Drai’s at the W Hollywood Hotel brings Sin City style to the City of Angels

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‘If this place is so hard to get into, then what’s he doing here?’ asked 28-year-old Alex Van de Camp, gesturing to an overweight man standing just behind him on the front patio of Drai’s, the white-hot new nightclub on the rooftop of the W Hollywood Hotel.

Van de Camp’s two friends laughed uncomfortably. He had verbalized what generally remains unspoken in Hollywood: the Darwinian nature of the velvet rope. In this case, the strong and beautiful get into Drai’s and the weak go to less-discriminating Sunset Strip bars like Saddle Ranch.

Opened earlier this month by Las Vegas night-life baron Victor Drai and partners Cy and Jesse Waits, Drai’s covers more than 20,000 square feet and has a capacity of nearly 800. That doesn’t make it a mega club by Vegas standards, but its arrival makes official a trend that has been evolving for several years now: Hollywood’s embrace of over-the-top Vegas-style night life.

Drai’s is just a short hike east on Hollywood Boulevard from three other large-scale nightclubs: the 38,000-square-foot Kress, the 33,000-square-foot Avalon / Bardot and the 13,000-square-foot Playhouse. It’ll take an awful lot of skinny, pretty people to fill all that space. But Drai isn’t worried.

To read the rest of Jessica Gelt’s story, click here.