Top Gun
D's Place
Sportsmans
Everest
My Bar
Oscar
G-string
The Club
The Stamford Arms
Lintas Melawai
'Five Plus One'
The old bar reviews are now well out of date - the street has changed greatly over the last few months. So here's a new bar review page, and new reviews will be added as soon as the Reveller can finish his in-depth inspections of the Blok M bars.
First impressions
As you pick your way between the potholes and piles of pavement detritus towards Top Gun the first thing you notice is a new awning over the familiar entrance, lit by twinkly little blue and white lights. A brash new sign retains the old logo and proudly announces one-stop entertainment - "discotheque, livemusic, resto and sportbar". Sadly no one thought to have it checked and corrected - a bit of a clanger as the bar is an expat watering hole, and grammatical infelicities on the main sign don't bode well.
The street door opens into a vestibule with a counter and a small cloakroom - a very sensible move by the management, and one that improves security into the bargain. In fact Top Gun has instituted a one-way system into and out of the bar, the exit being through a separate door channel partitioned off from the entrance. Entry to the main bar is through a second door, the whole set-up resembling a rather primitive wood-panelled airlock.
On pushing open the inner door you're struck by the fact that a lot of money has been spent on the design and furbishing of the place. For those who remember old Top Gun there's a whopping great smack of culture shock in store for you. Gone are the sticky, tacky carpets, the dingy bar, the crappy pool table, the plastic lamina wall panelling, the rickety old bar stools that we knew and loved.
The layout
The wall that partitioned off the old back-room bar has gone and the whole area has been opened up. The breadth of the bar makes for spaciousness, but with an illusion of intimacy. If nothing else marks out new Top Gun from the rest of the Pelatehan bars, it's the fact that all the places across the street are by comparison cavernously narrow and deep.
So you stand by the bar and look around. To your right, by the exit, there's a mini mission-control centre for the sound and light systems. To the left of this, in the far right corner, there's an L-shaped slightly raised dining area that's separated from the main area by a twee little balustrade.
Slap bang in front of the dining area, in the centre of the bar, there's a large projection TV screen. Next to this is an enormous panel advertising a well-know brand of cigars. Now this is an incongruity, a Pythonesque eyesore that cheapens and spoils the appearance of the whole place. Ships and ha'porths of tar is the expression that comes to mind. It really ought to go.
The far left corner is given over to a semi-circular raised platform for a band to play on. More about this later.
At the end of the bar there's an open-plan cash-desk, nicely designed and very functional. Next to this is the doorway to the discotheque. The first 'gotcha' here is three small steps as you go through the door. Normally this wouldn't matter, but could be a navigation hazard for well-primed guys who decide to wander into the disco in a state of less than stable equilibrium.
The disco is a little gem, and I felt quite at home within minutes of going in. As you enter there's a cosy bar on the right where the jaded reveller can rest his weary body as he recuperates and primes himself for the action ahead. The disco floor is lined on two sides with mirrors, and of course it's got the mandatory couple of chrome poles and raised platforms.
One of the old bar counters has been left between the disco floor and the bar area - it's a great place to sit and drink with the girls and watch the action. The only anomaly is a series of half-tables butting up against the right-hand wall mirrors, with bar stools on a slightly raised and fairly narrow platform - a triumph of design over function.
The disco is festooned with the usual state-of-the-art lighting equipment and rigged with a crowd-shattering sound system. Again, no expense has been spared and the attention to detail is remarkable.
The decor
My first observation is that the design and taste are decidedly Indonesian. The walls are decorated with what might best be described as Dan Dare retro wallpaper - a pale blue background with a repeating pattern of planets and kiddy-toy spacecraft. The ceiling is a relaxing pastel blue with faint scallops of white clouds and a Buck Rogers spaceship motif. This might be fine for a teenager's bedroom, but for a bar?
The lighting throughout the bar is subtle and sophisticated. The background illumination in the main bar is dim and mellow, which helps to create the right sort of ambience. The lighting panels above the bar cycle through a range of colours, one of which is a green-cyan flood that makes the place look like one of the floor-to-ceiling aquariums at Ancol Sea World. Six frosted plastic panels mounted on the walls behind the band corner cycle slowly through the primary colours and provide a rather pleasant, soothing effect. Unlike the music, about which more later.
