EXPERIENCE THE AWESOMENESS
5/24/07 San Diego nightlife: SD Museum of Art Culture and Cocktails in Balboa Park, Motus at House Of Blues downtown, and MODUS Supper Club in Bankers hill.
All photos and captions (except for the Playboy.com reprint and the Modus Bar Menu) by Reviewer Rob, www.ReviewerPhoto.com.
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SD Museum of Art Culture and Cocktails event in Balboa Park
SD Museum of Art does this quarterly social event and I saw a blurb about it again in Disconnected, a monthly cool-scene handout that has as its mailing address 30th Street in North Park. North Park is my old neighborhood and that place has really came up since I moved there from Pacific Beach and into a large two bedroom apartment near Illinois and Lincoln in early 1997 for $515 per month. This was less than $40 more than what I was paying for a cramped studio in PB that was smaller than the livingroom of my North Park pad. Those apartments are all converted condos now and their owners are trying to sell them for $300K apiece now. Anyways, with Ray At Night and the whole urban renewal movement North Park is now cool. Funny too, since I moved there ten years ago to get away from the cool part of town after a long period of cool-scene immersion. I wanted a change from the hip’nin-hap’nin part of town to the working class ghetto. But now North Park is all swanky and upscale too. But I digress…
Let’s start the slideshow. But it’s worth mentioning that the San Diego Museum Of Art is also having as its current traveling exhibit Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Delaware Art Museum which was reported in an earlier post.
The main area “ballroom” of SDMART.
The crowd upstairs.
The masterpiece room upstairs. Amazing that they have drinks flowing at a couple of bars and people partying while in the galleries hang these valuable masterpiece paintings on the wall in rooms next door.
This is in an exhibit where they have cut-away views through a wall at several paintings that are hanging on the wall’s other side. They do this to show the inscriptions on their backs, to let you read what the artists or contemporaneous curators wrote down. I think one of the painting displayed in this exhibit was 500 years-old and the language was in a Venician dialect.
Front view.
San Diego’s famous Balboa Park Organ Pavillion at night.
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Motus at house Of Blues
Tim has gotten a call the day before and HOB had gave his band a 10 o’clock slot. He texted me the day of so after the SDMART shoot I stopped in and took ome pics of his set. The San Diego House of Blues is a very photogenic place, aside from being a world-class music venue.
Check out the Motus myspace at http://www.myapce.com/motus. They’ve got four tracks up, all of them good: The Haunted, Yeah Right, Can’t Believe, and Know Better.
The crowd in the Green Room.
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MODUS SUPPER CLUB
One afternoon early last week I was driving over to the house of someone I know who had inherited his house in Banker’s Hill from his parents. He’d said I could use a room as a photo studio and so it was definatly worth a look. On the way up I passed by the new Modus Supper Club, which I’d previously read about online. Its name is similar to Tim Fennell’s band’s name of Motus, only spelled different by one letter. By the appearance of the MODUS facade it was a pretty cool joint, so I stopped in. It was at the front desk that the copies of Disconnected were sitting in a stack. Being the compulsive reader I am I got one and a couple of club fliers to peruse while I had a drink.
There was only one other guy at the bar, being about 7:30 on a Monday or a Tuesday. The girl at the bar placed a bar “menu” in front of me with all sorts of sexy and salaciously named martinis and other mixed drinks. Wanting a cold beer, I had a really good $6 dark London Porter.
Reading the copy of Disconnected I brought with me (which is a large flier/bill folded nine times) I saw immediately at the top of the page a listing for MODUS that described “Ariana as one of the top 10 bartenders in the US” according to Playboy.com (it’s true – I Googled it). I looked up to the girl working behind the other ennd of the bar cleaning and tidying and I asked her if she was Ariana. She smiled and said yes, and so I began talking to her about what makes someone among the top ten bartenders in the USA. Very polite and self-effacingly she started to tell me, sounding humble and almost embarassed, about how her and her husband Scotty started MODUS after spending years at other places in town, and how everything on the bar and kitchen menus is fresh and original creations. I asked her if I could snap her photo while she talked and she said yes. Really nice the way it tuirned out too. Here’s what Playboy.com had to say:
Ariana Johnson
San Diego, California
Modus
2202 Fourth Avenue @ Ivy Street, Bankers Hill
Signature drink: the ruby slipper (local organic raspberries, Hendrick’s Gin and a lemon wedge)
A trailblazer in a city that’s still hooked on Red Bull and vodka, Ariana Johnson makes such stunningly original cocktails that other bartenders have been known to try and emulate her bold concoctions. She paid her dues, working for seven years at Martini Ranch before helping open Modus with her husband Scotty. Both are young (she’s 29; he’s 30) and obsessed with fresh, organic ingredients. Ariana goes to the local market to see what fruits and veggies are available and then crafts drinks out of the bounty by nightfall. She seems to like naughty names — the bitter bitch (gin, grapefruit and rosemary), the dirty girl (vodka, bleu cheese olives and olive juice) — and unusual ingredients (black walnut liqueur, ginger root and soju, an Asian vodka). She’s a perfect example of a rising star with a strong vision and a sense of autonomy. Ask for a Long Island iced tea and she’ll send you down the road.
