Nyood Bar is located above (predictably enough) Nyood Restaurant , and borrows some of the same sharply-dressed, posh-esque ambiance. Quick note about my experience with the Nyood brand thus far: years ago, I requested it for my birthday dinner, left hungry and vaguely unimpressed, and ordered poutine on my way out. And in fairness to Nyood Bar, we got off on the wrong foot by the coat check, where a chair was artfully suspended above a plush white couch with an unmistakeable smear of blood on it.

On the surface of things, Nyood Bar is exactly what it sets out to be. A mid-sized, windowless room with loosely demarcated VIP seating areas sporting Grey Goose bottle service (vodka will run you between $240 and $1800), a DJ booth at one end, and a bar at the other. There are no beers on tap, and female bartenders make drinks with impressive efficiency. Yes, it's one of those places with a cover charge ($10 on the Friday night I stopped by).

The crowd is mostly comprised of late-twenty-somethings, fairly uniformly dressed (short dresses, collared shirts), and the sight of so many bodies packed like sardines and gyrating is, I'll admit, nicely reminiscent of music videos. Your choice of tipples is fairly limited to bar rail ($16 for a G&T and rye and ginger is the going rate, there as elsewhere), and the actually-quite-good music is loud in the cramped room.

Unfortunately, there's not much below the surface-a point that Nyood Bar makes repeatedly from the moment your clothes get sized up by the bouncers out front (it's highly recommended that you contact someone affiliated with the club to score a spot on the guest list), to your trip up the dim staircase (on the ceiling of which fluorescent beams spell out "we see what we want"), to the coat check girl hobbling on sky-high heels, to the man who coolly considered my I-was-out-at-a-pub-with-friends look and took the time to inform me that it was "different."

Perhaps my favorite (in a wry sense) aspect of Nyood is the John Christian Bovee nugget of wisdom written in cursive behind the bar--"False friends are like our shadows; keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade"--an admittedly profound sentiment that's also rather bitchy. It's the sort of thing that would function well as a mental anchor when tipsy, and running to the bathroom to recover from an imagined spat with your best friend.

Despite all this, I'd give it another shot (some day, in the far-off rosy future). I will also, however, reserve the right to be grumpy at the unadvertised, unspoken, but fairly evident requirement to show leg and teeter on stilettos. Ah, clubs.