The wait for dinner at Crystal City Restaurant was nowhere near as painful as it was this afternoon at the Camelot Show Bar. I’m hard-pressed to explain why. It may be because the women weren’t fully nude at CCR. It may be because the women didn’t try to suck up as hard to you at CCR. It may be because I had wireless internet access at CCR.

 Whatever the reason, my $5.99 New York strip steak dinner appeared in short order. Sure, I did have to ask the waitress to break my $10 bill, so I could have a steady supply of singles. CCR has a rather aggressive dancer schedule. No stripper shakes it longer than the length of a single jukebox song. That means they get up there, quickly strip down to pasties and a G-string, perform a number of limber exercises designed to expose the naughty parts of their anatomy, and get the hell off the stage.

And then they come right to your table, where protocol says  you give them at least a buck for wiggling their butt cheeks in rhythm. I felt obligated to pass out dollars even as I was stuffing my face with beef. I felt like Dad at the dinner table passing out money to his daughters.

Read More “My Dinner at Crystal City Restaurant: The World’s Thinnest Strip Steak” »

Crystal City Restaurant came highly recommended by an hospitality biz insider who’s been known to date a stripper or two. He told me that CCR — as it’s known among the regulars — has a good reputation for serving solid steaks along with its carousel of flesh on two stages.

The place looks rather harmless from the street. It features a brick-and-tile facade that gives little indication, save for the silhouette of two mammothly endowed women, of the nude acrobatics going on inside. Unlike at Camelot Show Bar, where I ate lunch today, you have to seat yourself, which is sort of a pyschological test to measure your perv and shame levels.

I decided that if I’m going to do this thing right, I’m going to sit right up front, by God. I claimed a four-top booth near the stage and plopped myself down. I promptly ignored the dancer about eight feet away and checked my e-mail accounts, typed out an e-mail to a source, checked facebook,  looked for comments on my previous postings, logged on to Twitter, and generally acted like I was at the office for about 10 minutes.

Read More “My Dinner at Crystal City Restaurant: A Bit of Vegas in Arlington” »

The first decision you have to make at Camelot Show Bar is the same one you have to make at any restaurant, even the ones without naked women dancing on a stage: What do you want to drink? It’s the question that the tall blonde in the skimpy bikini underwear has just put to me. The urge to order alcohol is high. It may be 1 p.m. outside, but deep in the bowels of this dark, clubby M Street NW skin parlor, it feels like it could be 1 a.m. And you’re way behind on your buzz.

But I have an overly developed sense of shame. I can’t look at naked women and drink. So I tell the waitress that I want water.

“Sure, one bottled water,” she says and immediately walks away before I can correct her. Still, sparkling, or tap are apparently not options offered at Camelot. It’s bottled or nothing.

The bikini waitress drops off the smallest bottle of Evian I’ve ever seen, along with a tiny wine glass filled with ice and two straws. I can’t tell exactly from the scribbles on my final bill how much I paid for the water, but it appears to be somewhere in the $6 to $7 neighborhood.

It’s going to be a long lunch.

Read More “My Lunch at Camelot Show Bar: The Jerk Chicken” »

I figured I had made it through the hardest part of this assignment when I actually took a deep breath and walked into Camelot Show Bar on M Street NW. I mean, just to duck under the Camelot canopy that juts onto the sidewalk like a giant canary penis, I had to saunter past the office workers standing in line at Chipotle, skip by the folks turning into the Sign of the Whale, and generally act like I wasn’t some perv looking for an afternoon fix of young nubile flesh while gnawing on a peppercorn steak with a side of mashed potatoes.

Well, I was wrong. The hardest part came when the dancer bounded off the stage and launched into that standard social protocol of all strip clubs: hitting up the patrons for cash while pretending to give a shit about them. The stripper approached my table. I had already placed my order.

“Hi, how are you?” she asked.

The interior of the club was dark, illuminated only by the sickly yellow glow of these backlit transparent panels, designed faintly in the style of a family coat of arms. Despite the poor light, I could tell this dancer was very tan. She was also young, although she was trying hard to act more mature than someone who shows her crotch for a living.

Read More “My Lunch at Camelot Show Bar: The Tape Worm Incident” »