268 Karangahape Road,
Newton
Auckland,


(09) 358 5103

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3 out of 5

If you can judge a book by its cover, you can judge a place by its name. And we all know from our school days that ink is messy stuff.

Such is the case with Ink Bar on K'Road—a fact that some people here seem to have forgotten, principally because school happened for them a long, long time ago.

Yep, what we have here is a bunch of people old enough to know better, but misbehaving in a big way.

This, however, is a Very Good Thing. Ink is a place where nobody really cares about appearances, partly because they're here late enough to be past caring, and partly because the main thing they want to do is dance.

And dance they do. When we roll in at 3am, Ink's small dance floor is packed to capacity and quick-rippling to caustic hard-house beats.

In funkier places you might dance from the waist down, dropping with the breaks. Here, you dance from the shoulders up—everyone does; all at the same time, with the same motion, punching their torsos forward. You kind of can't help it.

There's a rail running past the dance floor—one that has clearly bowed under past pressure. The result is a relatively-passable corridor that gets you to Ink's next most important area; the back courtyard.

On any given night you'll find almost as many people out here as inside. It's a sail-covered area with a small bar at the back, small tables and extensive bench seating running along one wall.

There are generally a lot of people out here looking a little dazed, but as one person said, “It's a great place to be dazed in.”

With the dance floor and courtyard covered, there's just one other area that's of importance—the booths under the street, where you can cosy up in relative privacy and stroke the soft furnishings (or each other).

You'll probably be getting the picture here. The bar is not that important, except, arguably, the end of it the DJ is installed at.

I'm in the toilet taking notes, of all things, when a couple of events occur that kind of sum up Ink:

The first is that my beer bottle marches, to the perma-beat, off the sink-side shelf. It's walked a full six inches courtesy of some very deep vibrations.

The second is a chap who says his wife is at home dealing with their troublesome teenager ... but that when he gets back he's going to get it worse.