Solid Vegas club but expensive to get the full experience

Peppermint Hippo is the second club I visited during my Vegas trip, and this review covers 2 visits on Friday/Saturday nights when the rest of my crew showed up. I’ve written reviews for the other clubs that I visited during this trip as well, and the same preamble about Vegas being expensive/overpriced relative to the rest of the country applies and that was definitely true for my experience at this particular club. I should also state up front that the visits to the clubs where I went in a group, including these 2 trips to the Hippo, were incredibly skewed by the fact that one guy in the group went kind of nuts since he’s an investment banker who has way more money than he knows what to do with and also has an absolute anchor of a wife.

Anyway, we called the club van both nights and got the free pickup and comped entrance to the club after a tip to the driver (something like $15/person). We also got wanded and patted down by security before entering. We initially wanted to go the Hippo because of the South Park LOL’s, but also because the rich guy in the group knew one of the hosts. I guess the Hippo used to be the Olympic Gardens in a previous life, and I think it’s the only big club that is actually located on the Strip relatively close to the main casinos. When you enter, there’s a foyer with a big metal hippo statue. Off to the right is the main room with a stage where there’s usually 2 girls pole dancing surrounded by tables and lounge chairs. There are multiple VIP booths along the right wall, a bar along the back wall, and also what appeared to be some bead curtained rooms along the left wall where you can get private dances, although I didn’t really see those rooms get used either night I went. Off the left of the foyer, there’s a similar although smaller setup as the main stage room although this seems to be the secondary room that only gets used if the main room is full. The real VIP/private rooms are located through another entrance off of this second stage room. We sat in the main stage room the first night, which is the livelier of the two, and the ancillary stage room the second night since all of the booths in the main room were taken by the time we arrived.

The host my friend knew escorted us to a booth, and my friend immediately started ordering bottles of champagne and liquor both nights. I didn’t see the drink bills either night but the cheapest bottle supposedly cost something like $1K, although he might have gotten a “discount” for buying multiple bottles each night. This club had a definite party atmosphere and it seemed like there were several large groups at most of the VIP booths who were getting bottles of liquor, including some with female gusts. Overall, it felt like you were in a casino night club except with strippers walking around who were willing to get naked for you. One thing I didn’t like is that if you got a booth and bought bottles of liquor, the hosts or waitresses immediately brought a group of strippers to your table to join you and it was really difficult to extricate yourself from the initial group of dancers selected by the hosts. I get that it’s their business model to make the booze disappear as fast as possible by having the girls “help” you drink the alcohol so that you’ll buy more, but I like it much better when you can choose who joins you so you can sample more of the girls. This is also the case with dozens of girls standing right at the front of the entrance waiting to accost you as soon as you come inside. The first night it wasn’t an issue since the girls who sat with us were hot and chill but the second night it was just a bunch of leeches who just wouldn’t go away no matter what we did.