It's more than a wee bit ironic. NYC nightlife fixture Spiky Phil, a sometimes DJ, doorguy and man about town who's bespoke suits and outlandish haircut instantly recall his London roots, hosts Dinner Club with his lovely wife Amy and their friend Miss Julia out of their massive apartment in Brooklyn.

A more-or-less private supper club, Dinner Club speaks to a growing phenomenon of nontraditional events catering (pardon the pun) to folks exhausted by the chaos and crowds at run-of-the-mill nightspots. After New York Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer amended some state laws to prevent bars from providing sponsored open bars and the city council has begun an assault on bottle service nightclubs, it's a bit understandable why nightlife has lost a bit of its luster. If you were poor, the open bars were a great incentive to go out. If you were rich, the bottle service places kept out the riff raff. But nowadays both are a bit harder to manage.

While there have always been house parties and underground things in warehouses and the like, more and more these days, people are opting to party in nontraditional spaces. From the collective arts space 3rd Ward to the No Ordinary Monkey parties which got written up in the New York Times last week thanks to their unorthodox location within a Chinese restaurant, and NME's US launch event during CMJ at a wedding hall, dynamic and exciting cultural events are moving out of established spaces into novel locales like never before.

For it's part, Dinner Club isn't replicating the party hard vibe of clubs or warehouse parties. It's a sophisticated theme dinner party complete with elaborate decorations and an expectation that participants will come in costume to help complete the affect. For instance, this weekend's edition celebrates the "unsurpassed splendor" and "majestic lifestyle" of the fifth Abbassid caliph Harun-al Rashid, which entails an elaborate recreation of a Middle Eastern court aesthetic and corresponding menu prepared by Miss Julia, one time chef at Manhattan hotspots the Soho Grand and Employees Only. Previous iterations have adopted less esoteric themes, from 1920's High Society to 1880's Parisian Salon.

Regardless of the theme or menu, EMERGE thinks Dinner Club is a remarkable phenomenon not simply for the effort and creativity involved but for the fact that it is organized and promoted to some of NYC's most clued-in nightlife devotees. What does it say about the state of clubland when it's diehards (such as Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs pictured above) are opting to stay in for elaborate costume dinner parties rather than hit the town?

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