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#253 – London Journal #19 – Last Night in London, Part C – Night Club Fantasy Camp, or Lederer is Still Hungry

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After the end of the Million Dollar Cash Game, we wandered around Soho looking for a restaurant, settling at a strange restaurant at midnight named Little Italy. We had a dozen in our party and the long meal gave me an opportunity to think about how the day went for several of the players.

Howard Lederer played two pots all day and lost $100,000. In the first one, as I described in #250G, he flopped a straight and lost to Allen Cunningham’s flopped set that turned into a full house on the river. In the second, he flopped top-two pair but Roland de Wolfe flopped a straight. Howard wasn’t bailed out by a full house and lost $50,000.

Obviously, he wasn’t happy about it, but he’s a pro so he wasn’t devastated. It didn’t stop him from enjoying the rest of the evening. At the restaurant, however, the waitress took away his plate while he was clearly still eating. I think he turned to his left to ask her for something and she slipped around to his right, deftly swiped the plate, and sped off.

“I can’t catch a break today,” was all he said.

Little Italy was a strange restaurant. In addition to being an Italian restaurant, it’s also a Night Club Fantasy Camp. That’s the only way I can describe the vibe.

When we arrived, it was midnight on a Wednesday, yet there was a velvet rope, a bouncer at the door, and a crowd partying on the sidewalk in front. We were led to a table upstairs through a narrow, crowded bar where the music (and the crowd) was pulsing. As we walked upstairs, I glanced downstairs and could see there was a mob in the basement throbbing to the music in near-pitch-darkness.

The sound was so loud that it was disorienting walking through the place. Consequently, I didn’t get a good look at the patrons until I walked out to the street a little later to make a call home. What I thought was a slice of London’s hip club scene was, on closer examination, about 500 of the uncoolest people I’ve ever seen in public. Middle-aged men and women pretending to trip out and lose their inhibitions.

In short, my crowd.

The guy forcefully bouncing himself off other patrons as he turned the narrow bar into a dance floor was wearing a suit and tie and perspiring heavily. The women were NOT impossibly thin models looking for Ecstacy but 30- and 40-something nurses and paralegals.

If it wasn’t a fantasy camp for wannabes who weren’t cool enough for the scene a couple generations ago, what function did the bouncer serve? Who was he supposed to keep out if he let that crowd in? Patrik Antonius?

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