Post-Pandemic Slide

Visited Gold Club on Saturday for happy hour, and it's been quite a while since I've been, almost a year. It's a pretty clean, classy (very very relatively to other SF clubs), and professional feeling. It's a bi-level place, one big stage with a pole and a smaller side stage for the dancer who's next up. Music is pretty loud but not ear-splitting, and the DJ is pretty much intelligible but thankfully not very wordy. There's plenty of small 2-4 seat tables clustered around the main stage and a bar to the side. A lot of them are marked reserved, but if you talk to the staff they'll pretty much always take the sign off for you.

The dancers were mostly a mix of asian and white, standard stripper look, albeit on the attractive side (enhanced boobs, tattoos, bored looks, etc), which I find kind of unfortunate. At least the dancers here seem to take their pole work seriously. While they're at the better end of what other SF clubs had (at least pre-pandemic), it feels like a step down from what Gold Club was pre-pandemic, where the girls used to be markedly hotter than others in the city, a lot of local college girls used to work here, and that no longer seems to be the case. And the amount of dancers working has shrunk, with the guy to girl ratio being about 3 to 1, when it used to approach 1 to 1 in the past. Even worse, this more "pro" selection was a lot pickier with their clientele, while I used to normally get approached by several girls who would sit and talk for a while, I didn't get approached once in the two hours I was there, instead they focused on the much older guys or regulars in the crowd.

I paid no cover charge as I showed up for happy hour (7-8pm), and drink were pricey, with even happy hour well drinks being around $10, and non-hh drinks being around $15. I didn't spend much money this visit, just sat at the rail and threw ones, but when I came here in February for a more party situation, 10 minute dances were $125 and the cover charge was $20.