Feel free to channel your inner Gatsby
Disco Dining Club marries gilded decadence with feel of underground club.
When Courtney Nichols set out to throw the dinner party/rave/immersive theater project that became Disco Dining Club, she had role models.
Among her influences: Indochine, the New York Asian-fusion joint and clubhouse that once catered to the Warhol crowd. Peak-era Formosa Café in Hollywood, back when Frank Sinatra was drowning there in want of Ava Gardner. Maybe throw in some Versailles and Weimar-era Germany on an underground club promoter salary.
“We wanted it to be like a Peggy Guggenheim party without all the trust funds,” Nichols said, of the New York art world doyenne whose collection of Picassos and Miró’s were rivaled only by her myriad sensory appetites.
On the third anniversary of her party (which hits the Mid-Wilshire Art Deco Building this Saturday), she’s off to a good start.
At a time when underground nightlife is faced with mounting pressures to stay afloat, be it soaring rents or increased scrutiny placed upon do-it-yourself venues in the wake of 2016’s tragic fire at underground Oakland art space Ghost Ship, it’s harder than ever to throw the kind of rough-andtumble, shoestring-budget events where culture takes shape.
So Nichols went hard in the other direction — throwing parties in the glitziest on-the-grid spaces she could find, with menus of caviar, oysters and champagne. She built on themes ranging from gay bathhouses to Russian royalty. Dinner usually comes with some kind of leftfield theater or a sweat-it-out ’70s dance party.
It has the heart of an after-hours club but revels in the gilded decadence most below-radar nightlife is out to destroy.
“There’s so much exceptional [nightlife] talent here, like A Club Called Rhonda and Making Shapes,” Nichols said. “But after Ghost Ship, people just don’t want to take that risk. That’s what I missed, music in diffuse spaces. You need a narrative to get people to leave the house today, but you can’t be smelling car exhaust while eating caviar.”
Nichols is a clubland fixture, usually easy to spot across with her shock of pastel hair and an interestingly cut dress. Her fascination with disco culture extends far beyond the music, into the ways the genre blended scenes and identities and gave clubbers permission to test their limits.
She always threw a good shindig, starting with her earliest proto-DDC parties in her West L.A. backyard. But the night she made the series official, she brought a gussied-up crew of latenight regulars to Cliff ’s Edge in Silver Lake. What had been intended as a genial night out with small-plates and champagne quickly escalated.
“People showed up in full regalia and by the end of the night they were having sex in the bathrooms,” Nichols said.
So began her wink-wink-nudge-nudge (but not at all, really) vision of supper-club indulgence. Disco Dining Club isn’t cheap. (tickets for Saturday start at $100 and go up to $250). But that’s all-in for everything, including (at the VIP level), a multicourse meal from Bistro LQ’s Laurent Quenioux, enough oysters to drag down a small yacht and a longform set from French disco mainstay Joakim.
Is it a weird time for her to dive into the aesthetic and gustatory signifiers of the ultra-rich? Disco scholars will note it’s no coincidence that the scene arose in the ‘70s, a time of distrust in government, crumbling cities and post-Vietnam cynicism that yielded some of the most unabashedly joyful music and righteously decadent nightlife.
In today’s divisive climate, there’s some sanctuary in walling off the bad news for a night and surrounding oneself with finer things.
“I can say without a shred of doubt that people need this right now,” Nichols said. “Right now , people still need to know that this life can exist.”