The kings of clubs

IN the conference room of Sam Nazarian’s West Hollywood offices sits a poster board map of Hollywood and environs. Dotted with the names of past, present and future hotspots such as the Meridien, Katsuya, Hyde, the Abbey, Shelter, Privilege and Prey, it looks like a Sunset Strip board game -- with the room’s occupants commanding the bulk of the properties.

“They’re definitely the great Monopoly players right now,” former Roosevelt Hotel nightlife matron Amanda Scheer Demme says.

Nazarian, a tall, gregarious man joined in the room by new partner Brent Bolthouse and Michael Doneff, the company’s marketing vice president, estimates that by the end of 2007 SBE will own 17 food and beverage establishments. His affiliation with Bolthouse, 36, the highly regarded promoter with the A-list Rolodex, gives the company formidable clout on the see-and-be-seen scene.

“A lot of people think we just own a couple of clubs together and we were thinking about maybe buying a couple of hotels, but it’s a pretty big infrastructure here,” says Nazarian, delivering his words at a jackhammer’s pace. “We’re really looking for the first time ever [at expanding from] downtown to Santa Monica.”

In addition to the recent purchase of the Abbey (previous owner David Cooley stays on as a partner in the West Hollywood hangout), SBE is signing a four-venue deal downtown with the Anschutz Co., the holding firm for AEG, which manages Staples Center.

It’s all part of Nazarian’s objective to make L.A. an SBE playground for adults. Imagine: You’re staying at Le Meridien in Beverly Hills (which will be renamed after its reopening in 2008) and you want to go out to dinner or for a night on the town. Your room key becomes a ticket to any SBE destination -- it gets you in the door and lets you put your tab on your hotel account. Numerous SBE clubs and eateries simply become extensions of the Meridien, which is planned as the first of the company’s five-star hotel brand.

Is it SBE’s world, and we’re just partying in it?

Seems that way already on most nights. “Right now Sam Nazarian has a majority of the hot clubs, so we usually head over to one of those,” says Christian Corben, who as an executive at Sunset Strip restaurant Katana understands L.A. hotspots. “I would say Saturday night at Privilege, get a table in the corner; it’s nice. Thursday night at the Lobby is fine.”

Indeed, at West Hollywood’s Privilege on a recent Saturday night, the crowd in the parking lot is dense, and VIPs are whisked off to a side entrance to avoid the mob and paparazzi. Inside the venue, a few hundred beautiful people wade through two smaller rooms to an outdoor patio that doubles as a dance floor. It affords a view of the sofas in the roped-off VIP section, so patrons can engage in some celebrity-spotting.

At the intimate new Sunset Boulevard lounge Hyde, which has a capacity of between 100 and 200, a who’s who of Hollywood -- including frequent Bolthouse guest Paris Hilton, and some behind-the-scenes players -- relaxes on luxurious furniture framed by wall-length mirrors. It’s a Tuesday.

SBE’s celebrity clout makes such venues the destinations of choice. “We see the bankers who come in from Wall Street and they’re like, ‘OK, the deal is great. But let’s go out. We want to see Paris Hilton,’ ” Nazarian says. “It’s pretty powerful to be able to have [those] relationships with celebrities.”

Nazarian landed on the club scene in 2003 when he and partner Reza Roohi (president of the company’s restaurant group) purchased Shelter. “[It] really was picking up the best licenses we could first,” he says. “That’s what we did with Shelter and Prey, Lobby and North.”

His background as a behind-the-scenes real estate investor puts him in sharp contrast with Bolthouse, who for 17 years has been the reigning L.A. nightclub king, a guy who continually has packed nights wherever he’s lent his name.

As a clubgoer in L.A., Nazarian was well aware of the Bolthouse mystique. “Growing up in L.A., obviously the Bolthouse brand is a huge brand,” Nazarian says. “I remember nights I was outside Las Palmas and waited an hour. I had never really spoken to Brent; the first time we really spoke was at his club [Body English] in Vegas, but obviously you understand that the following’s huge. That I knew.”

BOLTHOUSE seems the perfect name and face for SBE, a burgeoning empire that includes seven nightclubs-restaurants, two hotels and even a nine-picture film production deal with Lionsgate.

