I Bought $700 of Booze in a Korean Dating Bar and Still Got Rejected

Imagine a nightclub where it is never a sausage fest—where there are at least seven beautiful women to every dude, and where those lovely ladies magically sit right next to you at your table, eager to mingle without you even having to get out of your seat.

Welcome to the concept of booking, a Korean tradition of forced socialization between men and women at nightclubs. It's a courtship ritual fueled by bottle service, plates of carved fruit, and colossal tips that are passed off to your server.

Booking has roots in Confucianism's practice of using a matchmaker to find you a partner that was at your exact same social status. Today, however, one Korean friend tells me, "Korean guys just suck at talking to girls and don't want to waste any time, so they just pay for the process."

But if you ask me, booking is just about trying to find out how fast you can make out with a girl as soon as she lands at your table. That was my impression, at least, of this when I went to a booking club in LA's Koreatown last Friday night.

In South Korea, there are countless nightclubs that do booking; but in Koreatown, there are only three clubs serving the city's massive Korean-American population.

As a non-Korean whose Korean cultural literacy stops at knowing what kind of banchan I like, I found myself at the most mainstream booking nightclub, located in the heart of the three-mile-long neighborhood. The night started off innocently enough. I showed up to the club and got in because one friend had made a reservation via Yelp.

The ambiance inside the spacious nightclub was one that I'd come to expect at a place that offers bottle service. There were about 50 white booths but only a handful of them were filled at 11 PM. There were laser lights, a fog machine, a dance floor, and a DJ playing nothing but Drake and top-20 dance hits from the last two decades. We were seated in a corner booth in the colosseum-style space, and then things immediately started getting weird.

If your party is over five people, there is a two-bottle-minimum. The going rate for those two bottles—one Johnnie Walker Black and one Grey Goose—is $500. On top of this, you are obligated to tip at least 30 percent. Our party went even further by tipping an extra $40 on top of that, because we found out that the more you tip, the more women your server will bring—or that is the understanding between you and your server, at least.

Seven-hundred dollars and the most carefully sliced platter of ripe fruit later, our server told us that that we would be better off if half of our group went out for a smoke or hit the dance floor. That way, the first round of women would have somewhere to sit. Half of our group took one for the team and left the table, while I stayed behind with two of my friends. Just then, like wizardry, the server grabbed a group of three women and brought them to our table.

A woman who was about five-foot-three with short black hair and a black spandex skirt scooted over next to me.

"Hi!" I introduced myself enthusiastically, trying not to give away the fact that I have an amazing girlfriend who understood that I was only here in the name of investigative journalism. "How do you like it so far?"

"It's a little weird!" she responded. "Are you Korean? I thought I was coming here to meet a Korean guy."

After I explained that I am Mexican-American, things got awkward quickly—but not before I found out that she had just moved to LA from Iran, loves tahdig, is an architect, and was here with her three coworkers. Then she excused herself to the restroom and never came back.

It was now time for the other half of our group to take a seat and try their luck. Unfortunately for the rest of my friends, that's about all the action that we were going to see for the night. None of the 100 or so women in the entire nightclub—about 99 percent were Korean—wanted to stay and chat. "The girls don't want to sit in your table because you are not Korean and they don't speak English," our server informed us. Meanwhile, a nearby table of three young Korean gentlemen was on their fourth round of women for the night, and one of them was already making out with someone.

Just like that, our night and its false promises was over, and we all found ourselves $700 poorer. On one hand, it was a relief to find out that every woman appeared to be there voluntarily, and I didn't see any of them forced to do anything with anyone. (This was made evident by the three rounds of women who chose not to sit at our table and left, no matter how hard the server tried to convince them to stay.) On the other hand, if you are a single dude and not Korean, your experience is doomed from the start. We learned this the hard way.

Luckily for our group, we didn't let that get us down. We chugged those bottles all by ourselves and ended up getting our thrills from shooting raw eggs into each others mouths at a 24-7 soondubu jjigae shop.

While the experience was definitely interesting, all of us agreed that we wouldn't do it again. Thank goodness for cold, slimy raw eggs that comforted my friends' broken hearts by the end of the night.