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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, December 21, 2001

Sampling a few dressier Waikiki watering holes

By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Staff Writer

Deneb Catalan settles in to the elegant surroundings of Le Bar du Roi (The King's Bar) in the Royal Garden Hotel in Waikiki. The nightclub attracts well-heeled 20- and 30-somethings and features a Eurasian restaurant, separate areas for conversation and dancing, and an outdoor cafe.

Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

You want to show your out-of-town guests a sampling of Waikiki's dressier weekend nightlife offerings, but you haven't been over the Ala Wai Canal for a night out since "Wayne's World" and "Sprockets" were part of the "Saturday Night Live" skit lineup. You need some suggestions, quick, but don't know where to start, short of driving aimlessly down Kalakaua and Kuhio avenues.

Hmmm ... Good idea. But why waste your gas, when we can waste ours?

At your service, we selected the best evening wear from our closet and traveled beyond The Wave in search of the good, the bad and the ugly among Waikiki haunts for an evening of well-dressed shenanigans. We even went so far as to break our findings down to fit specific categories of out-of-town guests.

Here's what we found:

Guests: 20- and 30-something guests with gossip to catch up on

Try: Le Bar du Roi
Royal Garden Hotel, 440 Olohana St.
943-0202

Just beyond the revolving doors and ornate lobby of an elegant sidestreet Waikiki boutique hotel, the weekend-only nightclub Le Bar du Roi (French for The King's Bar) stretches through the high-ceilinged and dimly chandelier-lit architecture of Cafe du Monde, a Eurasian restaurant modeled on Los Angeles' trendy Sky Bar. The restaurant and its adjacent rooms have dark wood tables, armoires and red velvet-upholstered settees and pillows, and there's an outdoor cafe area lit by the glow of a large swimming pool.

At 10:30 on a Friday evening, most of the club's Banana Republic- and Armani Exchange-clad 20- and 30-something patrons were in the main room chatting over a down-tempo house beat sculpted by host DJ Georgio. Dancing — banished to a side room with more space and less-opulent furnishings — appeared to hold a distant second to the lounge's main activity: talking and downing martinis and cosmopolitans one after the other. The music was loud, but not so loud as to drown out oh-so-L.A. conversations about acting technique and dim-witted studio, er, department heads.

Lit by candlelight and the soft blue glow of brass lamps reflecting off the lounge's scattered oil paintings, the professional-looking crowd was less one of singles on the make than clutches of well-dressed friends huddled comfortably in corners, or near the well-appointed mirrored bar, hatching plans.

Guests: 20-something guests looking to hook up

Try: Wonder Lounge
W Honolulu, 2885 Kalakaua Ave.
922-1700

W Diamond Head Grill's popular Friday night Wonder Lounge (cover: $10) is an attractive choice for those who are single and looking for phone numbers, or maybe company on an after-hours jaunt.

The interior is a modernist classy mix of IKEA-style furnishings, black tablecloths, candles and moody track lighting. But a midnight crowd of around 250 combined with afterthought-level staffing can serve to squeeze out couples who simply desire dancing and a couple of drinks.

The problem with Wonder Lounge is its overwhelming success. On our visit, we struggled past a crowded dance floor to get inside one of Wonder Lounge's two rooms of music, then spent the next half-hour waiting for someone to take our drink and food order. When neither happened, we exited the amped-up house beats of area one for the R&B remixes of the lounge's more dance-friendly second room. To its credit, this room has a more accessible bar and dance floor.

If we had been looking to find that special self-involved someone, the crowd seemed to be full of enough well-dressed singles of both genders on the prowl to up our chances of success. And there are other pleasures to be found here too: Kudos to the W manager who stationed an extremely adept bongo player near the main dance floor. His accompaniment on a Madonna "Ray Of Light" house mix was pure bliss.