One thing that screams at me every time I go into new Top Gun is the flooring. Apart from a patch of maroon carpeting around the pool table, the main bar floor is a pale wood-grained plastic lamina that looks cheap and awful - Formica with a nasty dose of pernicious anaemia. Why they chose such a light colour defeats me. It spoils the lighting effect and makes the place look angular and vaguely institutional. A darker colour would have given the room more depth and enhanced the lighting.
The staff
If many of the bar staff look familiar it's because a lot of them have migrated from My Bar and Sportsmans. They're a cheerful lot, friendly and helpful, and are rapidly learning their customers' names and drinking habits. As you'd expect there's a strict uniform code - everyone is kitted out with matching outfit and shoes, all carefully badged and themed like some elite military unit. None of the customers give a tinker's cuss for all this finery - all that matters is that winning smile, that flashing eye, and getting their drinks without delay.
Nostalgia
You'll either love the touches of nostalgia, or hate them. The tawdry collection of saucy seaside postcards has been lovingly framed and hung on the wall above the main bar counter, making the place look like a bawdy travesty of a roadside shrine. The old black and white framed photos are still there, discordantly but reverentially hung around the main bar walls, and the original Top Gun motif has been enshrined in the disco as a huge backlit panel with flashing stars. In a way the sheer tackiness of these touches is rather endearing - it makes the place a bit more human. Without them the tightly-themed decor would be as sterile as a high street store furniture department.
The pool table
There's a brand-new full-size pool table in the main bar, and spanking new pool cues to go with it. The old hands are split in their opinion of this change. One of the charms of old Top Gun was a pool table of such terrible quality that it was a byword on the Blok, and a set of decrepit pool cues that were truly awful. But new Top Gun has ambitions in the Pool League, so it has to have a flash new table and straight cues.
What hasn't changed, alas, is the less than honest keeping of the pool table waiting list. As I went in one evening one of the regular players was angrily asking for his bill as he'd lost his turn at the table and the staff were unwilling to confront the selfish folk who kept on playing after their stint.
Another thing that the management should stamp on - quickly, and hard - is older girls hogging the pool table. In the old days the etiquette was that girls gave way to guys who were waiting to play. Nothing pisses off a guy more than waiting ages while the girls either prat about and waste time if they're novices, or play hard and long if they're the seasoned pros.
The food
The menu might be a new design - tightly themed with the colours and logo - but the fare on offer is the tired old list of yore. It needs a good overhaul, with more cheap and cheerful pub-grub items and fewer pricey full-scale dishes. More about the quality of the nosh in a later report, when I've had chance to sample some of it.
The music
Woe, woe and thrice woe. If one thing is going to kill new Top Gun stone dead in no time at all it's a live band in the main bar. It drove out a lot of the guys on the grand opening night, and continues to do so. I and a group of regulars collared the management one evening just before the band started to play and pointed out that all the guys were chatting contentedly around the bar. An expat watering hole is first and foremost a social place, where people meet to drink and talk together. If the Pelatehan owners don't realise this, more and more regulars will desert their bars. Ironically, it helped to kill off old Top Gun - and here we are again. Some people just never learn.
Customer comments
Here's a collection of random comments that I picked up over three nights in new Top Gun.
- It's OK, but it's not the old Top Gun, so why keep the name?
- I like the postcards over the bar, and the other bits of old Top Gun.
- It's a good place to chat with friends and play a bit of pool, but this band's driving people out.
- If the band is playing during Pool Competition games, we won't play here.
- It's looking good, but something's definitely missing - ceweks!
- Who's going to pay 200,000 rupes for a steak?
- The other night the place emptied as soon as the band started playing.
Personal thoughts and reflections
Old Top Gun was in and of its era. A unique place in its time, it was a one-stop shop for getting pissed, getting laid, and moving on. It was the ultimate cheap and cheerful watering hole, packed with Indramayu girls of all shapes, sizes and ages, and had the best bar food on the Blok. It was a boozy, bawdy, sleazy joint with a great spirit of community. For me it's sad that the new place cynically taps into a false vein of nostalgia. The old days are gone, and with them the organic, disorganised, uncoordinated, happy-go-lucky bars. Everything nowadays has to be themed and branded with sterile, almost military, precision. For me it's the triumph of form over content. This fashion might be fine for a supermarket or a laundrette, but not for a pub.
We know where Top Gun's coming from, but where is it going to? The basic concept is "all things to all men", and it's clearly aiming to skim the early evening chat-and-booze crowd from D's Place, Sportsmans and Everest, the sports enthusiasts from Sportsmans, the disco trade from D's Place and My Bar, and the live band enthusiasts from Oscar. Instead of seeking out its own particular niche in the Pelatehan eco-system it's going flat out to beat each bar at its own game. But as they're painfully discovering, some of these functions are antithetical and just can't coexist.
