Texan Promises Best Little Strip Club in Budapest

(Editor's Note: Since this article was published, the Candy Shop has returned to its old scummy and irredeemable owners, and reverted to the name and exorbitant pricing of the old Caligula. So don't go there unless you want to part with an arm or a leg, head to 4Play Lounge, Josey Walker's bigger and better new fleshpot.)

I've always been a big fan of Newton's law, which holds that for any action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For example, last week I wrote a column about how horrible, scummy and irredeemable the local sex industry is. Which means that now I have to write one about a part of the sex industry that isn't so horrible, scummy and irredeemable. It involves a strip club up on Szilágyi Erzsébet Fasor near Moszkva tér that for the last few years (and for at least the next few days) has been known as Caligula.

While the name "Caligula" conjures up images of slave girls and boys getting sodomized and executed and otherwise mistreated, the victims of this particular Caligula have more often been the patrons. People who walked in expecting a few hours of R-rated titillation often ended up experiencing something closer to an R-rated crime drama, sometimes complete with an out-of-the-blue beat-down. In other words, it was like almost every other strip club in Budapest or the region.

As for why such places are so rough and customer-unfriendly, the answer is not simply that they are run by the sort of shifty characters that you always find wherever sex (or the suggestion of it) is being sold. Rather, it's that the customers tend to be foreigners, and out-of-towners to boot. Any business that caters mostly to one-time out-of-towners is a business likely to be not too worried about customer service. Especially if said customers are also likely to be young, drunk, and sex-crazed.

Just like every demographic, however, the young, drunk and sex-crazed have in recent years found a segment of the travel industry aimed specifically at them - the so-called "stag & hen" specialists who chaperone groups of foreign, largely British, revelers. And now one such group of specialists has taken the industry to its next logical step, by stepping in and taking control of a local strip club, in this case Caligula.

Last week I spent a few hours lurking in the shadows of the club with Josey Walker, the Texan who, along with one partner runs the stag & hen coops Stag Republic and Hen Nation, and with several others the now the soon-to-be former Caligula.

"In any great city you'll find great strip clubs, because people want them," Walker said. "It's only here in Budapest - the so-called 'capital of porn' - that they are all seedy and disgusting."

Strip-club proprietor Walker and dancer: In a land of squalor and feloniousness, the merely cheezy could be king

Like most of the best business plans out there, Walker's was hatched through the eyes of a customer. He and his partner have been bringing groups of stags and partiers to local clubs for years, and never really felt like their clients were getting their money's worth. Even though they would sternly instruct the stags about the snakes and ladders of the local strip club scene, there would too often be major problems, or just disappointment at the quality of the show. Their clients wanted and expected a level of service that simply wasn't being offered.

In addition to renaming the club - it will be called the "Candy Shop" as soon as the local municipality finishes the paperwork - the interior of the place will get a major facelift. (The cheezy faux Corinthian columns are likely to be recast as giant candy canes, and the office-furniture-like chairs and plain wooded tables replaced with something a little more cheerful.) Walker has already dropped the drink prices to something you'd find in a normal downtown bar, and is considering a happy hour, so that patrons aren't tempted to load up on drinks somewhere else before coming by. He used the club's existing promotional materials as an example of the "exact opposite" of the image he wants to project.

Meanwhile, he and his partners are subjecting the bartenders and doormen to a re-education in service of McKinseyean proportions, including daily English lessons. When a couple of people popped their heads in and then retreated to the street, he ran up to make sure the bouncer hadn't been responsible. The dancers also seem to be getting some unusual attention. "You can't imagine how difficult it is to convince these girls to be nice," Walker told me, while offering a running commentary on the merits and flaws of the different performances. Which led me to pop the inevitable question: had he also gotten up on the stage and showed them how to dance? He looked at me as if I had asked whether it was his first time in a strip club. "I showed a girl how to give a table dance," he said, adding that he did so well that whomever he was gyrating over actually tipped him.

While Walker and his partners expect that their customers will be mostly foreign, he said he want to aggressively court local businessmen as well. Though agreeing that this might be a hard sell - in a country where most successful men have at least one mistress, who needs a strip club? - he said more locals would come if offered an inviting place with "unusual" dancers and without all the hassles and dangers of a normal strip club. "We want to be the guys driving the trend," he said. "But the first thing we have to show is that you are not going to be ripped off."

As for how the new club's competitors will take to this challenge, that's another question. Most will probably ignore it, at least at first, and some may even strike back. (Yes, the business is generally in the hands of rather unsavory characters; Walker told me he would have preferred to open a club in the Fifth District, were it not for the fact that "unauthorized" strip bars in the city center tend go "boom.") But over time, my guess is that, if one business shows the way, even the most horrible, scummy and irredeemable of the rest will be no worse than merely dreadful, skanky and hopeless.