THE LURE:
Brainstorming over Martinis and Chocolate at The WaterMark
Yesterday I went for a night out in my old high school stomping ground, Ventura County. I’d come to town for my friend’s bridal shower (on Sunday), so on Saturday night me and another friend decided to take the bride to be out for a ladies night/ mini bachelorette on Main St in Ventura, CA. After dinner we went to an upscale bar that my friends, who are locals, had always wanted to go to, but never had occasion to, The Watermark. It was Gorgeous! The perfect place for a special occasion date. Romantic mood lighting, polished wood paneling on the bar and walls, gleaming marble floors. Downstairs there was 50s era big band and Sinatra style music playing. If you took the stairs or the elevator up to the 3rd floor you were at the W20 lounge there was a live band playing up tempo jazz a few loungey areas with sofas and some tables scattered around. It was a cougar den up there though: mostly mid 30s to mid 40s ladies with a few gentlemen around the same age range… not really my scene so my friends and I opted to have some drinks and dessert at the deserted bar downstairs. While we were enjoying our drinks a two couples took seats at the bar next to us, but it didn’t seem like the kind of bar where a single lady can pick up something to go. The chocolate Indulgence and Meyer Limoncello Zabaglione desserts we had were fantastic though. SO good in fact that in my eagerness to get a spoonful of the gooey chocolatey goodness of the chocolate one I spilled half of my $12.00 martini in my lap.
The tall dark and handsome, tuxedo vest clad bartender who’d been attending to another customer saw my friends and I pilfering napkins from behind the bar and asked if we were ok. I told him: “I spilled my drink on myself, but it’s ok, my clothes are going to taste much better now.”
He laughed politely flashing a gorgeous smile at us before getting back to the other bar patrons.
I was trying to think of how I could work that into a pick up line and toying with the idea of trying t pick up the bar tender, but he seemed like he had his hands full and the lines I kept coming up with were all pretty raunchy and overly direct along the lines of: “I spilled a drink on my lap earlier… it was pretty good, want to taste it.” My friends agreed that was pretty vulgar and not likely to appeal to the type of guy I was after… so we put our heads together and came up with something better…My one friend suggested that I should just go up to a guy and tell him he looks like Robert Pattenson… I figured there were only two possible responses that would elicit though: a confused “who’s Robert Patterson” or offense at being compared to the pale spindly star of Twighlight. Either way I figured it’d be hard to segway into a conversation from there… after all, my pick up line really isn’t the thing that I’d like a guy to be holding against me at the end of the night. I did like the concept of a celebrity comparison though. Stroking a mans ego usually goes over pretty well, so I decided I would just taylor the celebrity comparison to fit the particular guy I was hitting on.
“what if they say they don’t get your comparison?”my other friend asked
then my first friend giggled saying “you should just be like –eeh me neither.” I thought that was a brilliant idea.
The CAST
Getting tangled in my line at Dargan’s and good looking catch at The Its All Good Bar
Around 10:30PM, my two friends and I crossed the street from The Watermark, flashed our IDs at the bouncer of Dargan’s Irish Pub , who didn’t ask us to pay a cover – YAY!- and found a place along a wall near the bar to scope out our fellow patrons. There were a lot of men… but they all seemed to be huddled together in a most un-approachable way.
Brainstorming over Martinis and Chocolate at The WaterMark
Yesterday I went for a night out in my old high school stomping ground, Ventura County. I’d come to town for my friend’s bridal shower (on Sunday), so on Saturday night me and another friend decided to take the bride to be out for a ladies night/ mini bachelorette on Main St in Ventura, CA. After dinner we went to an upscale bar that my friends, who are locals, had always wanted to go to, but never had occasion to, The Watermark. It was Gorgeous! The perfect place for a special occasion date. Romantic mood lighting, polished wood paneling on the bar and walls, gleaming marble floors. Downstairs there was 50s era big band and Sinatra style music playing. If you took the stairs or the elevator up to the 3rd floor you were at the W20 lounge there was a live band playing up tempo jazz a few loungey areas with sofas and some tables scattered around. It was a cougar den up there though: mostly mid 30s to mid 40s ladies with a few gentlemen around the same age range… not really my scene so my friends and I opted to have some drinks and dessert at the deserted bar downstairs. While we were enjoying our drinks a two couples took seats at the bar next to us, but it didn’t seem like the kind of bar where a single lady can pick up something to go. The chocolate Indulgence and Meyer Limoncello Zabaglione desserts we had were fantastic though. SO good in fact that in my eagerness to get a spoonful of the gooey chocolatey goodness of the chocolate one I spilled half of my $12.00 martini in my lap.
