Florida

From the Variety Club Blog, Florida

What in daylight looks like an obtrusive, gray blob of an eyesore becomes a club heaven once the sun sets. Let’s start with the no-bottle-service premise. That’s how you know everyone’s here for one thing: the music. That includes the sound system — Fraction-One, one of the best in the world — and the great DJs, each of whom brings a particular crowd, changing the scene nightly. On any given evening you might hear Blaisy playing menacing, deconstructed club beats as someone stands on a speaker and strips down completely (which happened this March) or watch a bunch of foreign trance-loving bros slingshot up and down to Gareth Emery at 1 a.m. on a Wednesday.

"Social dancing teaches us how to listen and move to the music and the rhyming lyrics."

All of this can happen in one place because the main dance floor is massive but intimate. It feels cavernous, sunken in and contained beneath a balcony, but that’s only the beginning. Behind one door there’s the Panther Room for smaller events; up a back staircase you’ll find the roof, with the beach skyline as a backdrop; and through a separate entrance you’ll land upon its newest addition, Halcyon, a record shop, café, and bar that has DJs spinning all vinyl sets all weekend. The appeal here is simple: It’s a club that doesn’t actually feel like a club.

"Tiny Bubbles" by Don Ho 

Contributed by Maile Yagi

That means all of the annoying things that might normally turn you away — overpriced cover, bottle service, obnoxious doorman — are nowhere to be found. Instead, with the only barrier to entry an already capacity crowd, you’ll walk into a Miami-inspired bar with palm trees and pink flamingo drink stirrers. But it’s the sweaty, 70-person-capacity downstairs dance den that’ll surprise you. I know, it is tough that you rich tourists have got to go back to whatever you got.

"Social dancers are aware that there are no classes in life for beginners:

right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult."