Entertainment

Blaxploitation, nightclub style

SIX nights a week, SoHo’s decadent GoldBar serves as a debauched hideaway where one might expect to find dodo eggs on the menu and hundred dollar bills in the seat cushions. But Mondays have become a family affair. Models, aspiring hoods, hipsters, and old-school party people take over the room, harmoniously toasting one another with 40-ounce Colt 45’s while eating chicken wings and grooving to a soundtrack of Marvin Gaye. This is Soul Kitchen.

“It’s about white girls dancing with black guys with the look on their face like, ‘I can’t believe I’m dancing with a black guy and drinking a 40,’ and black guys thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m dancing with a white girl and she’s drinking a 40,’” says the party’s co-founder Jack Luber, recalling one of many articles written about Soul Kitchen in its earlier days.

That may seem offensive to some, but it hasn’t stopped Soul Kitchen from becoming a celebrity magnet. Even supermodels Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell are malt liquor-chugging fixtures.

Luber says he convinced GoldBar’s owners to remove 80 percent of their tables so people could dance. The former 120-plus capacity room now holds about 150 party people who are as likely to have record deals as police records. (Luber estimates that “95 percent” of attendees who arrive before the room reaches capacity are admitted, with the only caveat being that the male-female ratio stays even.)

Soul Kitchen also added mirrored balls, black-light posters and muted blaxploitation film projections onto the walls. But it’s the music that keeps it real.

“For Soul Kitchen I had to deejay with records,” says co-founder Frankie Inglese, eschewing the laptop setup other deejays use in favor of old-school vinyl. Luber and Inglese, collectively known as “Frankie Jackson,” started hosting this fabulous fete at TriBeCa’s Vandam restaurant in 1989 before moving it down the street to Brothers Barbecue.

After an eight-year hiatus, it’s now reborn at GoldBar, bringing back old-school attendees like Bridget Hall, Jill Revson and Beastie Boy Mike D. Presumably, they all paid the $10 cover that’s caused more than one celebrity to walk away. Considering 40-ounce beers are $12 and chicken wings are free inside, the door charge is paramount to financial survival as well as the party’s democratic integrity.

“One night LL [Cool J] came in with a whole crew of people and it was packed and there’s always a scene outside and a line and people think that line isn’t for them,” recalls Luber of one party in the “Mama Said Knock You Out” era. It was explained to the rapper that his buddies would be admitted when similar size crowds of women arrived to keep the male-female ratio even, and everyone would pay the cover. The rapper stormed away, and Luber can’t recall whether he ever returned, but guesses he “probably” did. Fittingly, history repeated itself two weeks ago at Soul Kitchen’s relaunch.

“That happened just this past Monday with that guy Kid Cudi showing up saying, ‘Waddup, waddup, waddup, it’s Cudi,’” says Luber of the pop star who erroneously assumed he could hand out his CD at the door rather than ponying up $10.

“Yo, but I’m Cudi, I’m Cudi,” Luber recalls him pleading until the cashier advised him to “just support,” which he reluctantly did.

Luber and Inglese agree the party is about nostalgia as much as it is teaching a new crowd old music and club-land values. Up next for Soul Kitchen: afternoon parties where juices and snack food are served, loops of “Big Blue Marble” and “H.R. Pufnstuf” are silently projected and Bill Withers and Roy Ayers music is played. Stay tuned for more love, peace and soul.