The tall dark and handsome, tuxedo vest clad bartender who’d been attending to another customer saw my friends and I pilfering napkins from behind the bar and asked if we were ok. I told him: “I spilled my drink on myself, but it’s ok, my clothes are going to taste much better now.”
He laughed politely flashing a gorgeous smile at us before getting back to the other bar patrons.
I was trying to think of how I could work that into a pick up line and toying with the idea of trying t pick up the bar tender, but he seemed like he had his hands full and the lines I kept coming up with were all pretty raunchy and overly direct along the lines of: “I spilled a drink on my lap earlier… it was pretty good, want to taste it.” My friends agreed that was pretty vulgar and not likely to appeal to the type of guy I was after… so we put our heads together and came up with something better…My one friend suggested that I should just go up to a guy and tell him he looks like Robert Pattenson… I figured there were only two possible responses that would elicit though: a confused “who’s Robert Patterson” or offense at being compared to the pale spindly star of Twighlight. Either way I figured it’d be hard to segway into a conversation from there… after all, my pick up line really isn’t the thing that I’d like a guy to be holding against me at the end of the night. I did like the concept of a celebrity comparison though. Stroking a mans ego usually goes over pretty well, so I decided I would just taylor the celebrity comparison to fit the particular guy I was hitting on.
“what if they say they don’t get your comparison?”my other friend asked
then my first friend giggled saying “you should just be like –eeh me neither.” I thought that was a brilliant idea.
The CAST
Getting tangled in my line at Dargan’s and good looking catch at The Its All Good Bar
Around 10:30PM, my two friends and I crossed the street from The Watermark, flashed our IDs at the bouncer of Dargan’s Irish Pub , who didn’t ask us to pay a cover – YAY!- and found a place along a wall near the bar to scope out our fellow patrons. There were a lot of men… but they all seemed to be huddled together in a most un-approachable way.
I did a lap of
the bar and didn’t really see many promising prospects, the guys that I would
have liked to be uninvitingly huddled shoulder to shoulder with friends and
guys that weren’t so hard to single out were not really my type . After
re-uniting with my friends I did one last scan of the bar and spotted a pretty
cute Latino guy wearing thick rimmed glasses standing at the opposite side of
the bar from where we were.
As soon as I saw him, I immediately strode directly over to him, trying to think of a celebrity he looked like as I walked, after failing to conger up a celebrity comparison by the time I reached him, I decided to improvise:
“ those glasses look good on you.” I said following immediately with “...and you know what they say about people with glasses...”
“No what?” Hmm I’d been trying to bate him into conversation with that rhetorical question… giving him an opportunity to say something clever, but he was clearly going to make me do all the work here.
“ i dont know… they look smart... At least i get that a lot...” I said with what I hoped was endearing exaggerated lameness.
He didn’t laugh… clearly my awkward humor was lost on him, but he introduced himself anyway.
He asked if I was from Ventura.
“Nope. Bay area” I said… he didn’t have much to say about that, but the look on his face said that being a non Venturan was a strike against me.
“Why aren’t you drinking tonight?” he asked
“I am. I had a couple drinks at the pricey bar across the street.” He didn’t really respond, so I tried to think of something witty to say and instead came up with:
“My stomach is like totally spoiled now from the snooty drinks I had over there. It feels like it’s too good for the stuff they serve in here now.” I’d been going for sarcastic self deprecating humor, but I could see that this guy took me literally, and therefore I came off like kind of an uppity douche. Thus I wasn’t too surprised when the next thing he said was: “Well it WAS nice to meet you” and extended his hand as a consolatory thanks-for-playing-but-please-go-away-now gesture. I shook his hand, then immediately regretted having done so… because he was after all snubbing and rejecting me, I should have just turned and left without offering an appeasing handshake, but I guess sometimes it’s hard to repress the polite propriety my parents instilled in me. He hadn’t given me much to work with and clearly my humor was above his head, so I wasn’t too heartbroken as I returned to my friends saying:
“Not sure about the crowd here, shall we go to another bar?”
