Bonbonniere

In my experience partying at Hotel Chantelle, this space almost seemed like an afterthought. That’s not the case any longer with BonBonniere.
What once used to be a dark, dingy basement is now a spruced up beauty of a nightclub. It’s got the familiar markings of a downtown dance destination — bottle service, club lighting, DJs playing a mix of top 40 and EDM, etc… — so it’s certainly a different vibe than the previous incarnation. Is it an upgrade? Sure, but it’s also really hard to compare the two.
If you’re a club kid looking for something fresh, you’ll dig it.

Just some back story:
I came here because of UrbanDaddy — If you don’t know it I suggest you Google them, it’s like the lovechild of Groupon and Timeout. UD never misses a beat when it comes to new places whether restaurants, clubs or bars. That being said I really wanted to like Bonbonniere, which is a club run by Hotel Chantelle and operates on their lower floor. But I guess there’s always one bonbon that’ll give you a rotten tooth.
I even called Bonbonniere and was told there would be no cover charge to get in, and that the music would be EDM mixed with top 40 and hip hop, it sounded great.
So I arrive and patiently wait in line as it begins to snow. Ten minutes later some guy gets kicked out for being punched — of course that was his side of the story, although he was holding his broken glasses in one hand.
Some time later the same thing happens to another man who made more of a ruckus then the first gentleman as he had just spent $ 300 on bottle service, so he claimed. That wasn’t the bad part, the bouncers wouldn’t let him back in to get his coat.
Even after many minutes of telling the bouncers he just wanted his coat they kept ignoring him. It took his friend 20 minutes of pleading with the bouncers in the nicest language possible to get his friend’s coat, who in the meantime is in nothing but a shirt as the snowfall keeps getting heavier. The bouncers wouldn’t even let him stand underneath their shelter and kept telling him to leave.
It gets worse…
Once I arrive at the front of the line the manager, ALEXI tells the line that the club has reached its maximum capacity and the only way to get in is through table service or paying $ 60 to open up a bar tab. So in essence he’s urging people to get drunk, which will only lead to more fights — two of which had already happened.
Now I don’t drink and I tried to compromise with Alexi that i’d pay $ 30 just to get in because I really like the music and don’t need a tab. He wasn’t having any of it.
And what makes things worse is that after having said that the club was at maximum capacity people who weren’t lined up at all would show up, I’m assuming they were Alexi’s friends, and be granted entry. This happened a total of four times with 15 people going in. He didn’t even mention the $ 60 charge to them.
For a place that’s just opened up treating potential customers with such a patronizing attitude as if they were so below ground they were beneath the food chain isn’t very sweet at all.
I’m not saying the bouncers and the manager should be fired but they definitely need an updated training session on how to treat customers… not even customers, PEOPLE because they certainly act like they’re some sort of higher beings.
To summarize: I wouldn’t go to Bonbonniere even if I was diabetic and they were the only candy store in the world