Bright Lights, New City : Five New Nightspots, Including Three Transplanted From Manhattan, Hope to Revive the L.A. Club Scene

Let’s be honest: For months now, the conventional wisdom has been that the Los Angeles club scene has been washed up.

Remember Helena’s? It’s still around but when did you last hear about the goings-on of Madonna or Jack Nicholson there? The Stock Exchange? Who talks about its door trade anymore? And Flaming Colossus, Club Sandwich, Au Petit Cafe and Bazdo? Gone, gone, gone.

But the now-pooped-out, dance-till-you-drop circuit in Los Angeles is about to be revived. And the people most responsible for the reincarnation are trendy transplants from the Big Apple.

Beginning this month and continuing through the end of January, five new nightspots are opening quietly but confidently at a time when most Los Angeles clubs are considered close to comatose.

Two of the new clubs are home-grown operations: Spice Club, which kicked off Dec. 10 and exhibited just enough Hollywood tinsel (including glamour-girl-costumed waitresses) to keep things interesting, and Vertigo II, which will try to duplicate the success of its once-thriving namesake, which closed last August because of a landlord dispute.

But the big news to inveterate club-crawlers is that three outposts of successful Manhattan nightspots are coming to Los Angeles.

The newly named B. C. probably has had the most active word-of-mouth promotion because it’s the Los Angeles version of the hugely popular but pretentious MK’s of uptown New York City.

The Heartbreak Cafe, located on the site of Catherine’s Champagne Bistro (which closed due to a romantic tussle), is a direct descendant of the club made famous by Jay McInerney’s cautionary tale of New York’s drugging-and-dancing night life, his novel-movie “Bright Lights, Big City.”

And, finally, the China Club in Hollywood--billed as the Roxy for the ‘90s--claims it will become a mecca for the music industry in the same way that the New York version has been home to impromptu jam sessions with Keith Richards, David Bowie, Iggy Pop and others.

“I think New Yorkers see L.A. as the next frontier and are expecting to make an easy conquest of the city,” gripes Mario Tamayo, the Melrose Avenue restaurateur and club habitue who just happened to be scouting for a supper club location of his own. “The problem is whether New York people come here with New York ideas. Do they realize that the L.A. attention span is about the length of a cigarette?”

In the past year, no one club has gained a lasting foothold in Los Angeles, which is still dominated by noisy, crowded and often seedy venues that are very much underground and underwhelming. And, judging by the number of more permanent nightspots that come and go as fast as traffic on an open freeway, the idea of risking an investment of millions of dollars is seeming more and more unattractive to Los Angeles entrepreneurs.

Take, for example, the downtown Stock Exchange, which opened amid considerable fanfare in 1987 only to be threatened with a loan foreclosure a year later.

It recently received a reprieve from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency on a $1.5-million delinquent loan, which has become a cause celebre among civic groups who question the agency’s decision to lend taxpayer money “so yuppies can dance on Spring Street.”

“The nightclub business is really a fool’s game here,” moaned one Stock Exchange investor who asked not to be named. “And I think the road is going to be every bit as tough for these New Yorkers.”

Naturally, some Los Angeles clubaholics worry that the New York imports will try to dictate to them how night life should be run. After all, it was Studio 54, and its clones, that started the “door policy” to guarantee a club of velvet-roped exclusivity. That policy then was brought to Los Angeles in 1985 by Vertigo.

Generally, the feeling is that New York-style clubs can’t be transplanted to Los Angeles without some changes. For one thing, Angelenos are less willing than ever to put up with sadistic snottiness.

“People tend to like abuse in New York, whereas it doesn’t seem to go over very well here,” notes Andrew Stratas, B. C. general manager and a New Yorker.

No club, especially one hoping to be successful, can afford to turn off any member of that basic clientele that every nightspot hungers for--that mix of attractive actors, actresses, models, photographers, artists, musicians and studio executive types.

But many of the clubs that opened downtown like Roman candles last year found that it became increasingly hard to get the BPs--the Beautiful People or sheep-like Bo Peeps, depending on one’s point of view--to come down to Skid Row. “The BPs are not out in the numbers they once were,” maintains Lenny Berg, Heartbreak’s owner.

Another turn-off has been that Los Angeles clubs, opening where space was cheap, began to resemble “large glitzy ballrooms,” Berg notes. “Those are not places that make people feel comfortable enough to turn them into a hangout.”

