The new black
August 27th, 2008
Back in the 1970s and 1980s the Colosseum was a legendary Tel Aviv nightclub. Its only concession to Rome’s Colosseum was that it was round; other than that it looked like a 1970s airport lounge plonked down on a concrete promenade overlooking the beach. I dimly remember trying to get in there once, as a teenager on a visit to Israel, and standing no chance against the tides of other teenagers who were trying to do the same thing and were older, more beautiful and much better practiced with their elbows.
Then it fell into disrepair and stood empty and tattered next to the field of giant concrete mushrooms that are also a Tel Aviv landmark and whose purpose has always remained mysterious. Now at last it’s been bought up by an entrepreneur and revamped.
And vamped is the really the operative word.
A friend took me to the first of a series of preview nights a couple of days ago. After passing through a squadron of black-clad security guards, greeters and hostesses, we were shown into a space that reminded me of the black ship in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where “when you try an’ operate one of these weird black controls which are labelled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to tell you you’ve done it.”
The furniture was black. The fittings were black. The floors and ceilings were black. The bars and the walls behind the bars were faced in so much black marble that it was a wonder the whole construction didn’t just sink through the promenade into the sand. About the only thing that wasn’t black was the house cocktail, which was a watermelon mojito (I recommend sticking to the regular kind) and the bottles on the bar. The picture I took above, with my mobile phone, doesn’t really do it justice, but it didn’t look all that different in real life.
I haven’t seen this level of post-gothic excess since I left Russia, and there they stopped building these kinds of things years ago - the place has gone all designery and minimalist. In Israel they seem to be just catching up.
Membership will cost 500 shekels a month, which amounts to a little under $2,000 a year. Private members’ clubs have never really worked in Israel before, so some of my friends were a little sceptical that this one would. But maybe there is now a class of nouveau-riche wanna-be oligarchs who want to shell out for exclusivity, obsequious (ie, un-Israeli) service and a colour scheme that makes anything you wear look good.