With his Bolthouse Enterprises now a division of SBE, he feels he has a partner with the ambition and capital to take him forward. “When I saw what [Sam] was doing, it was very interesting to see there was a master plan,” Bolthouse says. “And it was nice to be able to take everything that we’ve worked our entire lives for and go to that next level with a partner who has vision and is willing to invest the time, energy and equity.... ‘Cause really, how much longer were we going to promote Wednesday nights at Shoe or whatever the place was five years from now?

“People can’t see five years from today. We can, and it looks pretty amazing.”

The pair is also assembling what Nazarian calls the “dream team” -- signing acclaimed designer Philippe Starck to a 15-year-deal and chef Katsuya Uechi, the man behind Katsu-Ya sushi bars and who created the menu for Hyde, to a five-year deal, among others. SBE is also hiring young promoters to be trained by Bolthouse.

Loyal Pennings, the co-owner of the fashionable nightspot LAX (which SBE inquired about purchasing) who has worked with Bolthouse for years, says, “Anybody that’s worthy of employment [Nazarian] is putting on the payroll.”

The goal? “Revitalize L.A. nightlife,” Bolthouse says.

“L.A. nightlife has always been fourth-class to any other city,” he adds. “There’s not really an amazing, world-class nightclub in Los Angeles, which is crazy.”

Service, of course, adds to any clubgoer’s smile -- but SBE is trying to elevate it to a science with a system the firm calls “customer retention management.” It’s a database housing what’s important about SBE’s VIPs.

“We have two or three people here in the office collecting all the information that [the hostesses] fill out at the end of the night,” says Daniela Danilovic, who is in charge of the firm’s VIP service. “We’re tracking customer frequency of visits; the average number of people in their party; their average spend per event; their favorite waitress; their favorite location; what time of year they like coming. And by building the database, not only are we able to offer great customer recognition for their spending habits because we track everything, we have liquor companies that are going to help us create gift baskets to send for birthdays, we’re going to send clients to the hotels for a weekend as a thank you when they spend $100,000 with us in a year, or if they want to take their wife out for a concert we can set that up for them.”

Though such practices are increasingly common in the hotel business, Demme says it’s impressive for an industry she believes traditionally thinks too small. “The nightclub business can be such a small business, but they’re doing what you should be doing, which is making it a corporate masterpiece,” she says.

Marc Schiller, chief executive of ElectricArtists, a New York-based digital strategy and marketing agency, lauds that thinking. “Restaurants and nightclubs traditionally are businesses that are very slow to leverage new technology tools,” he says. “If [SBE] can fully leverage social networking via mobile, they will really set the standard and be far ahead of the field.”

And though there have been rampant rumors about bad blood in clubland, Steve Adelman, co-owner of Avalon and the Spider Club (as well as sole owner of the forthcoming 86), wonders what all the fuss is about: “I think the city needs good nightlife so if they open up good clubs, great. Anything that’s good in Hollywood I’m for.”

Pennings also believes the presence of Nazarian is a good thing for L.A. nightlife. “Ultimately consumers are going to be the ones that benefit,” Pennings says. “He’s making people work harder and he’s made promoters much more friendly to the clientele because there’s so much more competition. He’s driven up rents. Hollywood is in a better, higher-profile place than it was before Nazarian came on the scene. We’re all making more money because of him.”

Still, backlash seems inevitable. Pennings likens it to those who prefer going to independent coffeehouses over chain stores: “There will be club connoisseurs that favor individual or privately owned nightclubs that aren’t part of this big team.”

Nazarian is hoping to avoid or minimize that by acting as a good neighbor. “We’ve been very lucky to have a great working relationship with the community,” he says.

Another frequent point for naysayers is that Bolthouse, who’s built his reputation on an air of exclusivity, is sacrificing that by being involved in so many interests. Bolthouse points to the differences in the company’s West Hollywood properties -- the Abbey, Lobby, and Prey. “Those are three different concepts,” he says. “The Abbey is what it is. The Lobby we’re waiting to get a permit to build the back patio.” Nazarian adds that Prey is being redesigned by Starck as a two-story supper club that will reopen under a new name this summer. Says Nazarian: “We’re trying to really encompass all aspects of lifestyle and branding.”