Hey guys,
Was in Osaka last week and thought I’d check out the happening bars, was completely unsuccessful but thought my info might help the next person with the same idea.
As far as I know there are 2 places in Osaka - Romantic (in Umeda) and Melinda (in Namba). I had social stuff on my first and last nights, and 2 free nights between so planned to visit one on each. My first failure was getting so totally shitfaced on the first night there was no way I was going to a happening bar on the second night - spent most of the day fucked up in bed!
So the following night I had to pick one bar, and plumped for Romantic as it was highly recommended to me be a hot Osaka lass I played with at Retreat recently. The building address is shown on their website, but not the floor or unit number, it says to call them from Kita Shinchi station. No answer though, so I went to the building and the floor listing next to the elevator shows they’re on 8F, so I just went up and rang the bell. No response, and the place looked totally closed. No umbrella stand etc outside, their sign’s still on the wall but the sign lights were off. So, no idea what was going on there, whether it was a random day off or it’s shut down for good or what (though their site’s still showing their event schedule), but anyway I headed to Melinda instead.
Melinda’s pretty hard to find, tucked away on the 3rd floor within a building near the big Dotonbori Donki, but no sign at street level. Again, you have to call them from nearby. The tencho greeted me at the door, but with the bad news that I couldn’t come in because I hadn’t made a reservation on their site... I had looked at the site obviously, but missed the reservation rule. He seemed cool and was very apologetic about it, and explained the system for next time. Which is, if you look at the homepage (http://club-bar-melinda.com/home.html) there’s a pink 今夜行くね button at the top - click it and then in the drop down you have to enter whether you’re male/female/couple, whether you’re new, which day you’re going, and your name. In terms of ID he said my overseas IDs were fine, though not before checking what country I’m from - I’m British which seemed to be acceptable, but I’m guessing that they might ask for Japanese ID if your nationality isn’t deemed to have acceptable ID. As discussed recently on TAG, the Tokyo bars are being super tight about ID these days but it evidently hasn’t affected Osaka.
So anyway, total failure, but hopefully others can learn from it. I decided to go try solo street nanpa for the first time instead, but I was freezing my balls off so just went for ramen then a pint in Hub, where there were no cute girls. Ah well, I don’t really know where solo drinkers go to find each other in Osaka. But I’ll definitely go to Melinda next time I’m in Kansai and give it a write up on here.
oh yeah and here’s Romantic’s site: http://www.romantic-luxury.net/system.html
Was in Osaka last week and thought I’d check out the happening bars, was completely unsuccessful but thought my info might help the next person with the same idea.
As far as I know there are 2 places in Osaka - Romantic (in Umeda) and Melinda (in Namba). I had social stuff on my first and last nights, and 2 free nights between so planned to visit one on each. My first failure was getting so totally shitfaced on the first night there was no way I was going to a happening bar on the second night - spent most of the day fucked up in bed!
So the following night I had to pick one bar, and plumped for Romantic as it was highly recommended to me be a hot Osaka lass I played with at Retreat recently. The building address is shown on their website, but not the floor or unit number, it says to call them from Kita Shinchi station. No answer though, so I went to the building and the floor listing next to the elevator shows they’re on 8F, so I just went up and rang the bell. No response, and the place looked totally closed. No umbrella stand etc outside, their sign’s still on the wall but the sign lights were off. So, no idea what was going on there, whether it was a random day off or it’s shut down for good or what (though their site’s still showing their event schedule), but anyway I headed to Melinda instead.
Melinda’s pretty hard to find, tucked away on the 3rd floor within a building near the big Dotonbori Donki, but no sign at street level. Again, you have to call them from nearby. The tencho greeted me at the door, but with the bad news that I couldn’t come in because I hadn’t made a reservation on their site... I had looked at the site obviously, but missed the reservation rule. He seemed cool and was very apologetic about it, and explained the system for next time. Which is, if you look at the homepage (http://club-bar-melinda.com/home.html) there’s a pink 今夜行くね button at the top - click it and then in the drop down you have to enter whether you’re male/female/couple, whether you’re new, which day you’re going, and your name. In terms of ID he said my overseas IDs were fine, though not before checking what country I’m from - I’m British which seemed to be acceptable, but I’m guessing that they might ask for Japanese ID if your nationality isn’t deemed to have acceptable ID. As discussed recently on TAG, the Tokyo bars are being super tight about ID these days but it evidently hasn’t affected Osaka.
So anyway, total failure, but hopefully others can learn from it. I decided to go try solo street nanpa for the first time instead, but I was freezing my balls off so just went for ramen then a pint in Hub, where there were no cute girls. Ah well, I don’t really know where solo drinkers go to find each other in Osaka. But I’ll definitely go to Melinda next time I’m in Kansai and give it a write up on here.
oh yeah and here’s Romantic’s site: http://www.romantic-luxury.net/system.html
