Disappointing visit and club seems to have lost its mojo

I visited the Spearmint Rhino on Saturday night. My friends and I have been to this club multiple times in the past and have usually had a solid time with the number, variety, and quality of girls available. For this trip, I went with a group of guys who were in town for the football playoffs, and we went here a little on the earlier side (10PM) before we ended up going to the Peppermint Hippo (also reviewed) for round 2, the reasons for which will become clear.

We called for a limo pick-up but the receptionist said it’d be an hour to get us even with a large group and we ended up just calling a bunch of taxis to the club. So already that was 1 strike against this club. Because we came by taxi, we had to pay the cover and as has been pointed out elsewhere the entrance fee was a weird # like $43.6/person due to the tax. Strike 2 came from the bouncers being really slow getting people into the club and just making you stand outside for no apparent reason, something like 15 minutes, even after they did their security check and when there wasn’t a line to get inside. Once we got inside, the host asked if we wanted to buy a bottle which no one wanted to do right away, and as a result we got escorted to this small ante room with a single very small stage and where only a few dancers were circulating. I’ve been to SR dozens of times before and knew that this was not the main area of the club and so we asked the host why we weren’t taken to the main room. His response was that we’d have to buy a bottle to get access to the main room which had never happened in the past to me or anyone else in the group. At this point, we should have known things weren’t going to go well at this club and we should have just cut our losses and bounced. But we were there already and had paid the cover and just said fuck it and got the cheapest bottle. Strike 4 was when I asked them to discount the bottle by crediting the amount we paid in cover off the cost of the bottle as though we got one of their VIP packages in the first place and they refused.

Anyway, we got our bottle (paid for by the same guy who was buying bottles at the Hippo) and went to the main room. The interior has been described many times before, but it has a darker interior with wood paneling and has more of a smoking lounge mood than the party atmosphere at Crazy Horse, Hippo, or Sapphires. We posted up at the center stage along the tip rail, which is surrounded by lounge chairs and a raised platform area to one side where there are reserved tables/booths. There’s a small bar area and a cashier along the back wall where you can get change if necessary, although I had heard somewhere that they also charge a fee to convert large bills to singles which is crap if true. Behind the main stage, there’s another lounge area with a second bar and a couple of individual satellite platforms where the 2 girls rotate to after coming off the main stage. My recollection is that the bathroom and the private VIP rooms are located off this second lounge area.