L2 - Love it or Hate it. They won’t care.

June 13, 2008 by Sexy Fitsum  Send to a Friend

Preamble/Disclaimer/Whatever
Some of you don’t go to clubs. Because you prefer bars, maybe, or you’re over the “club scene” and you find think people who play dress-up and spend $15-and-up just to get through the door of are tools. Fair enough. If that’s the case, then stop reading now. I know that’s probably like saying the following material contains graphic footage that’s not suitable for … but, seriously, resist the temptation to read further, because this is a post about a members-only club. In Georgetown no less. Membership starts at $1000 -$1500 a year. That’s if your application is accepted. Yeah. As of this writing, non-members can play for free if they’re invited by a member, or if they pay $30. There’s a reasonable explanation for this, but if you don’t buy that one could possibly exist, then now’s a good time to navigate away from this page.

Last December, I bumped into DJ Ivan G on Wisconsin Avenue, killing time while dj and mutual friend Dan Soda auditioned for the managers of a new lounge that turnt out to be L2. Audtion? When a mix CD or word of mouth usually does the trick? Ivan shares the ‘who’, the ‘where’ and the little ‘what’ that he knew, and that Adrian Loving had been playing there already for a month or so. I couldn’t even visualize the club’s location, even though I walk right by it every sunday, as it sits on one of my favorite streets in DC. It’s not even really a street, but more on that later.

Fast forward to some friday night last March when DJ Meistro got me an invite to his first L2 gig. All I had to do was wear a collared shirt and pass on the sneakers. Pretty reasonable. On my way there, I ran into another kid — whose name I never really knew anyway — who gave me his password for that night’s party at Modern. Just in case.
I find L2 on Cady’s Alley, a tiny 1/2 block strip that’s one block south of M Street and a few west of Wisconsin Avenue. The giant yellow brick Big Wheel Bikes building takes up one corner of the alley’s eastern end. The rest of the block is lined with ultra haute furniture and kitchen appliance showrooms; crack rock for Wallpaper* or Appliancist readers. The lounge itself couldn’t be easy to miss, hidden behind tall semi-opaque doors, lit from inside and with no signage, tucked deeply into the mass of buildings around it. Next door is it’s older sibling Kafe Leopold (get it? L2?) where the outdoor seating is always packed with chatty chill folk all nearly all hours.

As soon as I walk inside, I’m met by two black gentleman with clipboards and a latina or arab woman seated behind a short wall sort of like a hotel concierge. All are in dark suits and polite as shit as they check my name and ID and even laugh at my stupid joke about feeling like I walked into a waiting area for first class at Dulles. Not a single ear-piece bearing, unreasonably superior-acting, bulgy ‘roidhead in sight. Instead you get three coolly mannered Bond-types who can probably chop you in the neck and toss that ass through some trap door. I steps on to corridor to the lounge that’s spare, clean and very very white. The corridor opens up to a huge space; three open rooms to my right, a looong bar to my left with an open-ish equally ginormous unisex bathroom around the corner past the bar. Psychedelic videos of a seriously high production value run all night, projected against some of the tall bare walls. The sound system is fantastic. The furniture is simple looking but huge and well placed. Everything is so fucking clean here.

One thing I notice, aside from how psychotically untainted and shiny everything looks, is the people. There aren’t that many, maybe forty or so, tops. Shit. Thirty. The space could easily hold 1,000 heads. Of those thirty or forty people, most looked to be in their mid-to-late 30’s. It’s a mature crowd, where people know one another. That means no meat-market sleaziness and no random fisticuffs. The other thing I notice are the women: they’re all stunners, each and everyone. It’s almost like they’re rentals. How can this be? It’s almost weird. I try to talking to a couple but they just smile and slip back into their party. Almost anyone you talk to about L2 will tell you ,”Yo, the women…”

At the bar I ordered my first Manhattan ever, figuring that if there’s a place to experience the Manhattan that all other’s will be compared to, this is it. As far as drinks go, it’s a lovely well-balanced glass of hooch. No one ingredient overwhelms the others, and it doesn’t come off tasting boozy. I order another (I know. Trouble. Trust, I staggered out of that place) and notice the barman’s shtick. It’s a bit like a scene in “Cocktail” with the flare dialed-way down, and maybe produced in Russia. The bartender — actually he’s refered to as a mixologist — is Russian, sure, and there’s a hint of severity to the way he prepares drinks. Several bloggers call the bar and this particular guy (Typing mixologist once with a straight face is enough) as their favorite.

I walk home damned certain that I’d just been to the best nightclub in the universe. But no one believes me. Ask any dj who’s worked there and they’ll tell you the management’s a gang of morons. In fact Meistro only just got paid for that March gig a couple of weeks ago. Others call the lounge’s membership policy bald-faced elistism. But that’s the whole point. There are pearls and there are swine. Take it from someone who’s done clubs, bars, dives, brown paper bags in the park and worse: if what you’re about is well-built drinks, music at a conversation friendly volume, and losing all the bullshit that goes with nightlifing — herds of unwashed amateurs, doortards who fancy themselves special for some mysterious reason that would only makes sense to a doortard, barstaff that that are sometimes even worse, and pysch warfare masquerading as music — then, L2 is your man.

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