The Los Angeles clubs that find themselves spilling crowds onto the sidewalk on Friday and Saturday nights also could just as well remain empty on weekdays. Meanwhile, even underground clubs are finding it harder and harder to locate former restaurants and bars that they can turn into dance spots.

Overall, what the New York transplants are bringing is a new sense of style and intimacy in Los Angeles club settings: more of an emphasis on comfortable seating, good food, conversation pits, and less on the hyper-attitudes that have characterized Los Angeles clubs that seem to think bigger is better.

“Now L.A. people want to go somewhere more intimate where most of the people already know each other,” says Bret Witke, one of B. C.’s owners and a former partner in Au Petit Cafe.

To those in the know wanting to know more about the new spots, they are:

Heartbreak Cafe, 143 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles

Berg, a 64-year-old New York mortgage banker, was searching for a Los Angeles venue for his New York club for three years before he finally found one.

The problem? Nothing could quite compare with the blue-collar Manhattan cafeteria at 179 Varrick St., where the original Heartbreak operated from 1981 to last year.

At first, everyone in New York thought a Downtown ‘50s dance club in the middle of what then was the Uptown disco craze was doomed to failure. But, within a year, Berg’s club was so popular that Saks Fifth Avenue opened a Heartbreak clothing boutique in its flagship store.

Will the same thing happen in Los Angeles? Berg is hopeful. “I used to say I was running a California-style club in New York. Now I have a chance to test my theory out.”

Berg--who is given to hyperbole--claims Heartbreak is “synonymous with a laid-back good time. We don’t believe in the kind of snitty attitude you have at other clubs.”

Obviously, Berg is hoping the name will be familiar enough to attract the “A” list celebs that the old Heartbreak used to call its own, including Richard Gere, Tatum O’Neal and John McEnroe and, yes, Vanna White. (And Heartbreak was where Cher and her bagel maker Rob Camiletti first linked up.)

Berg, now a bona fide bicoastal resident with a house in Northridge, claims that his New York club is so well known that when he strolls Hollywood in a jacket with the Heartbreak logo on it (a broken heart with a guitar sticking out of it): “People stop me on the street and say, ‘When are you opening out here?’ ”

Round of VIP Parties

The Los Angeles club will feature staff faces familiar to New York regulars, including former New York general manager Jeffrey Hill. The Heartbreak opens Wednesday with the usual round of VIP parties: The unfamous won’t have access until at least a week after that.

The West Coast outpost will have something the New York club never did--”power dining,” defined as telephone-accessible tables with unlimited free local calling. Unlike the old Heartbreak, which kept the cafeteria going by day and placed turntables over the steam tables at night, the new Heartbreak claims to be serious about its food.

Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner (served until 2 a.m.) and able to seat 160, the restaurant has snagged chef Allan Fisher of Manhattan’s upscale southwestern Arizona 206 fame.

As for the dancing, about 230 club crawlers legally will be allowed upstairs to sample the ‘50s and ‘60s sounds with a few Top 40 hits mixed in. There also will be a billiards room upstairs to create a true clubby field.

“I want it to be like the corner candy store,” Berg says. “The sort of place that when you get into town, you come by to see what’s doing in the old neighborhood.”

B. C., 7561 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood

This is probably the most eagerly awaited of the new clubs, mostly because of MK’s formidable reputation. That’s where New York artist Eric Goode, founder of the Downtown New York club area, created a drawing-room danceteria in a four-story Manhattan townhouse (complete with a bedroom) where guests could actually have conversations amid the stuffed flamingos and wolf skeletons.

Now Goode has teamed up with two veterans of the Los Angeles club scene--Bret Witke of Au Petit Cafe and Chris Daggart of Boys and Girls--to open MK’s West Coast cousin Jan. 18-19 in a space once occupied by Mischa’s, the Russian restaurant.

Chef Named Viet

While MK is more a club than a restaurant, says Witke, B. C. is more a restaurant than a club. A New York chef who goes by the name Viet has been hired to oversee the Nouveau Indochinese cuisine. “L.A. needs a place to go where you can dine and then stay,” general manager Stratas says. “People want to have that option.”

But anyone expecting a Xerox of MK’s English manor decor will have to look elsewhere. “Too much, too heavy,” says Witke. “L.A. wouldn’t deal with it.”

Instead, B. C. ‘s 9,000-square-foot space is pared-down 1920s industrial with a decidedly Frank Lloyd Wright interior. And this club is small to the point of being claustrophobic: The dining room holds only 100; the club another 100.

