So tonight we're hitting up a few bars on Charleston just a few blocks west of the strip.
We're gonna start with dinner and drinks at the Artisan around 10pm. The Artisan is probably one of the coolest and best kept hotels in Las Vegas. In their words, "It’s 1914, the Parisian Left Bank, an elegant and mysterious world of art, absinthe, and decadent indulgence."
Inside the Artisan you'll find Mood Restaurant where we're going to grab some food after working a long day, where we can chill and catch up over a drink. Yvonne and I work pretty late at the tattoo shop so it's cool to find somewhere that serves food late at night. Mood serves food from it's menu until 11pm, and then it looks like they serve from their late night menu all night, and 50% off drinks and appetizers from 6am-8am during Happy Hour!
After dinner we'll probably mozy on over to the lounge and have a few drinks. Tonight it looks like they have a Yelp Drinks! Las Vegas special and they have 50% off featured beverages - score!
...and in their own words...
Timeless, hip and welcoming…OPEN 24-7!
The spirited and alluring ARTISAN LOUNGE is timeless, hip and always welcoming. This old-school club-room style bar, lounge and patio has long been a party spot for Hollywood hipsters and in–the-know Vegas locals. Enjoy handcrafted cocktails, fine beer and wine and a lively bar scene, or sneak off to a dark corner booth for a discreet rendezvous. ARTISAN LOUNGE features a humidor stocked with fine cigars, happy hour specials, and ARTISAN AFTERHOURS with DJs spinning Friday and Saturday nights from 10pm to dawn.
Our second stop for the night is going to be Frankies Tiki Room. Frankies, in their own words, is a "Unique combination of south-seas exotica, modern primitivism, with just a hint of Las Vegas kitsch."
If you wear a Hawaiian shirt on fridays, you get your first drink half off!
Frankies was designed and filled to the brim with well-known artists along with tiki/wood carvers from around the world including Bamboo Ben, Shag and Tom "Big Toe Laura" who's original painting you can find on the wall.
Frankies also serves amazing (and lethally strong) exotic drinks in Tiki mugs, which you can buy. There's a ton of different designs and they're all awesome.
After Frankies we're gonna make our last stop of the night Dinos. Dinos prides itself on being "the last neighborhood bar in Vegas."
Dinos is known for it's friendly neighborhood atmosphere, cheap drinks, diverse crowd, and awesome karaoke on Thurs, Fri, and Sat. nights.
So, if you're feeling like a night on the town, meet up with us at the Artisan around 10pm! And, as always, if you can't make it out, check our blog tomorrow for updates!
We started the night off right by heading over to Stake Out. Stake Out was a sweet, low-key hole-in-the-wall type bar with low lighting, comfy booths and rockin' tunes. A great place to start the night off, the music was the perfect volume to rock out to while being able to chill and have an actual conversation at your table. Almost all the music was 80's which totally rocked our world and we were singing along in no time. We both ordered a shot and a drink for around $5 to get started and decided to share the nachos. The nachos, slathered in "nacho" cheese and salsa w/ a side of sour cream and jalapenos was pretty good for $5, although we both seriously wondered if we would be regretting this later.
One item of interest that many people don't know if you're not a Vegas local, is that many/most bars in Vegas still turn a blind eye if you smoke inside despite passing the no smoking laws. Even if there are no ashtrays in sight, you can ask the waitress for a "smoking receptacle" and they will bring you something like an old tin Altoid box, which would look something like this:
Of course should anyone come into the bar that enforced these laws, the wait staff will deny that they were aware that you were smoking and said receptacle belongs to the patron.
We also heard about a so-called sex machine in the womens bathroom at Stake Out. Yvonne went to use the restroom and was checking this machine out. A woman in the bathroom noticed her looking at it and asked her if she's ever gotten anything out of this machine before.
When Yvonne answered in the negative, the woman then said she had to pee really bad, but she would be right back and told Yvonne not to go anywhere, b/c she wanted to buy her some items out of this machine. The woman then returned with a fist full of quarters and purchased 1 Pandora's Box - A Grab Bag of Sexy Surprises with "12 Different", and 1 Exciting and Breathtaking Guide to Modern Intimacy with 12 Illustrated Erotic Sensual Positions. This is a little preview of what you can expect from this machine:
A few highlights would have to be Working in the Garden, Pleasure My Love, the Unicycle, and the Bicycle Pump.
We ended up hanging out at Stake Out for quite a while, and after about 3-4 drinks each we were laughing so hard we were crying, talking about our experiences with pot when we were younger. For example, the time I went to a movie with 2 friends and as we passed the "Russell" exit off the 215, and we couldn't, for the life of us, figure out who the heck Russell Stiltskin was. As Yvonne and I were talking about this, Russell Stover was on the T.V. on a late night talk show. We later realized it wasn't Russell Stover, But this guy:
All in all a cool, chill bar! Damage: $30 tab for nachos, and about 2 shots and 3 drinks each.
Our next location was The Freakin' Frog. This bar had a cozy feel w/ a wooden bar and wooden floors. The bartenders were awesome. Just the type of place where they make you feel like you're at home. They were super knowledgeable about all the different beer and whiskey. We each ordered a Lindemans Framboise Lambic Belgian Raspberry Beer, which we've heard was bomb. At $9 a beer, they were, we both agreed, totally delicious and worth it.
After hanging at the bar for a few minutes, we wandered up in the Whiskey Attic. Up in the Attic there were a TON of bottles of Whiskey, Scotch, and Bourbon lined up along the shelves. One of the largest collections in the world, to be exact.
