Oh for chrissake...... Almost everything about this...

Oh for chrissake......

Almost everything about this place give me a feeling that they rushed to get it open - has an unfinished quality. I've been on both a weekend ($20 cover) and a week night ($15 cover), and this review covers both. TGS seems to trying for a strip club slash nightclub, like the chain in Calgary, but well....

The good is the inside of the club, nicely done, a slightly more exclusive upstairs with lots of places to sit, lots of seats around the bar, etc. On the weekend they have burlesque/go-go dancers working a second-stage pole and a go-go cage, which helps keeps the atmosphere up. Opening week there were very few (seemed like zero) VIP girls offering dances. Next week, about a dozen. Much better, but speaks to the "unfinished quality". The bartenders seems to know how to pour a drink (found it slightly cheaper than other Vancouver strip clubs), but not enough servers. That was bad. Real bad. VIP dances are $40 per (compared to $50 per elsewhere), and dances are somewhere between the No. 5 Orange's aggressive approach and Brandi's 2-foot force field between you and the girl. Feature dancers were a mixed bag. Some top end performers from Alberta, but more locals. Some good pole work, but generally nothing special at all. They'll tell you they have a 30-foot pole, but only 20-feet are visible - which in my mind make it a 20 foot pole. The weekend was a much younger, more female crowd, making it more nightclub-y than the weekdays.

One last thing, why does the DJ have to be visible? I'm sure DJ's are nice people, but who cares about seeing them?

I can't fault the idea of trying to mesh strip clubs and night clubs, and the idea of bringing in women customers so they'll bring in male customers has some merit. But The Granville Strip is competing with actual nightclubs, several within a 2 block radius. After the initial hype, why will those women customers come in? Maybe, to see kick-ass feature dancers, who have a lot of hype behind them as "dancers" and not "strippers"? Maybe cheap drinks? Maybe?