Downtown Las Vegas bar is perfect for science fiction fans

The Millennium Fandom Bar is the kind of place where everyone knows your name, particularly if that name happens to be in Klingon, Wookie or Parseltongue.

“I wanted to make a bar for all fandom,” said managing partner Alex Pusineri. “I didn’t want to make a bar that was just about ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Riddick’ or whatever. There is so much fandom to celebrate. Fandom is about everything.”

The bar is located on the bones of the old Lady Silvia, 900 Las Vegas Blvd. South, the library-themed bar on the ground floor of Soho Lofts. The books are mostly gone, but the shelves remain, and in each section of shelves, Pusineri has installed one item representing a different genre film, franchise or game. Some are easy to identify, such as the pair of lightsabers that often end up in visitors’ hands for photos at the bar. Others are harder to recognize, such as a small black rectangle that seems like it could be nearly anything but is actually a scale model of the monolith from the Stanley Kubrick film “2001.”

“I didn’t want to overwhelm the room with things, so I just have one thing from each movie or whatever,” Pusineri said. “Some are very obvious, and some are kind of hidden things for the people to discover.”

The idea for the bar came to Pusineri very naturally. He had finished his first novelette, “Symbiosis 1908,” and was pondering what his next creation should be.

“When I was young, my friends and I were kind of a geek squad,” he said. “We were all into different things like comic books and video games. As I got older, I saw that it wasn’t going away, and I wanted to make a place where people could come and enjoy these things and talk about them with each other. I also wanted a place where people could feel comfortable doing cosplay.”

Cosplay, where people create costumes and role play as the character, was once a small subset of people who attended comic, anime and science fiction conventions. In recent years, the line between play and profession have blurred with reality shows focused on costuming and body painting bringing the practice a bit more into the spotlight. At the Millennium Fandom Bar, it isn’t unusual to see one or several of the patrons in some costume or other, and the bartenders are almost always in costume.

“We have a regular cosplay night on Fridays, and we always offer discounts to anyone who comes in costume,” Pusineri said. “We also want people to know that it’s fine to just show up and have a good time here with or without a costume. It’s just that a lot of the time, the people in costume outnumber the people who aren’t in costume.”

For the most part, the people who show up at the bar looking for The Lady Silvia seemed surprised but amused. The bar also has several regulars who live in the building and have no interest in fandom or cosplay but who have been charmed by the affable Pusineri and his staff of friendly and attentive bartenders.

Richard Hooker of Las Vegas Pop Culture Tours helped Pusineri find the location and make the connections that helped him make his dream a reality. Hooker had many connections from his years as senior cultural specialist for the city of Las Vegas and knew just who Pusineri needed to talk to.

“I really didn’t do anything,” Hooker said. “I just made some introduction, and the next thing I knew, Alex had created this fabulous place.”

For Pusineri, the location was one of the critical elements, and he was pleased to find a place with a Las Vegas Boulevard address. When he first visited town, traveling from his native Paris 20 years ago with his brother, the pair never left Las Vegas Boulevard. He wanted to put the bar on that street so tourists could find it, but he also wanted it easily accessible to locals.

“The location is perfect,” he said “ You have downtown, which I love; you have the Arts District, and you have the Strip.”

The bar has been open since November, although it took until mid-February to go through the paperwork and red tape to put up a sign. With that milestone out of the way, Pusineri hopes to have a grand opening celebration in April. He has already tested the waters with regular big-themed events or parties on most Saturdays, a trivia night at 8 p.m. Wednesdays and a monthly superhero party.

“We’ve already had the Cosplay Winter Ball, our first Superhero Party, the Steampunk Ball and a ‘Star Wars’ party,” Pusineri said. “When we don’t have anything planned, we’ll throw up a good film on the TVs, or someone will get one of the (board or card) games out of the case and play. This is the place where people can come and feel at home with their fandom.”

Hours are from 4 p.m. to midnight Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday; 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. Friday; and 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. Saturday.

Visit millenniumfandombar.com or call 702-405-0816.

To reach East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor, email ataylor@viewnews.com or call 702-380-4532.