Drinking the Depths of Sanlitun Bar Street

Editor's note: We are very pleased to present the first edition of a new column by former SmartBeijing editor Morgan Short. Look for it every Thursday at 3pm, only on theBeijinger.com.

One of Beijing’s most famous and bustling nightlife destinations, Sanlitun Bar Street is a great place to visit if you’d like to experience some of that authentic Beijing “after dark” action, meet some exciting new friends, dance to the latest chart-topping hits out of Europe and the States, enjoy some hot, new music performed live on stage, and also to wallow around in the fetid mire of a wasted civilization asphyxiating on its own shame, pre-cum, and degradation, thrashing and screaming for a merciful release in the face of an unyielding typhoon of greed and garbage water – NO I DON’T WANT TO GO LADY BAR – praying, outright praying, for a fiery, righteous fist to slam down from the heavens, rip the pavement asunder, and send us all cascading to the floors of hell, so that we might eternally and without clemency reenact the horrible, morbid parade that is permanent damnation.

Plus there’s pole dancing!
 

But has anyone actually been to any of these fine establishments on Sanlitun Bar Street? I’m talking about classic, original recipe Sanlitun Bar Street – the one right across from 3.3 there on actual Sanlitun Lu. You know what I’m talking about. Club names are like “Love Baby Love“ and “Love Baby Baby” and “Face Love Love” and “Kill Yourself." There’s like 15 of them and every night the whole row is lit up in neon like Lucifer’s horrible boner. Has anyone actually been? I have! You bet I have! I went to all of them. Yes, all of them. In one night. That’s right. All of them. Like a heatseeking shithead missile, I went to all of them. HERE’S HOW THAT WHOLE THING WENT. Let’s go.

Setting the scene and rules of the game: 1. At around 9pm-ish, we started out from the intersection of Sanlitun Lu and Gongti, right across from the world famous Uniqlo Sex Hut. We made our way down into the shit, hitting every single bar before we were spit out the other end, across from The Opposite House, where everything kind of trails off into trees, black cabs, and embassies like a sigh giving up. 2. We were only hitting the bars. So “Tapas 22” was disqualified. Didn’t go to that one. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d imagine that it’s awesome, just awesome. 3. We had to get at least one drink in each place. No matter how much bullshit they were slinging with “laowai menus” and prices.
 

Skyline Club

Skyline Club is the one with the massive, neon guitar that squats on that Sanlitun Lu/Gongti intersection where the traffic is always so smooth. You’ve seen this place. In your dreams. In your nightmares.
 

 

Skyline Club set the tone for the evening to perfection. Present in this two-floored, bubble gum bar-and-stage were all three key themes that we would be revisiting ad nauseam all night long: Carlsberg beer was RMB 80 until 17 minutes of negotiation got that price down to RMB 20; pervasive was this unshakable feeling that every piece of furniture in the club was covered in a fine film of dried jizz; and, finally, the planned entertainment for the evening seemed carefully designed to lure and entice drunk and seafaring Norwegian tourists to smash their galleons on the rocks of pure, unadulterated boredom.
 

 

I’m already pretty speechless and this is just the first damn one. What can I say. Skyline Club. It looks like the kind of place my landlord hangs out in to relax and think up new and fresh ways to completely dick me over. I think this is him actually:
 

 

Side note: My landlord is like 80s movie villain-evil. Pure 80s evil. Like I bet right now he’s planning on shutting down and paving over some awesome BMX park that’s used by neighborhood kids and putting up a soulless mini-mall. Joke's on him though because I was also at Skyline Club thinking up a way to take care of him for good. It involves a climactic break-dancing competition right in the town square, and one of us is going to end up with the lease to my place and one of us has to leave Beijing forever. What was I saying? Oh yeah. F*ck this place. Next.
 

Boys & Girls Club

Mark it down. Mark it down, my friends. First appearance of “What’s Going On” by 4 Non Blondes was at Boys & Girls Club – the second bar – clocking in at 9.40. Honestly, I didn't expect it to take that long. But here we are. Boys & Girls Club.
 

 

It’s like a huge shoebox of a place and that shoebox once held a sweet pair of bright orange and pink LA Gear Regulators. Drinks were like … do you care about the drinks? Basically, it was the same at every single place: I would ask for a vodka, they would offer a full bottle of fake vodka for RMB 20,000; I would ask for the double thumbs up super-friend happy hour prices; they would offer a Carlsberg bottle for RMB 100; I would offer BURNING THE F*CKING PLACE DOWN WITH A FLAMETHROWER; we would settle on Carlsbergs for RMB 20. Boys & Girls Club was the mature one of the lot, I’d say. Middle-aged crowd and they wouldn’t let me sit on the couches, which I respect. Lots of people on dates (“dates”), and a painfully subdued sort of twinkling Mando-pop vibe via a live band that had a bassist playing a 90-string bass. Never a good sign. The neck on this guy’s bass was thicker than a 10,000-year-old redwood f*cking sequoia from a damn rainforest. Like the thing survived the comet that took out the dinosaurs but not the advent of jazz pop. I would be so bummed if I were that redwood. What a harsh buzz.
 

 

So it kind of felt like being at a retirement party for a guy who’s been selling aquariums and aquarium supplies in a regional outlet for 45 years and only half his office showed up and the other half stayed home to watch a Seinfeld re-run.

Berry’s
 

 

Berry’s is like a normal, invisible place. Like one of those places you walk by on Wudaoying Hutong, wondering who would ever smoke a hookah. Dude who runs it is just trying to fool himself thinking he’s in Wudaoying or some Gulou hutong, and not right smack dab in the middle of Satan’s codpiece on Sanlitun Bar Street. Got a Bud and a Breezer. Both excellent. Compliments to the chef.
 

