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| - Vegas Yelp UYE Karaoke Extravaganza!
SITREP
What a good time it was at Bazic Bar & Restroyaky. After the wonderful Fremont Street Experience, we knew there would be some Yelping madness we would want to engage in after Midnight. But after that crazy fantastic time, we indeed wondered if we would have any "juice" left to manage this task as we planned to attack the early morning (Midnight - 3AM) with renewed vigor!!
SETUP
Organized by our very own Seattle Yelper Clover A., this proved to be a good location to have a "meet-up" with Yelpers from different cities. [First we had to get there! LIMO RIDE: While at Fremont Street Experience, we went by the Golden Nugget, and there was a bored limo driver who looked at our crazy group and decided then and there that he wanted to be part of our madness. We had to get to Bazic QUICK for set-up, and so we negotiated with him, and he shot us over to our Korean Karaoke Bar destination in no time.]
BAZIC ROOMS
If you are familiar with the Rock Box in Seattle or Rurulala in Sacramento, it is a very similar set-up. Big rooms. Nice physical plant layout of couches and sectionals. Decent serviceable equipment. It had the potential to be Karaoke at it's very best.
KARAOKE BOOKS & EQUIPMENT
However, the books were JUST in Korean! There were some English-language inserted pages, but that was an obvious afterthought. In addition, we were somewhat limited in our selections it would have appeared, but we did manage (for the most part) with those selection of English-language songs in the narrow band of yellow and green pages.
And then there was the tech itself - such as the controls - which was all overlaid in Korean language and no English to be found. Made it difficult for us to read the stereo & equipment controls and it did become a nuisance to have one of the guys come and adjust/modify sound levels, feedback, distortion-issues whenever they did arise instead of being able to take care of the issue ourselves.
MY PERSONAL FAVES
I got to belt out my Def Leppard and Linkin Park Standards, so I was dam happy. I even smoothed out the end of the evening (er, morning) with the Beatles "Michelle", so it was all good.
THE FOOD & DRINK
There was an ample supply of all kinds of chicken appetizers, beer and sake to keep our energy up, so no complaints in this department. There were also some sweet-potato fries which were powdered with sugar so that they were sweet, and not savory the way I prefer them. Ah well. I still ate them and enjoyed them because I haven't met a sweet potato fry I do not like.
PRICING
Interesting to say the least: unlike the Karaoke I hit in Sacramento, San Francisco, and Seattle, this establishment has a sliding-mechanism that takes into account the consumables factor. If it was just Karaoke, the room rental was $40 per hour. However, if we consumed more than $100 in drinks & food, then the room rental would go down to $20 per hour. Since there was a group of about 14 of us, and we were there from 11am to 3am, we made sure to get more than $100 in consumables that we would probably have gotten anyways, but Clover and I did buy drinks at the end to "get us over" that last bump to $100 so we could default the hourly rate down to $20 an hour. [Note to self: I HATE doing math when I'm trying to concentrate on singing!]
KARAOKE CABBIES!
Now this was different: it was 3AM at the end of our stint, so this place does something interesting for it's customers - the servers / chefs double as cabbies! SERIOUSLY! Since we are "quite a way into" Chinatown-Vegas, it would take a while to get a cab out there. However, two of the establishments associates got two vehicles: one to take part of our group back to PLATINUM, and another to take my group back to STRATOSPHERE. A total win!
THE LOWDOWN
All-in-all, a good experience. I don't like to nit-pick the little things, and also have great respect for cultural traditions and cultural business-choices.
HOWEVER, given this establishment wants to do business with a mainstream English-speaking demographic (it's in Vegas, USA, after all), and given that one could reasonably expect that there would be a preference for more mainstream English-language music by a significant customer base of English-speakers, I'm just saying it would be prudent (as a BUSINESS owner or BUSINESS manager, etc.) to make sure to supply better books and readable tech that is readible in English.
If on the other hand, the point is to discourage English-speaking patrons from coming here to enjoy Karaoke, then don't change a thing. Frustrated customers just won't return. However, we hardcore Karaokers will find a way to manage, even if a bit more grumpily.
All-in-all, a 2-STAR experience. However, I'll be honest & say I am bumping it up to 3 STARS because of the courtesy the gentlemen showed us in getting us back to our hotels at the end of a lonnnnng night in the weeeee hours of the morning.
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