Cracking the Clubbing Code

Photo by Raul Vega

The waiter grabs me by the wrist and yanks me up from the red velvet booth midsentence, giving me just enough time to gesture to my girlfriend that I’ll be back. He drags me across the room, past rows of tables cluttered with whiskey bottles, overflowing ashtrays and picked-apart fruit platters. Then he stops abruptly at a booth crammed with grinning, expectant guys who, judging from the number of empty shot glasses, have clearly been here a while. I can barely make out their faces in the dark. It’s okay, the waiter assures me, they’ve requested me. Sensing the tension in my arm, my resistance, the waiter adds: “Don’t worry, the guys do all the talking.” Then he pushes me down next to a pudgy but attractive 20-something who blows cigarette smoke in my face. I’ve successfully been “booked,” a custom at Korean nightclubs in which waiters play matchmaker between guests, leading women to men’s tables. The guys I’m with have spent a lot of money tonight, and our waiter is looking at a significant tip.

We’re at Le PrivĂ©, the largest nightclub not just in Koreatown but in all of Los Angeles — a vast, Vegas-style compound with gargoyles on the walls, imposing knights on either side of the stage and an elaborate laser system projecting 3-D cubes that float above the dance floor. An elevated ring of glass-fronted private rooms encircles the main floor, like luxury boxes at a sports arena — perfect aeries for high rollers to scope the women on the dance floor whom they’d like to book. Though it’s far from full, there must be close to 600 people at Le PrivĂ© tonight. And aside from the friend I’ve brought along, I’m the only Anglo person in the room, the only non-Korean of any race, a situation I’m familiar with after living in Tokyo for three years — there’s that same curious blend of alienation, exhilaration and sensory overload.

In a way, Koreatown doesfeel like another country —four square miles of bustling, freewheeling nightlife thick with more than 1,500 neon-lit restaurants, bars, nightclubs, 24-hour cafĂ©s, karaoke “norae-bangs,” pool halls and high-speed Internet “PC bangs,” all catering to the largest Korean community in the world outside of Seoul: 160,000 in Los Angeles County, 25,000 of whom live in K-Town proper. It’s an insular place where most storefront signs and menus are in Korean, and there’s a complicated, word-of-mouth system for getting into nightclubs. But with the right passport, crossing into Koreatown after dark feels like falling down the rabbit hole and awakening in an enchanted bar with cascading waterfalls and bowls of butterscotch and mint candies by the door, a land where smoking is almost always allowed, and in some places the unfiltered rice wine, soju, flows until 5 a.m. When the Sunset Strip quiets down and West Hollywood and Silver Lake partiers slog back to their bungalows and Chi Dynasty leftovers, Koreatown is just heating up. In a sprawling city with only a handful of places open past 2 a.m., K-Town may be the hippest little pocket in Los Angeles, a teaspoon of Manhattan west of downtown, perhaps the last territory in the city where the party goes on 24/7.

Le PrivĂ© would be a good place to start — Nicolas Cage, who frequents the club, apparently thinks so. All across the room, young men raise votives on their table, saluting the ceiling as if hailing a cab. This is the standard way to get the waiter’s attention, but at times the bobbing flames make the room glow like an Aerosmith concert. The waiters, connected by a network of headsets, zigzag past one another in stiff, waist-length navy jackets that make them appear to be either bellboys or secret-service agents. They drag women behind them, who in turn drag their girlfriends behind them, pushing back on their heels and giggling, in some cases waving their hands “no” and even arguing with the waiters. “The girls resist because if they show interest, it’s considered shameful,” one clubgoer tells me. “Even if the guy is cute and she’s digging him, she has to play hard to get.” The booking ritual is a frenetic, patriarchal version of speed dating. But efficient. “It’s a great way to meet girls,” says one smartly dressed 26-year-old regular.