Listen up bros: Just because someone (the dorky bloggers, for instance) are telling you that a certain trend is over, doesn't mean that it is. You see, ironically, the people whose job it is to write about popular culture are often some of the least adept at being part of any trend larger than themselves. I mean, Jesus, look at Chuck Klosterman. Great writer, but you'd never want to take him to the prom.

When blogs started decrying "The End of Bottle Service" back in September – just about the time when all the bankers lost their jobs – we took it with a grain of salt. Especially since bottle service — the costly habit of buying extremely marked-up spirits at a club for the experience of being treated like a VIP — has been announced "over" essentially since it began. In 2007, Michael Gogel of Lotus announced bottle service was on its way out "now that anyone with a credit card can order it."

But with a recession well under way and jobs falling by the wayside, can we truly call this an end to the practice of using your plastic to gain door entrance and a stream of hot ladies all night? And who are we to tell you what to do, anyway?!!

The Lifestyle

Take a look at the current issue of New York-based magazines, where all the Holiday Guides are now currently in effect. See anything a little bit different? Perhaps it's because NY Mag is now veering their holiday bar scenes into DIY territory with The Makeshift Office Party, Time Out is giving you guides to New Years Eve after-parties at under the radar joints like Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn, and New York Times Magazine is now giving us McDonald calorie information instead of Russian Tea Room reviews.

So if magazines, whose sole purpose is to be the arbiter of taste and fashion, are leaning towards a less-is-more approach to partying, is it because high-end clubs and bottle service are truly over?
Time Out New York's editor Michael Freidson admits that industry coverage has shifted in the past several months:

TONY's always been a great source for affordable options, and we've responded to the current economic crisis with more coverage of cheap dates, cheap foods, cheap fitness and cheap culture, and also added a "cent" icon to every cheap event in the mag (and, of course, we still have our long-standing "free" icon).

Likewise, says one writer at the New York Magazine, "I know there's going to be a movement toward living cheaper and modesty, since we talked about it at the magazine, but I'm not sure to what extent."

Recently, the same friend emailed me noting that her editor was looking for "house parties" to cover in Brooklyn for NY Mag. No, she didn't want to know what was going on in Studio B, she wanted to know about the bed bug-infested McKibben loft parties, typically thrown by ubiquitous promoter Todd P and kids right out of college. So it's the writers and interns at these publications that editors are currently putting their feelers out for, and these are the grungy hipsters whose only experience with bottle service comes from Lil Wayne lyrics.

To put it another way: With the recession taking a bite out of everyone's pockets, (but especially media types) it's the kids who never had money in the first place, with their unpaid internships and two day jobs, that are suddenly determining the death of something that they never experienced in the first place.

The Two Business Models

In a September interview with DownBytheHipster, Prime owner JE Engelbert gave what he probably thought to a be warm, all-encompassing view of the new type of club. Of course, like all club owners end up inevitably doing, Engelbert just came across as a creepy Chester the Molester:

…the goal is to create an environment where the customers can go out to a fun place on Saturday nights without getting raped or abused at the door . . . In an era where NYC clubs treat customers like enemies and adversaries we feel this is a new and novel approach that will work extremely well.

You see, if you really don't want to get raped, you have to go to these new, friendly, anti-bottle service clubs (although Prime still offers bottle service!) and stay away from places like, uh, Hawaiian Tropic Zone, which to our knowledge never offered $400 of Grey Goose but does offer sexual harassment suits in the making for free.

Meanwhile, over at Matt Levine's Eldridge, the vibe is less "Meatpacking District Rapists," and more high-end hipster snobbery. When the Eldridge opened in the fall, it couldn't have come at a worse time for a small, elitist lounge that let its members in on a case-by-case basis. If the whole idea of bottle service was to only let in the types that had money, Levine's business plan lent itself to his (very) small space in the form of only letting in people that he personally knew. And of course, even though the Eldridge was supposed to be so much different from all those classless, bottle-servicey clubs in midtown, Levine was sure to accommodate anyone who wanted to relax with some pricey vodka and six of their friends…provided they were his friends, too.

What’s the point of doing press about the place if no one can get in?
We’re not doing a lot of press. We’re going to be cool because we’re cool, not because we have a publicist doing press for us.

The only problem with the Eldridge's business plan?

Monday nights we’re going to have movies-and-popcorn nights. We have a flat-screen TV behind a two-way mirror, and you can pop bottles and pop popcorn at the same time…We have $650,000 worth of Champagne on the wall. We have more Rosé Armand de Brignac on the wall than the entire state of New York.

So if "cool" is directly proportional to "lots of money" plus a little something extra, is it unwarranted to mention that the 13 tables that fit inside the Eldridge is probably all they are going to need? On a recent visit there, it took me a couple of Manhattans before remembering this was the same place that supposedly had gold in their floors. Which isn't to say that the Eldridge isn't nice…just small, exceptionally small, and obviously created for the utilitarian purpose of keeping everyone out. After being the Eldridge for a couple hours, packed body-to-body with other gawkers and people trying to sweatily pretend that they come here all the time, I'm still not sure if the club, reminiscent of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, even had a bathroom.

So if the answer to a recession-successful club isn't to let everyone in (like Groucho Marx would tell you), and the answer isn't to buy a space where only you and 18 other cool kids can hang out, then how will clubs survive? Easy enough: bottle service. Both the Eldridge and Prime, two entirely different subsections of the New York scene, still need the drunk patrons buying the 100% mark-up on Patron. The only difference is, now they don't plan on advertising it. Bottle service isn't dead, and it's not disappearing anytime soon, it's just retreating underground until being rich is cool again.