Wednesday night Upstairs, the exclusive SoHo club and location of much debauchery like dollar bill tossing, was raided by the cops.

Old news.

The charges had something to do with liquor license violations and a legal problem with the sound system. All I focused on was trying to hide my inherent panic: Where would I go to hear Hip Hop and Bruce Springsteen in the same night? Where would men go to meet models age sixteen and under? Where would Leonardo Di Caprio go to schmooze low key with his entourage?

Luckily, this terrifying series of questions didn’t continue for long. A mere thirty-six hours after the raid, I received a text from one of the owners at Upstairs assuring me it was re-opened and ready for Friday night. That was fast! It wasn’t until I was in the club this weekend that I realized why: The bar was closed.

But don’t think Upstairs was going to let a pesky little thing like a liquor license get in the way of their bash or business plan. They’re just serving bottle service only until further notice – and the creepy part is that is took me twenty minutes to even notice that the bar looked like an abandoned warehouse: a blank wall, utterly void of life, liquor or bar tenders.

Talk about a loophole in the system!

“No, you cannot purchase a vodka on the rocks; I can only sell you the entire bottle.”

Interesting.

I found this similar to how Milan recently enacted laws that prohibit liquor from being sold after 2 AM instead of after 4 AM in order to help prevent drunk driving. Now bartenders scream, “Two AM last call! Everyone get your bottles!” and people stock up on Magnums or just purchase bottles of champagne which they walk around downing as if it were JuicyJuice.

Yes, this is really going to encourage people to drink less.