A Few Odes To Excess

Stand-out features:

• Pangaea: John Walker Scotch costs Rs 11,90,000 (most expensive drink on the house), Lotus Lounge costs Rs 4.5 lakh
• RSVP: DJs-only run club, atmospheric outdoor bar, international gigs
• Billionaire: Cover charge, Rs 3,000; exotic cocktails, international acts
• Soi7: Rock ’n roll bar, kick-boxing ring, Pan-Asian cuisine
• Budapest: World cuisine, fine-dining garden area, eccentric masks on walls
• Peppers: 10,500 square feet dance floor, champagne showers, glitzy lighting

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Smog guns. Confetti showers. Gothic art.  Hedonistic haven. Supercontinent of excess. Pangaea. Billionaire’s hangout. It’s the new club in town, in Delhi’s tony Chanakyapuri, roiling with the energy and pageantry of Mardi Gras ever since it declared bacchanalia open in August. Here be dancers in micro minis (some on stilts, naturally); men in checkered trousers (Burberry? Etro? Bottega Venetta?), tweed jackets (Burberry, Armani?) and pointy shoes (Gucci? Canali? Prada?); women in short jackets and pencil skirts (let’s not even get started on labels here).

Michael Ault, founder of Pangaea, has given 30 countries 88 such clubs and decided it was time Delhi’s uber-rich finally had one of their own.

At the snazzily done-up bar (did we spot a few Indian collectibles there?), bartenders rustle up exotic—and needless to say, expensive—cocktails in manoeuvres that make Tom Cruise’s flair bartending in Cocktail seem oh-so-late ’80s. The liquor menu is an impressive one, especially the price list. A sampling? Well, John Walker Scotch: Rs 11,90,000; a bottle of Armand Blanc de Blanc Champagne (Ace of Spades): Rs 2,00,000; or settle for a humbler Dom Perignon Rose: Rs 1,02,000.

Incidentally, you could sip that Dom Perignon Rose cocooned in the lush upholstery of the acrylic-red, vivid devil art-splattered Lotus Lounge, with exc­lusive stewards waiting on your whims and perso­nalised guards securing your hallowed space. The price? Rs 4.5 lakh. “A night of tables and bottles, as we call it, could cost you between Rs 50,000 and Rs 5 lakh,” says Rahul Trehan, food and beverage president, Spice World.

It’s worth the money if you ask Khushi Soni, DJ, 28 years old. On an earlier occasion you might have found him behind the console, but on this particular Friday he’s at Pangaea as a guest. “This place makes you feel like you’re in Miami or Singapore,” he says. It’s perhaps what B.K. Modi, global chairman of Spice Global, intended when he brou­ght together architects from Australia, equipment from the US and lighting experts from Spain, Italy and Switzer­land to give Pangaea the Singapore-Miami atmospheric. The club, in fact, flew in the high-pitched house DJ from Miami, Max Vangeli, for a recent weekend bash—rapid-firing through tracks from Pro­digy, Gorillaz and Pendulum, the well-heeled patrons pumping their fists to the piercing music, and well-toned fashionistas waltzing across the dance floor and the granite podiums that line the tables.

Bollywoodwallahs, cricketing stars, industry and politics scions...it’s never too difficult to spot a celeb at Pangaea. American DJ and record producer Ryan Raddon, better known as Kaskade, was here, as was Vikas Sapra, the DJ who regularly rocks New York.

“There are many international musicians and DJs livening up the party scene,” says Aditya More, one of the managers at rsvp, the 6,000 sq ft upscale club launched recently in south Delhi by DJ Aqeel, who has made his mark with Bollywood remixes. This exclusively DJs-run club houses a breezy outdoor bar and a spacious dance floor, where the hip (entry is based on profile only) swing to commercial house music.

Belle Peppers This Gurgaon club has no hesitation seeing itself as a ‘jugaad joint’

The nights are getting young in the capital and the young are driving the nightlife in the city, their uber-luxe bacchanalia showing no sign of running dry despite the 1 am wrap-up injunction. Flush with disposable incomes, youn­gsters today seek an international experience without having to move out of the city. “The whole definition of nightlife is changing with the youngsters taking over the party scene,” says fashion desig­ner Nikhil Mehra. “People are experimenting with sartorial styles, exciting cocktails and eclectic music.”

