Don't Mention the Rabbit: Haze Opens This Weekend

Following the welcome return of Lantern last weekend - looks good, doesn't it? – clubbers have more reason to be cheerful. Haze, the new bar from the team behind White Rabbit, is opening this weekend (September 2-3) in a basement space at Guanghualu Soho. A press release put out over the weekend from the crew tells us ...

"The wait is over. The new messiah is here. Haze lounge-club has its grand opening weekend on the 2nd and 3rd of September. The posse that brought you White Rabbit Club now brings you Haze. Free entry and free awesome house music! Hope to see you there!"

Many of you won't know Guanghualu Soho, but it's easy to spot – it's a huge white building with large circular windows, 50m east of Dongdaqiao Lu. The entrance to Haze is on the west corner of the building – avoid the tiger-print effects and head downstairs. Be careful on the stairs, as they are rather steep.

I got a look around Haze a few weeks ago at a low-key warmup party. Although the team have been at pains to stress that Haze is not a return to the style of White Rabbit – they'd rather the name not be mentioned – it was good to see that they've not gone off at a tangent. Haze is still very much an electronic music venue, with a cool, simple design: DJ booth on one side, small dance floor, bar at the back and sofas around the side. It's "minimalist," but more polished and better-looking than the old Lucky Street White Rabbit. Here's an admittedly terrible photo I took of Thomas Gaestadius DJing at one of the warmup parties ...

All good so far, but one obvious challenge is in getting a crowd down to an area that's not a nightlife hotspot. That may be changing – Spark Club has just opened nearby, in the basement of The Place, and is generating a bit of a buzz. They're different styles of club, but there will be some overlap in the crowd for each, so they might well help each other out. In any case, I think the Haze team has enough clout to pull a crowd.

What I really hope is that both Haze and Spark can get around the perennial problem of the Dongdaqiao/Guanghua Lu area, namely that it's a taxi black hole. How many times have you ended up walking miles to find a taxi around The Place/Central Park/Guanghua Lu? Well, one of the Haze team assured me that "There will be taxis. That won't be a problem." I can only assume he knows what he's talking about.

Images: Iain Shaw and courtesy of Haze