There was an atmosphere of cheerful chaos at the unofficial opening of Beetle House, a Tim Burton-themed bar in New York’s East Village, on Wednesday night.
An actor dressed as Beetlejuice – one of the idiosyncratic director’s most famous creations – greeted customers at the door with a stream of crude innuendo, while inside, the patrons – mostly female, many dressed in goth or Beetlejuice-themed clothing – sat up at the crowded bar drinking cocktails such as Jack Skellington (a reference to The Nightmare Before Christmas), the Fleet Street Martini (Sweeney Todd), or the Big Fish Bowl, or at tables surrounded by artwork and bric a brac evoking his films.
An unspecified problem with the gas supply in the kitchen meant the menu had had to be whittled down to three items: wings, bread and chili, with themed items such as an Edward Burger Hands burger and Warm Wonka Bar Chocolate Cake sure to be available by the official opening on 6 May, we were assured.
But no one seemed to mind much that the menu had been “cut in half”, as the bartender put it. It was the drinks they were worried about. “Don’t cut the Fish Bowl in half!” one person yelled.
“It’s a long time waiting for this,” said Burton fanatic Alexandra Bunch of Staten Island, whose cousin Renee Bunch had surprised her with a night out at the venue. “This whole Tim Burton feel, I feel we don’t have it here in New York.”
What would Burton think of the place if he walked in right now? “I think he’d love it. He’d appreciate it his fans have an outlet, somewhere to hang.”
The bar – whose owners also run a Will Ferrell-themed bar nearby called Stay Classy New York – seemed to be more popular with women than men. Why was that? “Women are more open to finding [somewhere like this],” Bunch suggested. “I know a lot of men who are into Tim Burton, but will they come out to a bar?”
Her cousin Brian Bunch, sitting up at the bar, mused: “Men respect Tim Burton, but are we going to sit and watch every one [of his films]?”
This disparity did seem to be borne out by statistics, as one of my companions, Kieran Kumaria of Brooklyn, who works for data and polling company YouGov, was able to prove, showing customers on his phone the profile on Tim Burton fans that the pollsters have gleaned from their research panel of 150,000 people in the US.
Burton fans are disproportionately likely to be young women, urban and age 18 to 29, YouGov has found.
Beetle House was certainly getting one thing right for women, Bunch said – the restrooms. “Unisex bathrooms, it’s very hard to get them pretty and clean, but they did,” she said, adding: “Bathrooms are very important for a female.”
In truth, many of Beetle House’s cocktails – including the signature Beetlejuice: tequila with blackberry schnapps, Angostura bitters and a splash of cranberry – were a bit sickly-sweet, but the Big Fish Bowl, an enormous fruity blue vodka and rum concoction with candy at the bottom and cherries on top, was brutally effective and seemed to be the most popular around the bar.
Precious Val Webb of Maryland pronounced it “delicious”.
“Oh my gosh, it’s awesome,” added her friend Debbie Kern of Delaware.
The two were in town as a 60th birthday treat for Trish Dowd of Pennsylvania, who said her Beetlejuice cocktail was “very good”, although “a little too strong for me. She [the bartender] had to water it down for me.”
Better, it seemed, was the Chocolate Factory Martini, which chocolate blogger Lizzie Kumaria – Kieran’s wife – pronounced “the perfect chocolate alcoholic drink”. It had a “really good balance between booze and creaminess, like a liquid dessert, but not as heavy as a Bailey’s”. A small bar of Hershey’s was revealed at the bottom of the glass once the drink was drunk. “You could only drink one because it’s so sugary,” Kumaria said.
Sweeter still was the We Come in Peace (a Mars Attacks reference), which included salted caramel vodka, and reminded my girlfriend Eleanor Long of the “butterbeer” from the Harry Potter books. It tasted “like a melted butterscotch ice cream”, she surmised.
Brian Bunch preferred an Edward’s Lemonade, an old fashioned with orange bitters. “I order an old fashioned at every single bar,” he said. “I wouldn’t say this is the best, but it’s in the top five.”
Andra Passen of Astoria had dropped in with her friend Mary Adams of Brooklyn, both dressed in black and white stripes. “Most openings, I would avoid a crowd,” Passen said. “But when there’s a theme added to it we’re very much on board.”
Her favourite Burton films were Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. “I have a picture of him in my bedroom,” Adams said of the tragicomic Johnny Depp character. “And one of Catwoman,” she added, referring to the whip-wielding supervillain from Burton’s second turn at the helm of the Batman franchise.
What would Burton make of the critically-reviled most recent movie in the series, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice?
“I think and hope Tim Burton is very self-aware of the humour and freedom to be campy and I don’t think that’s Zach Snyder’s concern,” said Passen tactfully.
If there was a note of criticism of Burton’s work it came from David Love, a writer over from Los Angeles on business, who said he only liked the director’s older stuff – “up until Planet of the Apes”, his 2001 remake of the 1968 classic, which Love said was “pretty awful”.
Biopic Ed Wood was probably his favourite. “It’s the deepest he went with character. He’s great at imagery; this was very focused on character.”
But appropriately enough most customers seemed to prefer Beetlejuice, including Trish Dowd.
“It was fabulous,” she said of the 1988 cult classic. “It was crazy insane. I liked some of the actors that were in it. I’m old enough for that.”
