Reply #2 flowmon's post
It's interesting as I was going to write a section about the Korean ownership along with the heavy presence of Japanese and Korean customers. I didn't see evidence of any type of racism and customers are customers. As my observation has concluded, the Korean men tend to go in groups, get s**t-face drunk then may pick up girls. I'm sure there are some smart K-guys who want to enjoy the girls as much as the rest of us and they don't get "malibog" (Phils term for drunk/crazy). The J-guys don't seem discriminated against in K-bars from what I saw.
The ownership is quite evident as the korean managers make themselves well known. I saw one Korean manager berate a gal for now wearing her badge on stage, pulled her off and forced her to get her number on. I'm guesstimating that over 50% of the bars on Fields Ave proper are owned by Koreans. I didn't feel discriminated against (Chinese American) and it seems that there is an abundance of Korean restaurants in the area, which really doesn't bother me too much. It's not like they pushed out other eateries.
Korean restaurants are not that cheap so my tendency is go once in a while if I want some BBQ. I tend to like the nicer new restaurant called Envy, across from Phillies. Those places have reasonably priced food which covers Philippine, American and usually Mexican or even some European like German. I also go to SM Mall to get a good fix of actually very good Japanese food.
The price of drinks is under 100 pesos for most standard soda, water, juices and basic well drinks. The ladies drink has pretty much standardized on 300 pesos...where in the past you had a choice of LD (ladies drink) for 175 and SMG (San Miguel Lite) for 300. Now you don't have much choice as ALL drinks are 300 even if the girl chooses the one that looks like a red blush wine (it's actually a juice). I heard each girl gets 100 pesos as her cut of the drink.
I don't think the general run up of 3000 pesos to 3500 bar fines in the higher end bars (Atlantis) is a result of Korean ownership. I don't think there is a way to reverse the trend but the 3000-3500 can be brought down to 1800 to 2200 at some daytime bars. This is still a great price for a multi-hour, multi-pop type session. I will guess that almost all daytime action will be 2500 no matter where by early next year. Part of my next reports will cover the real hidden GFE that you can find in most bars and it's not that difficult. | |
