| B-SIDES | ▼ Music A Hidden Treasure You won’t find new Grapevine bar Magnum Room on TikTok or Ins- tagram. BY ALEX GONZALEZ G rapevine is home to several hidden gems. Even more hid- den is Magnum Room, a new speakeasy tucked inside the Hotel Vin. In true speakeasy fashion, you won’t find a website for Mag- num Room, nor will you find accounts for the bar on TikTok or Instagram. This is one spot you’ll have to find via word of mouth (or, in this case, by way of journalism). Next to Harvest Hall, an in-hotel food hall containing local favorites such as Easy Slider and Monkey King Noodle Co., you’ll find a private room bedecked with Western- style wallpaper and a rotary-dial telephone atop a wooden table. When guests pick up the phone, the phone plays a soundbite from Clint Eastwood. Guests can then enter the speakeasy by typing in a passcode on the keypad of a second door in the room (the passcode changes daily, and you’ll have to get it from the bar in the lobby). The bar’s sound, at least on the night we visited, consisted of a rotation of Spaghetti Western music and jazz. And while there’s no official dress code, patrons were dressed up, bordering on formal. Inside Magnum Room are large chande- liers, 16 comfortable seats, photographs and paintings, all evoking the feeling of a Prohi- bition-era speakeasy. While the Hotel Vin and the city of Grapevine in general are cen- tered on wine, Magnum Room offers a selec- tion of craft cocktails for guests who want to step it up a notch. Some of these cocktails include the Gold Fashioned, made with Maker’s Mark Cask Strength Bourbon, Liquor 43, Angostura Co- coa Bitters, and gold ($22). If you’re not into the bold, strong taste of an old fashioned, a better choice may be the Fig & Fume ($23). This cocktail is made with Mitcher’s Rye Whiskey, Amaro Nonino, Dos Deus Red Ver- mouth, fig syrup and chili bitters. Upon bringing this cocktail to your table, the bar- tender will light some applewood in a disc above the glass, to add a smokiness to the cocktail. If you want to keep it light, we recom- mend the Seltzer of the Queen, a house- made orange-basil seltzer with Chopin Vodka, Frankly Pomegranate Vodka and Yel- low Chartreuse ($15). For those not well-versed in the realm of 18 cocktails, or if you’re simply feeling confi- dent that evening, you can provide a list of your favorite flavors and spirits to the bar- Above: Grapevine has a speakeasy called Magnum Room; Right: Machine Gun Kelly has a reputation in Dallas at least. tender, who will make you a “Dealer’s Choice,” a unique cocktail based on your se- lections. Over the course of the past year, several speakeasies have opened throughout Dallas- Fort Worth, including a “singeasy” at Bishop Arts’ Casablanca and a manga-themed speakeasy at Neon Kitten in Deep Ellum. But like a traditional speakeasy, Mag- num Room remains clandestine — what- ever that means now. You’ll be hard-pressed to find social media images and postings of Magnum Room, but if you visit in real life, you’re in for a lovely, inti- mate evening of craft cocktails and good times with friends. Magnum Room is currently open on Fri- days and Saturdays and reservations can be made via Opentable. Magnum Room, 215 E. Dallas Road, Grapevine. Open 5 p.m. to mid- night, Friday and Saturday. ▼ NEWS JEOPARDY PLAYERS DON’T KNOW MACHINE GUN KELLY; DALLAS MAY REMEMBER HIS ON-STAGE BLOWJOB. BY EVA RAGGIO SEX PISTOL T his week, three Jeopardy! contes- tants were stumped by the clue “The stage name of this rapper and actor gets shortened to MGK,” given by host Ken Jennings. The correct response was “Who is Ma- chine Gun Kelly?” And even though the clue was accompanied by a photo of the musi- cian, the contestants clearly have had the good sense to stay away from TikTok and wherever else MGK appears seemingly al- ways. The Recording Academy doesn’t seem to know him, either. In November, MGK Monica Normand Photography Rachel Parker complained that he’d been snubbed by the Grammys. “wtf is wrong with the grammys,” MGK tweeted after nominations were an- nounced for 2022. These days, he may be best known as a collaborator of Travis Barker’s and as the boyfriend of Megan Fox — by somehow win- ning the actress over despite their first meeting sounding out of a script written by Tommy Wiseau. According to Fox, when she met MGK, she told him he smelled like weed, and he answered, “I am weed.” Yeah, that’s what those memes are about. It’s a shame none of the contestants were from Dallas, a city that could never forget him. There was a time we got to know Ma- chine Gun Kelly really, really, entirely too well. Before MGK was weed and back when he was a rapper, he played a set in November 2013 at the newly opened, now defunct Monroe Lounge in Dallas’ Knox-Henderson neighborhood. As Observer writer Danny Gallagher reported at the time, MGK’s Dal- las show included a dual performance when his then-girlfriend, Dallas porn star Rachel Starr, gave him a blowjob onstage. The video of the aggressive PDA is still floating around online, though it’s largely been removed. And hey, at least someone on that stage had some skills. MGK and Starr’s bit of shock perfor- mance may sound like a Jim Morrison mo- ment minus the talent, but it mostly recalls a recent incident in which Brass Against singer Sophia Urista pulled up a fan to the stage during a show in Daytona, Florida, and peed on his face. The fan seemed willing to let his face be- come the pot of gold in a golden shower, (“Get my man with the can on his head ready, ‘cause we’re going to bring him on- stage and Ima piss in this motherfucker’s mouth,” Urista had said before he lied down, face up, as she squatted down), but another concertgoer did report the incident to the police for indecent exposure and the band apologized to fans on social media. Machine Gun Kelly, on the other hand, was proud to make unwilling voyeurs out of the Dallas audience. In 2015, the musician told Huffington Post he had “no regrets” about any of his past stage antics and called the BJ incident “awesome.” 1 dallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 JANUARY 6–12, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com
