Pattaya in August is as bad as it gets. Drive through the city – Soi Honey, Soi Buakhao, Soi Lengkee, etc. – and its empty bar after empty bar.
Walking Street Pattaya in August is hardly better. Big-name go-go bars giving away drinks for ฿80. Others closing voluntarily until high season.
As Redlight Report predicted in May, this is the worst low season since the coronavirus pandemic and Pattaya in August has been the worst of the worst.
Sour Taste for Sweets Lounge Boss
This is the first time being in Pattaya in August for Gary, the new owner of Sweets Lounge on Soi Honey. It’s been eye-opening.
“I drove through town yesterday and street after street, the bars are just empty,” Gary said Tuesday. Walking Street may still be moderately full of Indians, and Soi LK may still bring out the weekend expats, but he said sois Buakhao, Honey, Lengkee and elsewhere were stark.
No Rush to Party
Around Walking Street, the opening of much-anticipated The Party on Soi 15 has been “delayed slightly” according to partner Alberto “Toto Pattaya” Cervantes, who still didn’t have all the required licenses in hand on Aug. 17, a day before its planned soft opening.
“We need to do a few changes to the rooftop (bar) and we prefer to wait and open all three floors together,” he said.
The Party is more than a go-go. It’s a three-floor entertainment center, with the former Shark Club and Jisoo go-go bar on the ground floor, VIP karaoke rooms on the middle floor and a swimming pool party bar on the roof.
It’s not a stretch to believe the delayed licenses and the “changes” needed for the swimming pool level are connected.
Miracle or Mirage?
In July, long-running Skyfall a-Go-Go on Walking Street was sold. In Pattaya in August, the sign for its successor went up: Mirage 555.
Tentatively set to open Sept. 5, Mirage 555 will look entirely different from the already attractive Skyfall. The entire interior has been gutted and crews are working overtime to get it ready.
The buyers of the new venture are Chinese. That’s about all that’s known about them so far. But, to be clear, these Chinese owners are not the same as the two Chinese university pals that opened Harem Ultra in Pattaya in August. In fact, the boss at Harem says he’s not even met his fellow countrymen in the go-go business.
The name Mirage 555 sets up easy puns. 555, of course, translates “ha ha ha” in Thai. The question is, will the new Chinese owners be laughing all the way to the bank or will the joke be on them?
Carousel Beer Bar Demolished
The last bar connected to Walking Street’s birth is now history. Pattaya in August saw the demolition of Lucky Carousel, the official name for what everyone knew as the Carousel Beer Bar.
The open-air rotating bar dated to 1978 and for decades was one of Soi Diamond’s defining landmarks. Der Farang recalled that the two counter-rotating Carousel sister bars were among Pattaya’s most photographed watering holes during the 1980s and later formed part of the bar empire of Swiss operator Otto “Calypso” Schaufelberger.
A July 2002 Pattaya Mail report recorded a “grand opening” for Lucky Carousel under operators Amporn Sawatsaloong and August E. Steiner. That appears to have marked a new ownership era rather than the birth of the bar, which had already been turning for more than two decades.
The adjacent Carousel A-Go-Go was a separate enclosed venue. It was operating by the 1990s and lasted until 2012, while the beer bar continued on.
The Carousel itself stopped rotating years ago but kept serving, eventually adding live music and remaining open through July. Ownership in its final years is unclear.
Now, in Pattaya in August, the structure is gone, the floor has been concreted over and one of Soi Diamond’s longest-running landmarks has finally disappeared after 48 years.
Getting Nasty with the Drink Monsters
For as long as there have been barfines there have been girls who, once relieved of her dancing duties, cajoles her customer to stay in the bar – or visit a bar in the same group – so she can continue to get overpriced lady drinks.
So it was a shock to see Pattaya’s ever-expanding Nasty group this week put the kibosh on its girls squeezing guys for even more drinks.
“Once you bar fine our ladies you no longer are obligated to pay lady drink prices,” Nasty Group’s top boss wrote on Facebook this week, to universal cheers from his bars fans.
“Yes, I did get resistance from my managers, but this goes a long way to retaining our customer base and hopefully attracting new,” he wrote. “I was a punter long before I crossed over to the ‘darkside’. I see both sides, but I’ll always lean toward customer value and service.”
Forget Double Lady Drinks: How About 60?
Nasty Group is, of course, the exception to the rule. With today’s costs for rent, dancers, electricity and liquor, no one should be surprised to know that most bar owners are unapologetic about trying to squeeze every last baht out of customers. They’re there to make money, after all.
The latest craze in go-go bars in Bangkok and Pattaya in August is “shot towers”. In most cases, they are small Ferris wheel-shaped racks that host a dozen or so shots. But go-go bars have gone all in, with multiple sizes for budgets of all sizes.
In one large Nana Plaza Bangkok go-go bar, the towers run in size from 12 to 60. Who in their right mind is buying 60 shots? Lots of people as it turns out.
The 60-shot tower, in fact, is perhaps the most-popular of all, with its five decks of shot glasses giving show-off punters and whales all the attention they’re seeking. But, most times, it turns out the shots are not for themselves but for the girls.
A night before Digital a-Go-Go shot this photo, one guy had the 60-shot tower filled with lady drinks for just one girl. Cost for the tower was ฿13,200 with ฿6,000 of that going to the lucky lady who drank only a couple of the shots. She gave out the rest to her friends.
With these towers, the girls are cashing in with management saying some girls are getting 350 lady drinks a night.
Crazy House Joins the 2020s
Soi Cowboy’s Crazy House has finally joined the computer age. Until a few weeks ago, every bin in the Soi 23 go-go was hand-written, as were those in sister bar Bad Beach. Buy a drink and a hand-written check was stuffed in the bin, then totaled later.
That system often led to claims about bill padding, even though the Crazy Group bars have always been very honest with actual cases of bill padding being extremely rare.
Nonetheless, when the group opened Supernova April 1, computerized bills began with it. A few months later, the same system was installed in Bad Beach and, now, Crazy House. Now you can always see how much you’re spending that that naked vixen is bouncing on your lap.
