting her considerable absinthe knowledge to her now utterly devoted bar patrons.

Fontana Bar, Bellagio

You want Vegas stories, insider knowledge and good cocktails? Sacrifice a ten-spot, snag a poker machine outside the Fontana Bar on the right-hand side, and make sure Sean Bigley is working that night. Time will fly by as you listen in on the hum of the Bellagio and watch your neighboring seats empty and fill with some of Vegas’ most interesting characters.

Blue Martini/Yard House/Cadillac Ranch/Louie Bar, Town Square Mall

What list of people-watching hot spots would be complete without the capstone? While each of these four sprawling venues has its own theme and atmosphere, the crowds are interchangeable: attractive local suburbanites on the prowl for companionship of indeterminate duration. But aligned in purpose -- hooking up -- they form the 800-pound gorilla of crowd-watching stadiums. Let the games begin!

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

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