The were up for it, so we walked a few doors down to the “ it’s all good bar and grill” and were drawn in by the funk-rock live music being played by a live band inside. Once again, I was delighted that there was no cover, but once again, once inside, it looked like the 90s had just never stopped for the folks there. It was a sea of plaid flannel, trucker hats and hoodies. I was really regretting not saving some of my own plaid flannels and timber boots from high school, it probably would have upped my game with the Ventura crowd.
The guys in this bar were much cuter and seemed more approachable. My soon to be wed friend immediately spotted an attractive lad standing directly behind me and told me that it was her Bachlorette wish to vicariously hit on through me. Since I am after all the fairy of Bachlorette wishes, I had no choice but to oblige.
I decided he looked a bit like Heath ledger, so I swiveled around and casually asked:
“Hey do people tell you al the time th at you look like heath ledger?”
“No.” he replied with a chuckle.
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense ‘cause you really don’t look THAT much like him.” I said playfully.
he laughed heartily at that then asked.” So you really think I look like heath ledger?”
“ No. I just said you dont didn’t I?”
. His friend interjected at that point "heath ledger? More like Jesus. "
“...oh i wouldn’t know. I’ve never met Jesus.” I said.
The Ledger-alike immediately shot back: “Oh have you met Heath Ledger? "
He was quick. That was good. “Yup” I said without missing a beat “he and i were bffs before he died. Im still not over that though... So thanks for bringing it up.”
“Well, actually you came over to me and brought up Heath Ledger, so you can’t pin that on me.” He retorted.
I laughed. “I guess you’re right.”
I’m just having a cherry coke, the ledger-a-like explained to me as the bartender handed him a beverage.
“Oh. That must make you very popular with your friends who drink…at least if you drive.”
“No I don’t drive.”
“oh. Bummer… you don’t drink and you can’t be a designated river…I guess you’re pretty useless then” I teased
We fell into the usual conversation at that point about what we did for a living and where we lived. The Ledger-alike introduced me to his two friends. At first I thought maybe he was trying to pawn me off to one of them, but he lingered and continued to engage in conversation, so I guess he just wanted to show me off.
One of his friends, who apparently worked at the bar offered to get me a drink . I took him up on the offer, asking for a water.
We talked a bit more, but I didn’t get the feeling anything was going to happen with the Ledger-alike so I told himI wanted to get back to my friend’s bachelorette party. He asked me to find him and say goodbye before I left, but my friends were ready to go immediately after I got back to them and I didn’t see him as we headed out the door, so I guess it was not meant to be, so me and my 2 lady friends ventured out of Ventura and get back to my parents house for the night.
THE SPOT(s):
THE
WATERMARK:As soon as I saw him, I immediately strode directly over to him, trying to think of a celebrity he looked like as I walked, after failing to conger up a celebrity comparison by the time I reached him, I decided to improvise:
“ those glasses look good on you.” I said following immediately with “...and you know what they say about people with glasses...”
“No what?” Hmm I’d been trying to bate him into conversation with that rhetorical question… giving him an opportunity to say something clever, but he was clearly going to make me do all the work here.
“ i dont know… they look smart... At least i get that a lot...” I said with what I hoped was endearing exaggerated lameness.
He didn’t laugh… clearly my awkward humor was lost on him, but he introduced himself anyway.
He asked if I was from Ventura.
“Nope. Bay area” I said… he didn’t have much to say about that, but the look on his face said that being a non Venturan was a strike against me.
“Why aren’t you drinking tonight?” he asked
“I am. I had a couple drinks at the pricey bar across the street.” He didn’t really respond, so I tried to think of something witty to say and instead came up with:
“My stomach is like totally spoiled now from the snooty drinks I had over there. It feels like it’s too good for the stuff they serve in here now.” I’d been going for sarcastic self deprecating humor, but I could see that this guy took me literally, and therefore I came off like kind of an uppity douche. Thus I wasn’t too surprised when the next thing he said was: “Well it WAS nice to meet you” and extended his hand as a consolatory thanks-for-playing-but-please-go-away-now gesture. I shook his hand, then immediately regretted having done so… because he was after all snubbing and rejecting me, I should have just turned and left without offering an appeasing handshake, but I guess sometimes it’s hard to repress the polite propriety my parents instilled in me. He hadn’t given me much to work with and clearly my humor was above his head, so I wasn’t too heartbroken as I returned to my friends saying:
“Not sure about the crowd here, shall we go to another bar?”
