Fat Tuesday    

431 South St., Philadelphia, PA 19147

Phone: (215) 629-5999

Floors slippery and sticky - hose down the floor and the crowd every hour on the hour!

Lids on the Daiquiris.    

Ever been to New Orleans? Yeah, me neither. But I have watched plenty of late night television where they show ads for videos like "Girls Gone Wild" and "Mardi Gras Uncensored."  From these videos, I get the impression that the whole "Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras/Big Easy" thing is quite a scene.  

Down on the eclectic South Street, Philly has its own slice of the wild life in the form of Fat Tuesday. Fat Tuesday sits back off of South Street in a nook that also houses a GNC Health Store and a Pizza shop.  Yeah, I know, it sort of kills the Mardi Gras ambiance but what are you going to do?

Fat Tuesday is larger than it looks. Their basic layout is a large room, big enough to hold a couple hundred patrons. On the left hand wall is an elevated area that acts as a stage for bands. On the opposing wall is the bar. Even though the bar takes up most of this wall-space, there didn't seem to be enough stools around the bar. Amidst the mob of people, there could have been a couple stools hijacked, but it's hard to mount a stool in the middle of the dance floor. Fat Tuesday has a small deck area in the front of the building, but there is a rather large sign posted that prohibits Fat Tuesday patrons from: Shouting at passersby on the sidewalk, glass bottles on the deck and leaning on the railing.

There are about 10 TV's of all shapes and sizes mounted around the entire place. It's almost impossible to stand anywhere in the bar and not have a view of a TV somewhere. Thankfully, the TV's were locked on ESPN. Fat Tuesday has NFL Sunday Ticket, so during football season you can plant your ass at their bar and watch all of the Sunday games your eyes and stomach can handle.

The bar's specialty (due to their New Orleans' pedigree) is daiquiri's. Sure there are a couple American brewski's in bottles, but the only liquids pouring from their "taps" are creamy daiquiris. The daiquiri creations include: Sex on the Beach, White Russian, Rum Runner, Piña Colada, Jungle Juice, Creamcicle, Long Island Iced Tea, Margarita and something called "190 Octane." Although I didn't try the 190 Octane daiquiri, something tells me that it should come with either cab fare home or a designated driver.

The only problems that I saw with serving daiquiris are the mess and the bloated feeling after you swill a couple. The floors were fairly sticky from spilled daiquiri's. Hey, it's crowded, people bump into one another and a daiquiri in an open plastic cup is bound to slosh around. The daiquiri's at Fat Tuesday taste great, but they're thick and it's hard to put away more than 2 slushies at a single visit. You just get too filled up. If you can get down more than 2 daiquiris in one night you are flouting the laws of gastrointestinal fortitude. Translation: the next morning won't be pretty.

While sucking down a daiquiri (and fighting off a serious brain freeze) the Fat Tuesday bouncers threw beads indiscriminately to the crowd. I thought that you had to earn your beads the hard way down in the Big Easy by doing something like flashing breasts or "whipping it out." This is not the case at Fat Tuesday's - you get beads just for showing up.

Fret not, Mardi Gras Karma was restored when a very cute blonde took the stage just as the band started playing Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself." At the coaxing of the crowd (and a few strands of beads), her top came off and just for that brief moment I was down in the Big Easy in the celluloid fray of Mardi Gras Uncensored 2 - Electric Boogaloo.