First of, is that how you spell wine-ing? Meaning that I had a bunch of wine? lol, I'm not sure about that. Normally I don't do fancy stuff like this but I have a couple of friends that are always running off and doing 1st class things like this. They have quite a bit more money than the average person so they can afford this much easier than I can, but on occasion I do join and the other night was one of them.
This evening took me to Karma, which is a place I had heard of but never been to.
This is on the "other side of the river" where the population is considerably more afraid of Covid than we are back in my own part of town and it was kind of funny to see the stark contrast between the staff and the guests. I didn't notice any guests wearing mask but the staff were wearing both masks and face shields, we also had to do some QR code thing and get our hands sprayed with some futuristic sanitizer gun with a UV light on it administered by one of the staff before you went in. I hadn't ever seen anything like it.
The place itself is pretty upmarket and certainly a lot more fancy schmancy than my usual dive bars.
The bar was sunk in the floor in the middle of the room and all of the seats were around it. The pictures are a bit wonky because the lighting in there was like a strip club. Thankfully the DJ was made to have his music at a reasonable volume and this was fantastic news to me.
I really don't like it when I go somewhere and there is a DJ because that person is capable of ruining any night if they are too loud and DJ's tend to be too loud. This was a pretty expensive fixed menu tapas and wine tasting, so if he had been loud enough that I had to shout for my friends to hear me I probably would have complained to the manager.
The tapas were mixture of cheeses and various other snack type things, the best of which was the oysters in a half shell that they conveniently brought out at the end of the entire thing. It was pretty obvious that this was done intentionally since we were technically allowed to order as much as the various tapas as we wanted without limit. The oysters were almost certainly the most expensive part of it all.
The total price of all of this was 790,000 VND or about $40 USD. This probably doesn't sound like a lot for people living in the west but for Vietnam, this amount is nearly what the average local makes in a week.
We were guzzling wine (which wasn't very good) at a fast pace so I think that we might have been one of the few tables in the place that the owners probably lost money on. Mission accomplished!