The were up for it, so we walked a few doors down to the “ it’s all good bar and grill” and were drawn in by the funk-rock live music being played by a live band inside. Once again, I was delighted that there was no cover, but once again, once inside, it looked like the 90s had just never stopped for the folks there. It was a sea of plaid flannel, trucker hats and hoodies. I was really regretting not saving some of my own plaid flannels and timber boots from high school, it probably would have upped my game with the Ventura crowd.
The guys in this bar were much cuter and seemed more approachable. My soon to be wed friend immediately spotted an attractive lad standing directly behind me and told me that it was her Bachlorette wish to vicariously hit on through me. Since I am after all the fairy of Bachlorette wishes, I had no choice but to oblige.
I decided he looked a bit like Heath ledger, so I swiveled around and casually asked:
“Hey do people tell you al the time th at you look like heath ledger?”
“No.” he replied with a chuckle.
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense ‘cause you really don’t look THAT much like him.” I said playfully.
he laughed heartily at that then asked.” So you really think I look like heath ledger?”
“ No. I just said you dont didn’t I?”
. His friend interjected at that point "heath ledger? More like Jesus. "
“...oh i wouldn’t know. I’ve never met Jesus.” I said.
The Ledger-alike immediately shot back: “Oh have you met Heath Ledger? "
He was quick. That was good. “Yup” I said without missing a beat “he and i were bffs before he died. Im still not over that though... So thanks for bringing it up.”
“Well, actually you came over to me and brought up Heath Ledger, so you can’t pin that on me.” He retorted.
I laughed. “I guess you’re right.”
I’m just having a cherry coke, the ledger-a-like explained to me as the bartender handed him a beverage.
“Oh. That must make you very popular with your friends who drink…at least if you drive.”
“No I don’t drive.”
“oh. Bummer… you don’t drink and you can’t be a designated river…I guess you’re pretty useless then” I teased
We fell into the usual conversation at that point about what we did for a living and where we lived. The Ledger-alike introduced me to his two friends. At first I thought maybe he was trying to pawn me off to one of them, but he lingered and continued to engage in conversation, so I guess he just wanted to show me off.
One of his friends, who apparently worked at the bar offered to get me a drink . I took him up on the offer, asking for a water.
We talked a bit more, but I didn’t get the feeling anything was going to happen with the Ledger-alike so I told himI wanted to get back to my friend’s bachelorette party. He asked me to find him and say goodbye before I left, but my friends were ready to go immediately after I got back to them and I didn’t see him as we headed out the door, so I guess it was not meant to be, so me and my 2 lady friends ventured out of Ventura and get back to my parents house for the night.
THE SPOT(s):
The W2O lounge on the 3rd floor and the bar on the ground floor are fun for a ladies night out - if you’ve got some cash to burn. It’s gorgeous inside and the drinks and desserts are delicious. Pretty much all drinks were $10.00+ and desserts are around $8.00 or so. There is a lot of seating upstairs, but not a lot of standing room to mingle and meet people. Most of the patrons upstairs and downstairs seemed to be at least in their Mid 30s and upper middle to upper class.
DARGANS:
The Venue itself was a typical Irish pub, with shinned wood bar and tables. They served dinner until 11:00 and at the bar had beer wine and whisky. They also offered late night food served until 1:00 AM which is always nice. There were a lot of tables and bar seating though none were available when we got there. The fact that there were so many tables left little room for standing or mingling though and dancing seems like something that probably doesn’t happen there. The ratio of men to women seemed at first to be skewed in favor of a single lady such as myself looking to find a guy to connect with, however, at least the night I was there. The, mostly early to mid 20s guys did not seemed like they were mostly looking to hang out with their bros rather than mingle with the opposite sex, so it seemed like its probably a good place to go hang out with friends on a night away from your significant other, have a beer and shoot the ish, but not the best pick up spot.
THE ITS ALL GOOD BAR
I feel like this place lived up to the casualness implied by its name. It was packed with a diverse mix of ladies and gents from 21- 30 years old. The fact that it was a smallish bar with not a lot of seating made it quite conducive to comingling with strangers. They offered a full bar selection (mixed drinks, beer, wine etc). They had live music and the band I heard was pretty good, so there were a lot of people dancing and folks seemed to be enjoying themselves. I’d say this is a good bar to go to if you are on the prowl… probably not so good if you are looking to catch up with friends over drinks.
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