I’ve asked cocktails to do all of that and more. But to unclog my pores and erase my fine lines? I thought that was the province of dermatologists, not daiquiris. Silly, excessively sober me.
According to Provocateur, a nightclub in the meatpacking district that caters to the pampered and primping set, I can have my facial and drink it too. In early April the club, which opened last year, introduced a menu of spring and summer cocktails, jointly created by a bartender and a beauty vendor, that purport to smooth skin, plump it up or improve it in other ways.
Looking a little blotchy? Find fruity remedy in the Watermelon Kiss, with tequila, watermelon and (the menu claims) the power to help even out your skin tone.
Oil glands in overdrive? Experience citrusy salvation through the Sweet Enchantment, which combines vodka, kumquats and special vitamins and minerals that, we’re to believe, have a payoff not dissimilar to benzoyl peroxide’s.
I have to hand it to Provocateur. In a booze marketplace lousy with come-ons and gimmicks, it has contrived a fresh one: the nightclub as day spa, the bender as Botox. And I don’t have to struggle to come up with the right language for that achievement, because one of its chief architects volunteered his own encomiums.
“Radically innovative,” said Scott-Vincent Borba, the beauty vendor. A former model turned purveyor of complexion-enhancing lotions and potions, he repeatedly used that phrase and variants of it to describe the quality that distinguishes and unites him and Provocateur’s owners, Michael Satsky and Brian Gefter. “They are true visionaries,” he said.
Mr. Borba said the three found themselves on the same wavelength this year, when he realized that many of his clients — who, he said, are “celebrity A-list” — had a similar complaint about Hollywood awards season festivities.
“Golly,” he quoted them as saying to him, “I’m always at an event — the Golden Globes, the Oscars, whatever — and I really want to be able to enjoy myself and know that what I’m putting in my body in a cocktail form is not only going to be good for me but helping me in some way.”
Right around that time, he said, Provocateur’s owners, whom he hadn’t previously known, got in touch to see if there might be some way to adapt his products for nightclub use. “They were just starting up this radical concept,” he said, whereby they wanted their patrons to be able to “walk out looking and feeling absolutely as beautiful and confident as when they walk in.”
Mr. Borba immediately climbed on board. “And I don’t leverage my brand equity any which way,” he told me on the phone recently.
Mr. Satsky, in an interview at Provocateur, said he was familiar with Mr. Borba because “a lot of my girlfriends were consuming his products,” especially a line of flavored waters infused with what Mr. Borba calls “crystallines” of vitamins, minerals and fruit extracts that are intended to correct skin imperfections. Mr. Borba refers to them as “skin-gestibles.”
Mr. Satsky said he thought cocktail versions of those would help him sustain the “extremely female-friendly environment” he wants at Provocateur.
And the other components of that environment? Most of the nightclub’s drinks, which cost $22, are brightly colored and sweet. Its décor, including what look like furry swings and lacquered lawn furniture, evokes a garden party on acid. And there are phallic symbols in the fantastical collages on the walls. Mr. Satsky pointed them out.
Provocateur isn’t your usual bar. Its hours are 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. (Tuesday through Saturday). You typically need prior approval from Mr. Satsky’s office to be let in the door, and that approval is contingent on friendship with established club patrons or recognizable social, economic, artistic or celebrity clout.
In a post last year, the restaurant news and gossip Web site Eater.com mulled Provocateur’s hyper-exclusivity and estimated that there was a mere 18 percent chance that a random person arriving at the club could get in the door.
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