The bartender, Scott was really educated and informative. Up in the attic we met Ramon, who peaked our interest, when he ordered a $22 shot of bourbon and went through an extensive process of tasting and sipping the liquor. Here's a photo of Ramon and his shot from the bottle of bourbon he was drinking:
We asked Scott, the bartender, if he could pick out one of his favorite bottles for us. He showed us this one:
It's a $28 year old Kentucky bourbon called Willett and a shot of it retails for around $100/a shot. There were only 115 bottles made and this bottle was number 35. Scott also showed us a bottle of Whiskey aged since the 1930's and the shots went up to $400/each!
Here's a few more random photos of us in Whiskey Attic:
We took our time socializing and sipping our $9 beers. We left the Freakin' Frog around 12:30am.
Total tab: $18 +tip for two Raspberry Beers.
Next destination: Champagnes Cafe. As soon as we pulled into Champagnes parking lot we saw the most incredible sight. At first we thought it was "Ecto-1" or the Ghostbusters car. As we walked up to it, this is what we saw:
Yvonne and I made a little bet. We had to each guess who the car belonged to once we got inside. The loser had to go up to the owner of the car, or "Grandpa Vampire" and ask for his autograph and get a photo taken with him. Yvonne was totally correct and chose the right dude w/in about 1 minute. It took me like 5 minutes to look around the bar, and I chose a goth looking dude with a devil lock and a hat sitting at the bar. FAIL. My roommate, Fred, was at the bar w/ his girlfriend who is a bartender there. We asked if she knew who the car belonged to and Yvonne was right. So I sucked it up and went up to him, and asked him enthusiastically if he was Grandpa Vampire, and if I could have his autograph! We took a photo, but for some reason it didn't save onto the camera!
Grandpa asked us if we wanted to see the inside of his car. So we went outside and checked it out! Here's what we saw:
Grandpa Vampire was definitely one of the main characters we met throughout the evening. He performs weddings, vampire tours, and makes appearances at parties. Here's the business card we got from him, complete w/ his autograph and photos of him in complete makeup on the back:
..and while we were outside, Grandpa Vampire (I kept calling him Grandpa Monster) told us his personal philosophy:
Inside, the karaoke was rockin'! Mostly locals, kicking back drinking and taking turns on the stage. Everyone at Champagnes was totally fun, strangers talking to strangers and dancing, singing along, heckling, each one of us a character. I got up and sang "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N Roses right after a group of guys signed up one of their friends to sing an AC/DC song. The dude had no idea what he was gonna sing, but he freakin' ROCKED the shit outta "Dirty Deeds". It was kinda hard to follow up that one! However, Sweet Child O'Mine must have been meaningful for at least one bar patron that evening. After I got offstage this woman that had been sitting at the end of the bar all night like the living dead playing video poker all alone got up, and hugged me. She very sincerely looked me right in the eyes and said, "Thank you. You don't know how much that meant to me" and hugged me again and then went back to playing her video poker! Yvonne got up after me and sang "What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes. Grandpa Vampire got up and sang New York, New York.
We closed down the bar that night with karaoke ending around 2:45am. The six of us remaining sang the last song of the night together as a group onstage which was Bohemian Rhapsody. At the end, we held hands, standing across the stage, arms high up in the air and took a few bows as a group to the other six people still drinking in the bar saying "Thank you, thank you, you're too kind." I may have gone a little far when I asked the rest of the group to file off stage so I could take my final bow alone.
Yvonne had a #1 fan, this dude with long hair that was totally headbanging all night up front. As we were leaving he put his arms around us and made us promise him one thing. He said, "Promise me....that you'll never stop singing. Singing makes the world go 'round."
...and on that note, that was end of the night!
Drinks were about $4/each at Champagnes, I think we had about 2 drinks each for total of around $16 + tip. We left Champagnes around 2:30-3:00am
Tomorrow night we've decided to keep it close to home and see what the nightlife is like on the UNLV campus close to Tatlantis where the tattoo shop we work at is located.
We're gonna start the night off right by heading over to a well-kept local secret right on campus called the Stake Out. This two-story bar w/ pool tables on the second floor is known for cheap awesome food and drinks where you can get a PBR and a Jameson for around $5. It's a local hang out for students, UNLV staff and anyone else who likes to have a good time.
After that we'll be heading to the Freakin' Frog and Whiskey Attic. This is a bar located right in the heart of campus and is known for it's huge selection of beers from around the world. It has live music and a band called the Cory Wilkins Band will be rockin' on the stage tomorrow night. Rumors are the raspberry beer will rock our world!
After we hit up the Freakin' Frog we'll be heading over to Champagnes Cafe to bring in the night. Champagnes Cafe is a real Vegas dive-bar with red velvet wallpaper, candles on the tables, super low lighting, and on a little stage in the corner you can find Karaoke hosted by Bobby Shawn, complete in a sparkly tuxedo.
If you're interested in joining us, leave a comment or meet us at Stake Out where the festivities will begin around 10pm! If you can't join us, then be sure to check back after Saturday for photos, and play-by-play rundowns of the evenings events!
This is a blog about Athena and Yvonne and our life and times living in Las Vegas. We're two tattoo artists that work at Tatlantis, a tattoo shop just off the strip on the UNLV campus. Las Vegas has to be one of the most unpredictable cities in the world. Every single nook and cranny has something weird, odd, gaudy, hilarious, seedy, unusual, chintzy, plastic, desperate, awe-inspiring, drunken, tragic, ironic, real, fake...you name it, you can find it here! So we've dedicated every Saturday night for the next year to choosing a new and unusual location in Vegas to drink, gamble, explore and document the possibilities of whatever shenanigans we may find in these places. So, if you've ever wondered what it was like to live in a city like Vegas, you like to party, you've ever wondered what lies in the darkness beyond Las Vegas Boulevard, live and work as a tattoo artist in a city like Vegas, and have all the time in the world to explore all the nooks and crannies, then you found the right place.
