The new nightlife
Feb. 19, 2006. 10:29 AM
RAJU MUDHAR
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER


With club goers of a certain vintage, Roxy Blu left a lasting impression. When it opened in the late '90s, an adventurous booking policy, parties like Movement and a young and sexy crowd made it, for a time, the place to go in the now-booming King St. West area.

Its location at King and Brant has since become flanked by the extremely popular Brant House, Touch Lounge and other bars. But Roxy petered out and closed late last year. In its place stand the restaurant Eight and its sister club downstairs, Eight Below, which opened last night.

Gone is the sweatbox of the dance floor room and smaller lounge room. While Roxy was dark, the new restaurant is bright and airy, with the main dining room done in whites and yellows. There's also a separate lounge area in darker tones, with a room for private dinners. This kind of renovation makes it hard to remember where things used to be.

While the restaurant soft launched a couple of weeks ago, this weekend marks the official opening of both spots, and the arrival of a new player in Toronto nightlife.

Eight is the Hingson Entertainment Group's first venture, but the group has been making news because they are entering the market in such a big way. Beyond Eight, the group has bought Fez Batik, Banzai Sushi and has plans to open a boutique hotel. The biggest news: Hingson took over the giant Lucid space on John St. and will turn it into a new club called Circa.

So who are these guys?

"I'm absolutely not a party guy. I'm a family guy," says John Cheong, sitting at the chef's table next to the open kitchen at Eight. Cheong, 46, is a businessman and speaks like one, and he admits he'd rather be at home with his kids than out on the town. The family business (Hing was his father's name, hence the name) is in engineering and construction and he took it over after his father's death in 1999. He and his partner Fred Bain are the men behind Hingson.

"As part of our engineering and construction portfolio, we've built a lot of clubs, restaurants, football fields, whatever. With that in mind, I decided to diversify the company ... so we looked around and looked around and found this place.

"We've targeted six places to complete this year. That's good so we have enough volume for us to have central purchasing and good enough to tell the sponsorship `Hey, we're here. Give us a break.' So I think we need to be felt as a presence instead of just another kid opening another club and restaurant."

The way Cheong talks about clubs could tend to suck the fun right out of it. But that's where Peter Gatien comes in, preceded as usual by his reputation. The short version: born in Cornwall, Ont., he moved to the U.S. and opened a string of nightclubs like the Tunnel and became the club king of New York.

If you mention his name, the first thing people will likely say is "Have you seen Party Monster?" It's the 2003 movie about an infamous 1996 murder case among Manhattan club kids; Dylan McDermott plays Gatien ("that's not too bad," he says with a smile) but the tale isn't entirely flattering: One of his party promoters kills a drug dealer. As well, there was a death due to an Ecstasy overdose at the Tunnel in 1999; after that Gatien was targeted by New York authorities for a drug case.

He was found guilty of tax evasion, served 45 days in prison and returned to Canada three years ago; this is his first foray in Toronto's nightlife.

Gatien consulted on Eight and Eight Below, but what's to come is really where his vision will be brought in.

"I'm basically taken on to be sort of the visionary of the concepts of what we're going to do, whether it's this place, whether it's Fez or the boutique hotel," he says sitting on the top floor of Circa, slated to open in April. Gatien says he was first brought in to consult on the hotel and had pretty much sworn off clubs.

But during a walkthrough with his designers Travis Bass and Joachim Hannerz, the plans for Circa are laid out. What's planned sounds very impressive; on the other hand, so did Lucid when it opened up in 2004. Then the former Playdium space, capacity 3,000, encountered a litany of problems: There was only one entrance and if there was a lineup, patrons had to be penned across the street. Because of its size, music would bleed out everywhere and it felt empty if it wasn't packed to the gills, and it wasn't even on its opening-night party, an obvious warning sign. (If you can't fill it when you're giving away drinks ...) It flamed out quickly, but the new owners are not daunted.

"Quite frankly, I wasn't interested in re-entering the club world, but upon visiting this place, I was astonished by how great the facility is," raves Gatien. "It's got an incredible layout — I really like that from almost any room you could have total visual access to everywhere else in the club, and I got very enthusiastic about it."

Fez is going to undergo a major overhaul, but the plan is for it to be more of a food-driven venue. They're not ready to reveal what they'll do with Banzai Sushi, across the street from Fez, though the group is already using it for corporate events.

But Banzai shows the risks Hingson faces. The highly designed spot opened up in November 2004, never really caught on and died with a whimper. The major complaint about the club district is that it's oversaturated, so the drive for something new is always paramount. That's one big reason that it seems the area seems to be constantly undergoing Extreme Makeover: Clubland Edition.

There's currently a moratorium on building new clubs in the entertainment district, as well as a new ban on adding clubs west of Spadina. A new club must be in a space that already has a liquor licence. So what's left is putting new faces on old spaces. Some have speculated that this has upped the value of the existing clubs, but owners disagree.

"I still think that clubs are selling for cheap because there are so many of them," says Charles Khabouth, one of the city's most prominent club and restaurant impresarios. "You can go downtown and buy a club for $200,000 right now."

Well, he can and has.

Khabouth is the current king of Toronto's club scene, and the reno-remake model has been his modus operandi for years, first with the Guvernment and Ultra. More recently, he bought Loft on King St. W. and turned it into Lux. He bought and renovated This Is London, which marks his return to confines of clubland, but now that he finally feels he's making the most of the Guvernment, his ambitions are extending beyond Toronto. He's working on a nightclub in Niagara Falls' Fallsview Casino. He talks of opening a rock club here and of expanding into the U.S. — and, he says, he almost bought Lucid himself.

"They tried to make a deal with me. We were to buy into Lucid and combine it with my other venues and then we were to go public which is what really got me excited, but actually, it was the week of signing that I walked away ... they were $18 million in debt, and by me getting in I would have had to carry the debt."

He also had issues with the layout and foresaw other logistical problems. These issues don't faze Cheong.

"The people who opened it were theme park operators. There's nothing wrong with theme parks, but if you put them in charge of a multimillion-dollar business, you're basically letting a blindfolded person drive a Ferrari down a highway."

As an example, Cheong cites the lease. The former owners were paying upwards of $260,000 a month plus utilities. He says his company pays $140,000 a month for everything. Lucid's owners also had to take on high-interest loans to survive, "whereas all Hingson entertainment venues will be financed by Hingson Financial at a much more favourable rate," he says with a chuckle.

The giant club demands giant plans. There will be a sauna-themed bar; a tech-inspired bar with sensors that react to touch and will send beams of light to the another area in the bar; and an area to be created by Kid Robot, a design firm best known for its remarkable toys.

Gatien is also in negotiations with what he calls a big name fashion designer to design the top-floor lounge. There's much, much more, and Gatien is supremely confident.

"Everything from art to fashion to music is extremely well represented here (in Toronto) and that gives me the ability to really put together exciting concepts.

The design element is important, but the reality is that it's the people that you draw to your spaces in the end that make them institutional and make them go on forever, or not."

Cheong and Gatien seem like unlikely partners, but if their plans come to fruition, by the end of next year they'll join the ranks of the Liberty Entertainment Group (owner of bars like the Phoenix and C Lounge) and Khabouth as the key movers in Toronto's club scene.

"That's not really a motivation," says Gatien, as a sly smile forms on his lips.

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"When I die, I want to be buried under the dancefloor"- Frankie Madgenta