“It’s the familiarity and shared tastes in music and cuisine which draw people to classier places,” says Ranjit Javeri, a 30-year-old risk consultant from Mum­bai who moved to Gurgaon three years ago. He’s at Soi7 in Cyber City, the hangout that brought Thai­land’s sparkling street-life culture to town barely a month ago. A space that doubles up as micro-brewery and luxury lounge, this is where Gurgaon’s techies are meeting on weekends for pitchers of wheat, Belgian or dark beer while swaying/swinging to soft rock, retro and reggae on a dance floor that opens out on to the terrace. Shraddha Dudeja, a 22-year-old who works with an ad agency in Cyber City, calls it her ‘comfort den’. “Places like Soi7, which cater to a richer, more exclusive clientele hold up because you have a dedicated crowd,” she says. “Most discotheques and bars in Delhi-NCR shut down after six months.”

She has a point. How then have places like Blue Frog and Kitty Su held up? It’s the quality of music for Mahesh Mathai of Blue Frog, who has had a pretty successful run with the long-standing enterprise. “Delhi is going out a lot more, even on weekdays,” he says. “So, music groups, bands and DJs are primarily driving the party culture here, especially among the upper middle classes.”

However, luxury clubs like Peppers at Hotel Bristol in Gurgaon have no such pretensions. It’s run by Shamsher Singh who himself describes it as a ‘jugaad joint’. Just a few months back, he spru­ced up an already existing club to dedicate a 10,500 sq ft space to European, Asian, Punjabi and what he calls “modern” themes. Quality of music be dam­ned, patrons jive to loud bhangra beats amidst champagne showers, even as neon lights zig-zag across the room, and willowy model types share champagne spritzers with the inheritors of wealth. The more swish set at Pangaea may scoff at what they might see as a possibly cartoonish affair at a spaceship of a club, but it’s a friendly crowd lured southward by Shamsher. Clusters of men wearing lea­ther motorcycle jackets or shrouded in patterned scarves may give the place a downtown vibe, but this is where Gur­gaon’s rich get their dollop of ‘unlimited fun’. “Peppers isn’t for everyone,” says Shamsher. “Only the rich and affluent who don’t mind spending a few lakhs for a night get entry.” Among the few places in NCR to stay open till 5 am, it’s a much-loved hunting ground of night owls.

Dinesh Tanwar’s Billionaire, the expan­sive night club at the far end of a narrow, deserted lane in Vasant Kunj launched six months ago, was designed to cater to the high and mighty of Delhi, but seems to have gone down the Peppers way. An ‘international’ chain, with centres in Dubai, London and other European countries and designed to cater to the super-rich, the blue-tinged club with oversized couches, long tabletops, expensive cocktails and blasting electronic dance music has an ardent following among the young. The cover charge isn’t sobering either.

What drives Delhi to these varied places? For a people who get bored easily, it’s the ability to keep up with the evolving music and fashion scene, according to designer Gaurav Gupta. “Given an underground world music vista, it’ll open up the city even further to a younger, hip crowd,” he says. Perhaps Budapest, the newest watering hole in south Delhi—yes, just a few weeks old—wants to crack that puzzle. Designed as a stri­ctly European pub, the decor is trendy, with face masks reflecting lights that bounce off the walls behind the DJ console, world cuisine to attract more foreigners and music strictly English commercial and house.

If Pangaea is the refuge of industrial bigwigs, Soi7 is more for the creative set, who make no distinction between their Friday noon and weekend. How­ever, for someone like Divya Tyagi, a PR professi­onal who parties every weekend, a solitary club is just one stop in a long evening. Sti­cking to a comfort zone is no fun for some, they’d rather soak in the entire experience of a club-dren­ched neighbou­rhood, which gets inten­sely sceney in the late hours. Now there are enough high-end night clubs fuelling that aspiration. Just put the money down.