![]() They decked out the space with contents of one owner’s collection of records, Pop Art, and Beatlemania ephemera, making it “one giant time capsule of why people love music,” says Broadway actor (and regular) Syndee Winters. RPM Underground opened in 2019 after Raj Banik and his business partners noticed a lack of large-scale karaoke-party venues. “I think she was a little surprised when karaoke started going down.”) “Everybody joins in, and it’s rowdy, it’s crazy, it’s a transformation.” (“I saw Lorde there once,” says Vanity Fair art columnist Nate Freeman. “It’s a chill vibe and then it’s just, like, party time,” says actor and philosophy grad student (and regular) Billie Alexopoulos. Now, on Mondays at 11 p.m., a server turns on the screen (tucked between hanging dried plants from Green River Project, which did the interiors) and people sing in English, Japanese, and Mandarin between shochu highballs and Sapporos. “For us, it was very important to keep the legacy of Winnie’s alive.” So the owners started hosting outdoor karaoke during the summer of 2020 (“It got almost too crazy - we started packing the whole street,” says Kanayama”), eventually moving the whole thing inside when indoor dining returned. (It reopened in 2019 on East Broadway.) “We started getting these OG Winnie’s customers, Chinese people from the neighborhood, gallery people,” says Yudai Kanayama, a co-owner of Dr. Clark opened in 2020, it took over a space on Bayard Street formerly occupied by Winnie’s, the karaoke dive that closed in 2015 after a 28-year run. “The staff was like, What is she doing?” Whitney says. ![]() Alyse Whitney, a food editor who has been a Gagopa regular since 2012, says her friends have brought everything from homemade crab rangoon to Murray’s cheese boards to - once - three slow cookers full of hot dip. (For those who don’t plan ahead, Gagopa keeps a fridge stocked with $4 beers and bottles of wine and soju.) The staff provides buckets of ice to keep drinks cold and will bring takeout orders directly to your room, or you can bring your own spread. Gagopa offers private rooms for groups of up to 40 people (from $9 an hour per person) and is especially beloved for its BYO-friendly attitude. Gagopa seems more than happy to simply be itself,” says Tae Yoon, the New York editor of Thrillist, who has been going out in Koreatown since the late ’90s. Inside: a mirrored, disco-lit, linoleum-floored karaoke fun house. Gagopa is in a nondescript building in Koreatown with spare signage and a few string lights.
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