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

"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.

Photo: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times