Endless summer night life

It’s 10 p.m. on an overcast Thursday night, and there’s a line 30 or 40 deep waiting to get into Sharkeez bar and restaurant on the Hermosa Beach pier.

To Sharkeez’s right, at Patrick Malloy’s, the balcony is overflowing with the essence of a beer commercial come to life; to the left, at Sangria, pumping house tunes blare as beautiful California people dance and flirt.

Inside Sharkeez, beach bunnies in tight jeans and tank tops bump and grind with robust-looking surfer guys in T-shirts and jeans or long shorts. Two women are dancing on a counter, to the delight of the crowd.

Throughout the country, people and businesses are contending with a sluggish economy and an overseas war, but you’d never know it from the bustling scene in the South Bay communities of Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo Beach.

Ten minutes north of Hermosa by car, at Sharkeez in Manhattan Beach, a somewhat lower-key scenario plays out.

A little after 9, a mix of barflies and college students, predominantly from Loyola Marymount and USC, are watching the end of USC’s upset of Stanford in college basketball’s Pac-10 tournament. As soon as the game ends, the sound on the TVs is muted, the music kicks up and Sharkeez quickly morphs from a sports bar to a dance club.

Murals at Sharkeez in Hermosa show surfers and bikini-clad women under a golden sunset, while a crystal blue sea beckons Clearly, the myth of the endless summer is alive and well here.

People seeking the California of the Beach Boys turn up in the South Bay all the time, says Greg Newman, owner of the Sharkeez restaurant and bar chain, which also has locations in Newport Beach and Santa Barbara.

“Maybe they came to visit on Labor Day weekend and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, beach everyday and volleyball,’ “says Newman, who grew up in Hermosa and attended USC. “And they get it: There’s such a cool scene, so many good-looking people.”

Yet the South Bay isn’t exclusively for the beach crowd. Manhattan Beach has two outstanding jazz joints, Trio and Michi. The latter, a glistening metallic and glass restaurant, caters to a sophisticated, martini-type crowd. In the corner, a jazz ensemble, members dressed in black tie, lays out perfectly executed notes while well-dressed patrons mingle at the bar.

Trio and Michi are helping to pump new life into the Manhattan Beach scene, while the venerable Chillers and the hot jazz-blues club New Starboard Attitude keep Redondo happening.

But crowds don’t lie; Hermosa is king of the South Bay right now. Newman says it’s been that way since the Hermosa Plaza opened at the end of the ‘90s.

“Every six or seven years it seems like it shifts,” he adds. “In two years, Redondo may do a renovation and then all of a sudden it’ll be Redondo. When I was a kid growing up it was Redondo, with the Red Onion, Chillers and Moose’s. Then it shifted to Manhattan, and now here.”

If, at times, the South Bay club world seems impervious to outside influences, Ron Newman, Greg’s father, says that’s not the case. The recent club tragedies in Rhode Island and Chicago have made club owners hyper-vigilant about overcrowding.

Sharkeez, he says, has always been conscientious about crowds anyway. “If you come into a club and you’re getting bumped all the time,” he says, “you don’t want to stay.”

While safety is paramount, for Sharkeez and the rest of the South Bay clubs, it’s also important to keep its customers happy. Tourists come and go, Greg Newman says; it’s the regulars who keep the scene humming.

“There’s probably a group of 500 people that you recognize, that are all in the scene,” he says. “But every three years it’s a new 500.”