Some­times, a bar is too pre­ten­tious even for me. Though by “pre­ten­tious”, I don’t mean what some peo­ple seem to mean by that: expen­sive, styl­ish, ambi­tious or glam­orous. No, it’s bars that make a great show of aspir­ing to all those qual­i­ties, and yet end up being the same-old same-old Courte­nay Place tack, that real­ly set my mandibles on edge.


Take this place, for instance. It’s keen to impress pun­ters with its “exclu­siv­i­ty”, but if there’s any door pol­i­cy here it seems to be “must be wear­ing this sea­son’s Supré”. It wants to pro­mote itself as a bur­lesque-style cock­tail bar, but play­ing end­less remix­es of 70s and 80s hits is not the way to do that. It pre­tends to embrace deca­dence and dar­ing, but is deeply con­ven­tion­al and cor­po­rate. It wants to daz­zle us with “glam­our”, but looks like it’s aim­ing to attract the sort of brain-dead bleached and gelled pseu­do-slebs that infest the Auck­land gos­sip rags.

Maybe if it were hon­est enough to admit that it’s just aim­ing for the bridge & tun­nel crowd of glossed-up RTD-swill­ing teenage girlies and the thick-necked leather-jack­et­ed mid­dle-aged men who love them, it would­n’t grate so much. And frankly, in such a loca­tion, one should­n’t expect too much more. But by pro­mot­ing itself as exclu­sive and sophis­ti­cat­ed, it’s open­ing itself up for ridicule.