Porn Valley- Potentially the best bar in the Valley is located just down the street from the best cheese steak location in the Valley. Veronica Rayne is having a Jersey Mike’s steak, and the practiced eye can tell it’s the Chipotle Cheese steak which is number 43 on the Jersey Mike’s sandwich menu.
Jack Vegas is saying, yeah, he just started going there a couple of weeks ago, and we laugh conspiratorially knowing that you have to order by number in Jersey Mike’s, because if you tell the counter guy you want the cheese steak, he’ll stare at you like a drug crazed moose. Rayne and Vegas have just opened a bar/restaurant called Oxygen, and it’s about time the porn industry as well as members of the Moose Lodge had a place to go locally.
Having grown up in the bar business myself, I’ve always felt that gin joints were an excellent place to advance one’s social skills if not to provide an excellent starting point for a crime novel.
Rayne and Vegas’ place [a former Hungarian restaurant located at 19550 Ventura Blvd.] is done up in a nice soothing blue neon chic. I ask her what she calls it.
“It’s an under the sea concept,” she answers. Rayne’s mother is also partnered up in this venture and is responsible for putting the menu together.
Rayne, who concedes that her venture has been the source of mostly shithouse gossip, laughs about the one story written by AVN's Peter Warren that had Justin Syder as a business partner.
"I like Justin, but he's not a partner," she stresses.
When I walked in Friday night, Rayne was getting ready for the evening’s crowd. She said she had 150 in the night before for Football.
“We were jammed,” she reports. Rayne mentions that she’s lost something like 15 pounds in the last two weeks getting the place open.
I speculate that this Monday night will no doubt bring in even a better mix of citizenry with an early bird doubleheader. But Rayne wasn’t even aware there was Monday night football, because she wasn’t planning on Monday night openings. Now she is.
“Fine, then there’ll be Monday night football,” she declares. Rayne’s got a revised press release going out the beginning of the week detailing the new events she’s planning in the hopes of attracting an eclectic customer base.
Thursday nights Rayne’s going to have a male and female porn star in for signings and Polaroids. But I guess now it’s referred to as digitals. I remember her saying that Jack Lawrence, www.jacklawrencexxx.com will be in. I didn’t get the girl’s name.
“I want to do things no one’s doing,” Rayne declares. “I just want people to have a good time.”
Rayne says her place will be available for birthdays, video release parties or whatever the porn industry needs to celebrate these days.
Maybe a better fall business-wise because the first nine months of this year have really sucked so far.
