Entertainment would come from hip-hop artists like Nas, R. With the acronym standing for Beverage, Entertainment, Dining, Hoyos tried his best to honor each letter. The club’s “mattresses” were actually made from that cheap foam, cut into long shapes to fit along the club’s walls, sheer curtains hanging from the ceiling dividing the “beds.” Total design costs were around $600. Opening on December 29, 1999, Hoyos’s Miami outpost cheekily called itself B.E.D. “It was to promote a time for stimulating, intellectual discussion, and was generally a mark of good standing in society.” “ The Romans’ style of dining was supposed to be relaxed, not formal,” he says. (Picture a hedonistic, Etruscan emperor in a toga laying on his side as nude slaves fed him grapes and poured goblets of wine into his face.)Īmazingly, according to Keith Bradley, the Professor Emeritus of Classics at Notre Dame, this style of dining was considered refined at the time. Hoyos was familiar with ancient Greek and Roman concepts like the triclinium, a formal dining room in which three chaise-lounge-type seats were arranged around a table. Supperclub was (and remains) the first bed-in-a-bar establishment. Soon, the gay-friendly, retro-futurist, three-roomed spot had become famed for its dominatrix waitresses with trays of slurpable oysters served between their legs, performance artists, pole-dancers, fortune-telling penis “readers” in the bathrooms, a cross-dressing American maitre d’ named “Howie” and, most importantly, stylish diners eating multicourse dinners off trays placed in the center of stark, white beds. Van der Leden’s vision? Keep the same underground vibe, but turn Supperclub into a legitimate restaurant… with beds. There’s no sleeping in the beds!”Īmsterdam’s Supperclub opened in 1991 as, according to The Guardian, “an anarcho-artists’ collective with bug-eyed radicals squatting on mattresses plotting to overthrow multinationals.” (Hoyos claims it was really just four very wealthy friends of his who wanted their own private space to party.) Not surprisingly, the club was popular with Amsterdam’s elite, but it was not exactly profitable-anarcho-artistic ambitions rarely are-and the place was nearly bankrupt when textile magnate Bert van der Leden purchased it in 1997. recalls accidentally dozing off only to have a bouncer rouse her with a stern admonition: “Ma’am, you have to wake up, or we’ll escort you out. It appears one thing was expressly forbidden at B.E.D.
“No one had been inside in a few years, and the previous tenant’s furniture was still set up.” New Year’s was now just 13 weeks away, and he immediately went to work redesigning the inside with cheap plywood and $3-a-foot, high-density foam, taking interior inspiration from his beloved Supperclub. “It looked like a nuclear test site,” recalls Hoyos. He quickly found real estate, though, in a rectangular shitbox on the 9th Street block of Washington Avenue where countless other bars had already gone belly-up in the past decade. With $700,000 of his and his friend’s money, Hoyos arrived in Miami on August 13th knowing nothing about the city’s nightlife codes. “If it doesn’t, who cares? It will still be the greatest party ever!” “If it works, great, we’ll keep it open,” he recalls telling them. No one had any ideas, but Hoyos had a grand one: A nightclub built, perhaps, for one night only. It was already August of 1999 when I asked my friends, ‘What do you want to do for New Year’s?’” He was now looking to set up his first nightclub. “Everyone was smoking pot, lying around in beds, it was that kind of scene.”Īn Austrian count- seriously-born to a line of wealthy European bankers, Hoyos had found great success in the 1990s organizing raves in Amsterdam.
“This’ll never work in Miami,” thought nightlife impresario Michael Capponi after his friend Oliver Hoyos flew him out to the Netherlands in the late-1990s to visit something called Supperclub. What happens when you take ancient Greek and Roman dining concepts, an Austrian count by way of Holland, of-the-moment celebrities and some of the most groan-worthy wordplay a new millennium had ever seen? You get the brief era where beds in bars were the hottest thing going in American nightlife.