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.