And what will be missing from B. C. ? MK’s attitude. “There will be more of a warm, open feeling in our club here than at MK’s,” Stratas says “Once you’re in the door of a place like this, you’ll be treated well. But in New York, even though you’ve gotten in, you’re still treated as if you were left outside.”

China Club, 1600 N. Argyle Ave., Hollywood

When owner Danny Fried opened the China Club in the basement of the old Beacon Hotel in Manhattan in June, 1985, he intended it “to be a pick-up game of softball for the entire music industry.”

So far, no one has tried to steal home base, but the China Club has been the locale for music videos by Daryl Hall and Holly Knight and three episodes of the CBS-TV series “The Equalizer.”

The only thing surprising about Fried’s expansion to Los Angeles is that he didn’t do it sooner than this Jan. 15-20.

After finding a venue just blocks away from Capitol and Motown records, Fried says his Los Angeles outpost should attract record company executives, recording artists, agents and hangers-on.

“There’s no place at the moment in L.A. like the China Club,” he boasts. Even serious rock ‘n’ rollers are hard pressed to disagree.

‘Here to Stay’

With a $2-million renovation showing “we’re here to stay,” Fried has installed an Oriental Deco decor with mahogany wood, China blue walls, 24-foot ceilings and a state-of-the-art sound and lighting system. Billed as a low-key place where annoying strobe lights, “boom-da-boom” background noise and roaming photographers are banned, Fried wants a “living room atmosphere” that can also double as a some-time recording studio.

Naturally there will be live music and dancing to canned rock, as well as a full dim-sum kitchen. “However, we don’t consider ourselves a restaurant,” Fried emphasized.

Spice Club, 7070 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood.

Not since the Stock Exchange opened last year has such an expensive, ambitious restaurant-club opened in Los Angeles. But Hollywood developer Maurice Safizadeh wanted to construct “a complete entertainment complex” in his office tower as part of the revitalization of the area.

As a result, Safizadeh and his partner, Andre Bohbot, formally of Max Au Triangle, have given their club a rather hokey Hollywood high-concept theme throughout.

Yes, the female staffers dress up as Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and Mae West. And, yes, Spice features a schmaltzy dinner show-dance revue, “from Hollywood with love” four nights a week that’s tailor-made for un-hip out-of-towners. But on weekends the place hopes to become a serious trendoid club.

Decorated in “Neo-Classical Post-Modern,” Spice’s 14,000-square-foot space could hardly be called intimate. Still, it’s broken up into a 100-seat restaurant, two dance floors and a VIP boite known as the “Champagne room.”

Two chefs, one Italian and one French, will serve up a “Riviera” cuisine until 2 a.m., but the chefs themselves “aren’t anybody renowned,” admits marketing director Sarah Jensen.

Jensen is not shy about admitting that the club has targeted the former Vertigo-Flaming Colossus crowd on weekend nights. “Right now, so many clubs have closed that we’re looking to pick up that clientele.”

Indeed at the opening party Saturday night, the usual suspects surfaced--Tim and Barbara Leary, artist Andre Miripolsky, fashion designer Pepito Albert and furniture designer Harry Segil, as well as a smattering of celebrities.

Vertigo II, 333 Boylston St., Downtown.

At one point or another, everyone who was anyone in the Los Angeles club scene passed through the doors at Vertigo. Assuming, of course, that they could get past the doorman.

Located Downtown in Myron’s Ballroom from 1985 to last Aug. 5, Vertigo immediately became infamous for bringing that obnoxious New York club custom, the “door policy,” to Los Angeles. (That’s the practice where doormen play eenee-meenee-minnee-mo with wannabe patrons.)

Adding to the dose of glitz, it didn’t hurt that one of the owners, Mario Oliver, was keeping house last year with Monaco’s Princess Stephanie or that regulars included celebs Mickey Rourke and Nicolas Gage, who would roar up to the door with their motorcycle gangs in tow.

Then suddenly Oliver’s relationship with Stephanie was over, and Vertigo was no more. So partner Jim Colachis began looking for another Downtown venue.

In its new state, however, Vertigo II--as it’s become known unofficially--is hoping to slink into existence on New Year’s Eve with “a very low profile,” says Colachis, who used to routinely encourage media attention. “We don’t want anyone to know about us. The people who already know about us are enough.”