Turning Japonais, I Really Think So

I admit it, I'm feeling a little fuzzy today. I really didn't have that much to drink last night, but I didn't arrive back at my apartment until about 4:30 am, and then for some unfathomable reason, I woke up at precisely 7:30 am. Ugh. Are you KIDDING me? I did manage to fall back to sleep for another hour and a half or so, but I mean, come on -- just over four hours of sleep doesn't cut it.

Yesterday was a sort of fun serendipitous kind of day. It turned out that both PJ and friends Josh and Robin were going to be in New York (from SoCal) on the same weekend. PJ was here to meet a friend for a Rage Against the Machine concert tonight and Josh and Robin were each here for separate business trips and decided to extend those commitments into a bit of a vacation.

After PJ and I visited Niketown to buy him some new runners and grabbed a drink and a snack at favourite Irish pub, McGee's, we all met up for dinner at Japonais, down in Gramercy. Japonais has a very cool, urban vibe and was jammed full of NY hipsters -- and for good reason... aside from the great ambiance, the foold was incredible. We ordered "the Rock", an appetizer where you cook your own thinly sliced pieces of beef on a scalding rock (there's a really similar dish at Megu), and an array of rolls, sushi and sashimi. My roll (the "Tuna Tuna Salmon roll") was so good on its own that I barely even needed soy sauce.

After dinner, Robin hooked us up with bottle service at Duvet. If any of you remember an episode from "Sex & the City" where the fabulous four go out to a club called "Bed", then you know exactly what Duvet looks like because apparently that's where that particular episode of "Sex" was filmed.

There are literally beds arranged around the dance floor, complete with crisp white sheets, tons of comfy pillows and the suggestion of curtains at each corner as if it were a showroom of four post canopy beds. Apparently bottle service for a bed starts at $1200. Yikes.

We danced a little, but mostly we got such a kick out of watching the goings-on. Groups of (generally) girls who were in full-on party mode at 1:00 am, were dropping like flies by the time 3:00 and 3:30 rolled around. It was interesting to watch the progression as fatigue set in and effects of alcohol (and goodness knows what else) wore off. One girl popped right out of her dress on the dance floor -- too bad she had her back to her dance partner at the time, he missed the whole thing! (I'm sure he got to see MUCH more than that, however, as the night evolved!)

The craziest thing about Duvet though was the bathrooms. There's a single unisex bathroom. Think "Ally McBeal", but with bass-heavy custom-spun DJ tunes pumping through the vents, a large black bouncer-looking man handing out paper towels after you wash your hands and a giant circular stainless steel sink in the middle of the room with mutiple faucets and soap dispensers. (Sort of a combination of that one bathroom in the Harry Potter movies and a barnyard trough. Seriously, I kinda felt like a cow, mosying up to the farm water trough.)

But the most disconcerting thing about the bathrooms was that the doors of the stalls were made with one-way glass, so even though you know no one can see in (after all, you couldn't see in when you were outside waiting your turn), once you're in a stall, you can't help but feel like everyone at the giant sink is watching you do what comes naturally. Maybe the more you drink, the less you care?