Fish Head, 16 W. Ontario: As club openings go, it was more of a mixed crowd than usual. Besides Candice, who is an architect, and Dawn, who does makeup, and Scottie from Jam, who always wears his hat backwards, and BJ, who is back from New York to work at China Club, and Larry, who left China Club to work at a club that hasn’t opened yet, and a woman in white heels who looked like Charo, there were about 80 fish, though the fish kept to themselves.
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The fish live inside the bar top, which doubles as an aquarium. Ira Sapir, glass blower and former futures trader, opened the club with aquarium in 1986 and called it Outtakes, after an exhibit of photos from Nicaragua. Now Sapir has new partners, a new name, new decor. Some of the old fish are still there. Old or new, we decided, the fish were the dreariest creatures in the place.
Later we told a friend that the club was nice but the fish were vapid and thus anxiety provoking. “No, you’re wrong,” the friend said. “You should see Pam’s goldfish, though you can’t because she moved with it to San Francisco. It sleeps in a little house. Pam’s friends love that fish. Maybe you need a new perspective on fish. Rent The Little Mermaid.” We did and agreed that Flounder is exceptional–he yells at a shark, he weeps at love thwarted, he exhausts himself pulling Ariel the mermaid across the sea so she can be with Eric. But frankly, the whole movie is about how the mermaid wants to be out of the water riding in wagons with Scandinavian Eric and combing her hair with a fork. So we haven’t changed our minds about fish.