At the moment Top Gun must be hitting the other early evening bars quite hard - twenty-plus early evening guys is a fair slice of the expat pub-goers. The disco is building up momentum slowly, and on two nights was doing quite nicely until about one o'clock - but then everyone piles across the road into My Bar because that's where the action is and where the girls are. That's going to be a hard nut to crack if Top Gun is to make it in the disco stakes.
What we all want is for Blok M to be a collection of bars each with its own character and identity - not a series of themed clones. We want to be able to wander up and down the street and drop into whichever bar suits our present mood. I hope that Top Gun finds its niche and develops its own personality - it's got the means, now it must find the ends.
Update, February 10th
I've been in a few times now, and I'm pleased to say that things are looking good. The management have reduced the loudness of the music - it's still loud, but not too bad, and any reduction is welcome. This also means that they're listening to customer feedback.
The pool table has been sorted out, and it's now being well run. The waiting list is being kept honestly and efficiently, so you can scrawl your name up and get on with the serious business of drinking and wenching until your name is called.
The food looks good. I've sampled the lamb chops, and can report that they're succulent, well prepared, and come with a very tasty mint-jelly based sauce. And the chips are real chips, not the crinkle-cut frozen jobs that most places palm off on their customers. The side salad is fresh, and has a particularly nice touch - slices of olive to give it a bit of pizzazz. A dish of pieces of fresh fruit rounds off the meal nicely.
The disco is doing well, thanks to the appearance of girls. A mixed bunch, but some of your My Bar favourites seem to have migrated so you'll see a few familiar (and very pretty) faces among the crowd. The guys and girls drift in and out of the disco in much the same way as they used to at old Lintas Melawai, so the Top Gun configuration seems to be OK.
All in all, a pretty positive thumbs-up for the place. I'm making it my early evening oasis of choice, and enjoying the pool table enormously since getting over the culture-shock of the loss of the old table.
First impressions
I dropped into the new G-string bar last night and had a good look round. As people surmised from the outside decor it is indeed a music bar. And it looks good. The interior is very smart indeed - downstairs has got two bars and a music stage, upstairs there are two pool tables, a couple of Internet stations, a restaurant area and at the far end a very nice looking bar with some very nice looking barmaids.
One thing is for certain - when it comes to design and decor, this place wipes the floor with new Top Gun. The downstairs bar has got a dark gray stone floor, gray walls made of those compressed birds-nest building panels, and a dark ceiling. Lighting is excellent. The main bar is just like Everest, a central horseshoe shape. But in addition, as you go in the door there's a very cosy little semicircular bar on your left that's really snazzy.
Upstairs is a knock-out. There's a lot of space, and a clever use of mirrors and sculpted glass panels gives it a sophistication that will make your typical Blok M carouser feel a bit out of place. Again, excellent design and close attention to detail is evident throughout.
According to a tatty photocopied flier that I picked up, there'll be live music on Wednesday, Thursday Friday and Saturday nights - my main revelling nights, so it doesn't look as though I'll become a regular customer.
My initital reaction? C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. It's very good and markedly different from the other bars, but it's somehow anomalous and doesn't fit in to the tenor of the street. I was reminded very much of Everest when it first opened as I sat downstairs and sank my virgin beer in the place; a lot of investment, a lot of style, but I fear it won't make the grade as an upmarket venue unless it can attract new customers to the Blok. And there's the rub. Jalan Pelatehan isn't on the mainstream city entertainment circuit, and who's going to make an excursion 'darn sarf' just for one bar?
So here we go again, folks - downstairs, a loud and raucous watering hole, upstairs a very swish pool/dining area and a bar. Do you get a feeling of deja vu? Oscar, Everest, My Bar, perhaps? In none of these places has the upstairs ever really taken off, in spite of intensive marketing. The street now has four bars offering live band music, which is bad news for me and a lot of the guys who have already expressed their dislike of this type of place by walking out of Top Gun when the band strikes up. I get the impression, though I may be wrong, that the owners of G String may be targeting their place at high-earning Indonesian customers rather than the expat community.
[The high price of drinks that was previously quoted during the opening week has, I'm delighted to say, been
revised - draught beer is 15k all night long!]
I wish the place well, but wonder where they're going to get the customers from. Yes, it's yet another character in search of an author.