2012 Reader Bar & Club Awards: Club of the Year

With all the results announced on Saturday at our 2012 Reader Bar & Club Awards party, now it's time to take a closer look at who won, who narrowly missed out and what it all means.

Let's start with one of the big ones. Traditionally, we've given a single "Bar of the Year" award marking one venue out above all others. In 2004, the very first year of the Bar & Club Awards, a nightclub (Cloud Nine) actually won the top award, but since then the Bar of the Year award has been dominated by cocktail bars (Centro, Q Bar, Mesh), all-rounders (Fubar, First Floor, Browns) and a sole rock venue (D-22). This year, we decided to give the clubs more room by creating a "Club of the Year" award to parallel the "Bar of the Year" contest. So what of the "Club of the Year" winners?

Club of the Year
Winner: Spark
Outstanding: Xiu, Haze
This time one year ago, club life in Beijing was looking pretty moribund. In the 2011 Reader Bar & Club Awards, The House won the "Best Place to Dance" award - and closed two weeks later. The runners-up were Punk (closed last weekend) and Vics. Xiu won everything else that sounded like a club-related award. But by late summer 2011, the revival was on, with Lantern, Haze and Spark creating new spaces for electronic music. The more recent openings of The Bar at Migas and Elements offer further evidence that the club scene, in both its underground and mainstream forms, is on the road to recovery, but the "Club of the Year" results tell their own story.

In first place, almost inevitably, was Spark, shipped seamlessly from Taipei to The Place basement space, which had been haunted by the slow death of Song Music Bar & Kitchen. Spark lived up to its name, creating an instant buzz among the city's more fashion-conscious clubbers not seen since the early days of d lounge or Punk. The Spark effect was similar to the seismic influence that Great Leap was exerting on beer drinkers in 2011, but you know, different crowds. Spark's success to this point has been all the more remarkable given its location. Put simply, a year ago nobody in their right mind would have backed a club in The Place/Guanghua Lu area to pull in a crowd, let alone win awards.

Perhaps more surprising is that two of them have done it. In nine months, Haze has gone a long way towards putting the burden of White Rabbit memories to bed once and for all, fusing the owners' underground instincts with a more pragmatic sense of what their audience will come back for. They've done well and deserve their runner-up award.

And then there's Xiu: Need anything more be said about the Park Hyatt's bar-meets-club-meets-terrace-meets-Beijing-duck-restaurant? Yes, actually. Now three years old (anniversary party on May 30), Xiu is entering that stage of existence where it's time to look around at the new challengers and consider how to keep ahead of the curve. Sure, Xiu has won six awards this year, but others who once dominated Beijing nightlife have slipped back into obscurity because they stopped innovating. Xiu is nowhere near that stage yet, but in Beijing, irrelevancy is often the accidental offspring of complacency.

More on the Reader Bar & Club Awards to come tomorrow ...