Guests: Sophisticates seeking conversation, fine drinks and all that jazz

Try: Lewers Lounge
The Halekulani, 2199 Kalia Rd.
923-2311

With its elegantly plush sofas and chairs, brass lamps, hardwood floors and darkened corners and nooks, The Halekulani's Lewers Lounge seemed the ideal spot for clandestine conversations over a glass of some inconceivably aged and expensive alcohol. Though nearly empty at 9:30 on a Saturday night, it exuded the quiet confidence of an establishment that didn't require something as trivial as a crowd to make it interesting.

Coming in from a blustery and damp night to the bass and piano soundtrack of "Take Five," courtesy of Lewers' resident musical duo, we ordered warm coffee and spirit blends. The music turned to Ellington and Gershwin standards. We sat within earshot of comparisons to St. Tropez and Belize summers from a raucous table of well-to-do Brits.

More couples — some in evening resort wear, others in jacket-and-black-T combos and evening dresses — entered as I considered a musical request form under the glass dish of pistachios on our table. Passing the request on to pianist Jim Howard, he politely advised that I wait a bit for bassist and vocalist Bruce Hamada to return.

"I can play it," said Howard, sporting an exquisitely tailored tuxedo, "but Bruce can sing a terrific version of it for you."

Thirty minutes and another round of coffees later, Hamada apologized to the "couple who have been waiting patiently for this song" before launching into Gershwin's "I've Got A Crush On You."

I nodded "thanks" as my girlfriend and I walked out onto the veranda and into the night. Hamada smiled and winked back.

Guests: Mature visitors seeking dining, drinking and dancing with a view

Try: The Hanohano Room
Sheraton Waikiki Hotel, 2255 Kalakaua Ave.
922-4422

There's arguably no better way to describe what is probably the only appeal of The Hanohano Room to those below age 40 than to describe the actions of the youngest people we encountered there: A couple of giggling 20-something girls riding up and down the Hanohano's glass elevator without ever stepping foot into the venerable Waikiki nightspot.

Indeed, a large part of The Hanohano Room's appeal has always been its vistas: sweeping tableside views of Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head on one side of the room, and the entirety of Honolulu's south shore urban citiscape on the other.

But even with its cavernous interior sadly empty at midnight on a Saturday, The Hanohano Room glowed in all its late-1970s time capsule glory, alive with a terrific seven-piece band, piped in disco-era Rufus and Chaka Khan, and decadent platters of ice cream bon bons delivered with trailing fogs of dried ice.

The Hanohano Room's smallish, stylishly-dressed crowd didn't bother worrying about how few of them there were. They simply wanted to dance. A snappily-attired senior couple practically leaped from their late night supper to rumba to a cover of Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason" before waltzing to an eggnog-gooey "Merry Christmas Darling."

"It's too bad that no one dances like that anymore," sighed my girlfriend Dawn, 23, watching the two glide across the floor.

I couldn't agree more.

Guests: 20-somethings who want to move

Try: Maze, Waikiki Trade Center, 2255 Kuhio Ave., 921-5800

The snaking line outside Maze nightclub at 12:30 a.m. on a Saturday (cover: $5) was a mix of fashion styles. Aloha shirts and jeans. T-shirts and jeans. Even peasant skirts and hippie blouses.

Most clubgoers, however, were dressed to impress — females in slinky cocktail dresses of mostly darkened shades and males in pressed dress shirts and slacks, a few with suit jackets.

The dress code posted near the entrance read "absolutely fabulous," but the meaning was apparently open to interpretation, depending on which of the club's three lounges one chose to occupy.

The Paradox Lounge, with its arty lamps, shabby-chic modernist furnishings and down-tempo ambient electronica, was obviously the dressy crowd's choice. The Red Room, with near-zero furnishings and a large dance floor booming with bass-heavy L.L. Cool J and Ice Cube jams, was mostly frat-boy fashionable. The Maze Arena — all cool blue and green lasers, pumped-in smoke and progressive house trance — was all over the fashion-world map.

Impressively, at least to us, all three lounges seemed to hold dancing — solo or otherwise — miles above the arts of conversation or hooking up. The music in all three rooms was loud enough to require sign language training in order for us to understand one another.

And so, we took our dressy selves to the hip-hop and Fred Durst doppelganger-dominated Red Room where, finally, we danced.