 

Lan Gui Fang

This was the most “Chinese” of the lot. Like “traditional Chinese elements.” The name’s Chinese with no attempt at an English translation and it’s absolutely covered in red lanterns. The whole club was most unimpressed when this foreign face darkened the door, like “Guten tag, my international friends! Let’s exchange the chocolate of our country, smoke cigarettes, and get into painful conversations about Iraq and Guns and Roses!” I would never do that (I might do that) but what did they know – fair play – so it was a pretty chilly reception in this bar for me. Big crowd. Swirling lights everyone. Warcrime-core KTV performing on stage at a comically loud volume. The whole place was like being inside a disco ball going over a waterfall. This dude in particular jumped on the mic and started doing Linkin Park as loud as any human could fathom while this beleaguered smoke machine belched out noxious mustard gas on the first five tables.
 

 

Had to give it up. Good times.
 

 

Did tequila shots. Tasted like PCP and Sharpie marker ink accented with your shredded junior high report card.
 

Day Off
 

 

We are officially in pole dancing territory my friends, here we are at Day Off. Let me tell you it wasn’t a “day off” for the performer right here. She was doing her own music to dance to. Like she would do a pole dance to a song, and when the song was over, she’d trudge on over to the side of the stage, skip two songs down on the soundsystem and start it all up over again. Strippers doing their own music. Like … damn, right? But yeah, I guess it’s not “stripping," It’s pole dancing. There’s no nudity, FYI. It’s pole dancing. Basically, the rest of the places from here on out are all straight-up pole dancing places, broken up by a KTV act in between the gals. It’s like cutting edge 2005 shit that has taken the street by storm. Sanlitun Bar Street is on the bleeding edge of 2005 trends. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing. Everyone was pros. I can’t do it, that’s for sure.

 

It’s a special talent to look like you’re contemplating the different ways you’d like to commit suicide whilst swinging around on a pole 10 feet in the air at like 50 miles an hour. Talent.

No. 60 Pizza Happybar

 

Man. Highlight of number 60 Pizza Happybar was that it was called “60 Pizza Happybar”. Got a nice ring to it, know what I mean? This was another pole dancing place, same as the other one, with the one exception that these dancers were “Russian dancers” according to the guy suggestively screaming in my face out front.

 

Definitely had a “Russian” sort of vibe to it. Maybe too Russian though. Like I got this nervous feeling that at any moment Liam Neeson was going to drive a Range Rover through the front window of the club and start snapping everyone’s necks like WHERE’S MY DAUGHTER, just garroting people with CIA piano wire and slashing everyone up with one of those knives that fits on your thumb.

Swing

 

Swing!

 

Had a very talented Filipino cover band that sang me “Happy Birthday” (not my birthday) and then medley’ed that right into “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers like a bunch of Filipino cover band Gandalfs. Whoa! That’s like two presents! Thanks so much! They were lovely. And for some reason singing behind a bunch of podiums. Maybe they were also handling baggage check-in on Air Suck?
 

 

Swing also had this wall of pictures, which was supposed to be like those “look at all our regulars having a good time our bar” kind of walls, but in this context, on this road, it was more like a wall of missing children. Have you seen these missing children? This is Dimitri, last seen disembarking a plane from Stuttgart. He lasted in Beijing three hours before being swallowed up whole on Sanlitun Bar Street in 2003. Or it’s like a serial killer’s trophy wall in some evil dungeon in Alabama. Like, if you look close enough, all the people in these pictures have their eyes blacked out and a pentagram drawn on their foreheads. But I liked the band.
 

Side by Side Bar No. 56

 

Side by Side Bar was putting a deeper, more nuanced spin on the pole dancing thing. Like the bar still looked like Christmas 69’ing Halloween, but the pole dancers were doing their thing to “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which always seemed to me like a super deep song.

 

I gotta say I never understood what they were talking about with this “Californication” thing, but after this night, I understand all too well now. I really get what “Californication” is. I can’t really explain it to you but I just know.
 

Adam’s

 

Adam’s has this sort of stuff on the wall.

 

But it was like an oasis of style, restraint, and taste, right smack dab in the middle of this ocean of violent schmaltz that is Sanitun Bar Street. God bless you, Adam’s. Felt like I was on a Carlsberg-sponsored Napoleonic death march and Adam’s was the brief respite of calm and serenity in the face of this all-consuming onslaught. Adam’s has a proper drinks menu with real prices and they’re nice. Don’t take these small things for granted. I gotta apologize to Adam’s, though, because at this point we were rolling with like 12 hammered Scandis, and they got all agro up in that place. The cold hard fact is this: You can’t roll on Sanlitun Bar Street without picking up at least double digits in hammered Scandis in your wake. These people cling to your person like wasted, pale-faced dingleberries, with their “whad do you do in Beijing” and “how long haff you been in Beijing” bullshit and there’s just no getting rid of them. You just gotta go with it. That’s the realness.
 

Down Town

 

So the stage at Down Town was designed to look like a unicorn’s labia flying through space vajazzled with Mandopop singers. Weird vibes. Down Town is more eye-searingly pink, teal, and purple than all the other ones on this street, which is a huge, huge thing to say. Kind of looked like where Avatars go to cheat on other Avatars when they’re in town on business, doing Avatar business shit.

 

Like, oh shit don't tell my Avatar wife back home in the enchanted forest with the Jesus tree or whatever. Just seedy Avatar shit. Gross Avatar shit. This is what Down Town is all about: Avatars into gross butt play and torture, living their worst Avatar lives. Haha. Welcome to the Beijinger, my friends. Welcome, welcome! Oh man, I’m running out, how many more of these do we got.
 

Red Moon Club

Last one!
 

 

Uh yeah. It was great! RECOMMENDED.

Photos: Morgan Short