The Party

Work hard, play hard had been my motto since college, and I finally felt it was time for me to go in on the play hard side of things.

It’s 10:30 P.M. and I’m just closing up shop in Chinatown. The stools are up on the counters, floors wiped, burners off and scrubbed, cash counted and balanced. I step out into the dimly lit New York night and get a text from a certain friend we’ll call “Kyle.”¹ “Circle?”

Back in 2011, Circle was the Asian club in town, where girls showed up in heels and glitzy dresses, pulling out IDs of questionable validity, and guys in suits and nice shoes splurged on bottle service. It was the usual endgame of a typical night out in K-town, Manhattan’s neighborhood filled with Korean BBQ joints and karaoke. My friends and I would pre-game at Third Floor (a soju-centric lounge fittingly on the third floor of an office building), head over to Circle to pay twenty dollars at the door (or, better yet, blow a thousand dollars on a bottle and a tiny table), before finally stumbling out (maybe with someone new, maybe with your original crew), and ordering up some bulgogi and galbi at Miss Korea.