The outside of the bar. Its easily recognizable sign is what I noticed in the flier blurb about owner/bartender Ariana in Playboy.com.
A martini listed on the menu as The Dirty Girl. It sounded like one of the “naughty name” cocktails mentioned on Playboy’s website, so after drinking a melon flavored (?) drink Ariana chose for me she called a Skinny Dipper, I asked for one of these. She looked me square in the eye and repeated my order with a straight face as if to be sure I knew what I wanted. I did; it’s a really dirty martini, with two or three large juicy olives skewered on a stick that have their stuffings replaced by blue cheese. I’m not sure if it’s the abundance of olive juice or the cheesy flavour that makes this drink so good, but this reviewer says go for it, have a Dirty Girl. Woo.
Scroll down to the the bottom of this post to read the current complete Modus bar menu.
Below is the Modus Supper Club’s current bar menu:
Modus Originals:
Fresh Start 6
: Licor 43, champagne, rose water
Foreplay 9.5
: Wokka Saki, organic strawberries, champagne, sugar
Cool Love 9.5
: Hendricks Gin, rose water, cucumber, lemon, lime, sugar
Ruby Sipper 9.5
: Hendricks Gin, raspberry puree’, lemon, sugar
Candied Ginger 9.5
: Fresh sliced ginger, lemons, Hanger One “buddha’s hand” Citron, sugar cane
Cherry Poppin’ 9.5
: Leblon Cachaca, Cherry Heering liqueur, lime, sugar
Sour Flower 9.5
: Pimms No. 1, kumquats, blood orange juice, splash gin, soda
Skinny Dipper 9.5
: Yellow Watermelon, spearmint, Skyy vodka, lime, sugar
La Revolucion 10.5
: Patron Anejo, triple sec, blood orange juice, splash Aqua Perfecta Pear liqueur
Dirty Girl 9.5
: Skyy, house made blue cheese olives, olive jus
Bitter Bitch 9.5
: Millers Gin, fresh oro blanco grapefruit juice, rosemary, sugar rim
Should Woulda Coulda 9.5
: Wokka Saki, oro blanco grapefruit, champagne
Mango Djarum 10.5
: Maison Surrene Cognac, triple sec, mango puree’, clove sugar rim
Mocha Martini 10.5
: Espresso, Goldenbarr chocolate vodka, Godiva liqueur, splash _ & _
Divine Brown Manhattan 12.5
: Old Whiskey River, Charbay Black Walnut Liqueur
*tax is not included to price of drinks
Modus Originals:
Fresh Start 6
: Licor 43, champagne, rose water
Foreplay 9.5
: Wokka Saki, organic strawberries, champagne, sugar
Cool Love 9.5
: Hendricks Gin, rose water, cucumber, lemon, lime, sugar
Ruby Sipper 9.5
: Hendricks Gin, raspberry puree’, lemon, sugar
Candied Ginger 9.5
: Fresh sliced ginger, lemons, Hanger One “buddha’s hand” Citron, sugar cane
Cherry Poppin’ 9.5
: Leblon Cachaca, Cherry Heering liqueur, lime, sugar
Sour Flower 9.5
: Pimms No. 1, kumquats, blood orange juice, splash gin, soda
Skinny Dipper 9.5
: Yellow Watermelon, spearmint, Skyy vodka, lime, sugar
La Revolucion 10.5
: Patron Anejo, triple sec, blood orange juice, splash Aqua Perfecta Pear liqueur
Dirty Girl 9.5
: Skyy, house made blue cheese olives, olive jus
Bitter Bitch 9.5
: Millers Gin, fresh oro blanco grapefruit juice, rosemary, sugar rim
Should Woulda Coulda 9.5
: Wokka Saki, oro blanco grapefruit, champagne
Mango Djarum 10.5
: Maison Surrene Cognac, triple sec, mango puree’, clove sugar rim
Mocha Martini 10.5
: Espresso, Goldenbarr chocolate vodka, Godiva liqueur, splash _ & _
Divine Brown Manhattan 12.5
: Old Whiskey River, Charbay Black Walnut Liqueur
*tax is not included to price of drinks
All photos above from the totally awesome camera lens of Reviewer Rob, at ReviewerPhoto.com. ~Ed
