PM Nightlife Lounge

Markets down. Unemployment up. Equity gone bye-bye.

This is a touchy time to open a luxuriously appointed nightclub that caters to conspicuously consuming Dallasites and fly-through celebrities. But that's what PM Nightlife Lounge at the Joule hotel is about - and it's about it very, very well. This is one of the most ambitious, and at first blush most fully realized, debuts in a decade.

PM is a small gem, at 1,500 square feet, but exquisitely set by all-purpose lifestyle purveyor Todd Fiscus. He and his collaborators have combined wit and big dollars with a cool charm that's uncharacteristic of strained-expectations Dallas. The folks at PM won't cough up numbers, but one designer pal with an accountant's eye suspects a high-six-figures budget.

Whatever the money amount, it was well-spent, evident to all who step past the glass door and down the broad stairway, which creates a sense of moment in itself, to the rectangular room below. Installations of pyrite and crystal sparkle at each turn. Huge mirrors reflect kindly on guests, because the creamy lighting here flatters everyone, which is a neat trick

Slyly segregated spaces - front bar, left- and right-side seating arrangements, back bar concealed behind a beaded curtain - promote both intimacy and sociability, another neat trick.

The fixtures and furnishings, by Mr. Fiscus' own description, exist in some nether dimension between Opium Wars-era Chinese brothel and the remainders from a David Lynch soundstage. (Cue the dancing dwarf.)

General manager Chad Boyle, familiar from Hotel ZaZa and Steel, applies his enthusiasm for wine in PM's bar menu and bottle service selections.

He and reservations coordinator Sarah Thornhill are dedicated to a hard door that stays that way. Those are brave words in a tough economy and on a Main Street clogged with Ed Hardy T-shirts during the weekends and would be the neatest trick of all.
-Mr. Dallas (10/2008)