MIKE HAMOD, the city’s most ambitious club owner, sits in the office of his downtown club, WET. He is only 28 years old with a close cropped haircut and beard, dressed in a hoodie, T-shirt and jeans (not just any jeans—Rock & Republic jeans, and everything as crisp and new as if direct from the factory), and has the composure of someone older. His accent—Hamod is Syrian-Lebanese—also gives him a slightly Old World air, but the only things that excite him are what’s new.
“It’s new everything,” he says of the WET remodel. “New VIP areas, new color scheme, new bars, new water features, new bathrooms. Nothing of the old club is remaining.”
WET will complete its shed and regeneration with a grand reopening on June 26.
Hamod also hopes to give the Vault, the bankrupted ultralounge on Santa Clara Street, a similar treatment—new name, new brand, new look. Then there’s a restaurant concept for downtown that’s so new he won’t even discuss it (possibly high-end sushi?). Oh, and there’s the supper club in Orange County (opening December) and the restaurant in the luxurious condominium high rise Escala in Seattle.
It’s an impressive empire Hamod is amassing, but one that hasn’t come without controversy. While he dreams of putting downtown San Jose on the entertainment map along with San Francisco, New York and Miami, one man’s dream is another man’s nightmare. “Obviously, San Jose and nightlife is a very sensitive subject. There’s a lot of the venues that come and go, a lot of problems,” he says. The club has been closed for two months due to a license suspension but successfully avoided permanent closure after it challenged the constitutionality of the police chief’s right to revoke an entertainment permit.
Hamod was raised in a family with a portfolio of industrial interests—wallpaper, adhesives, sheetrock—across Syria and Lebanon. He moved to Emerald Hills, Calif., in 1999 as a teenager, after a well-traveled childhood—he draws much of his club-design influence from the venues he saw on trips to Paris, Milan, North Africa, Beirut and New York. “I’ve seen a lot and I learned a lot,” he says. “It helped having the ideas and having a large imagination. That’s why when I saw San Jose and the potential as a city, it was just beautiful, because it’s such a fresh and new downtown.”
After completing a degree at San Jose State in finance and marketing and working as a concert promoter in San Francisco, Hamod pooled his assets and opened WET nightclub in 2008.
The 16,000-square-foot water-themed club—complete with a live shark tank—was a success, lines wrapping the block at 7pm before performances by top tier talent like DJ AM and Travis Barker, Jermaine Dupri and appearances by Carmen Electra and Kim Kardashian. Hamod says he makes a point to show up to the airport with top-of-the-line SUVs and handlers in suits for his high profile acts—the A-level treatment in a D-level market, as he puts it. He has emails from Dupri at three in the morning after his set, asking to make monthly appearances at WET. The club employs 200 people with an in-house staff of promoters.
But WET also drew a lot of unwanted attention. Hamod admits he was not well versed in the political history of the area and he opened in an environment where many club owners felt persecuted by police. After several summons to the club for fights, Police Chief Rob Davis used a powerful and ambiguously written entertainment ordinance to shut the club down in fall 2009. “It was a big hit financially. Did I learn from it? One hundred percent,” he says. “Was it maybe too harsh? I believe so.”
Hamod closed for a month to revamp his security, but he also brought a lawsuit claiming the city’s entertainment ordinance was a violation of First Amendment rights. Though it was thrown out by a federal judge, City Attorney Richard Doyle says the city amended the ordinance soon after. “Even after it was thrown out, we thought, we probably need to clarify things,” says Doyle.
Even though the pared down ordinance might be considered a victory for the clubbing industry, Hamod only wants to discuss his commitment to partnering with the city and the police. “I had to learn that I had to conversate more with people from the city, politically, let them know what we’re doing,” he says.
In order to address concerns from the city, Hamod has changed his bottle service policy—all VIP bottle services come with a personal bartender, rather than letting patrons pour for themselves—and Hamod is eagerly eyeing a high-tech drink monitoring system called The BarMaster that weighs the shots being poured by his bartenders to prevent overserving. Hamod characterizes the club’s remodel as a “rebirth,” not just for the look, but for his relationship with the city. And going into the 26th, he seems to be on good terms with the SJPD.
“I’ve been working with him for almost a year. Whenever I ask him to do something he does it,” says the head of the downtown services unit, Lt. Jeff Marozick. “If he’s able to run a safe and successful business, I’m all for him being down there.”
While Hamod, whose iPhone seems to go off every five minutes or so, excuses himself to attend to something inside the club, Mauricio Mejia, the Vault’s co-owner, comes into the office. Now that WET has initiated a deal with the courts to pay off the Vault’s debts and take over, Mejia says he and Hamod have become collaborators instead of competitors. “You have someone who’s become very successful very quickly and now he’s bringing in my experience,” says Mejia. “I think the closure of his operation has been a humbling experience to him. The closure of my space has been a humbling experience. It’s brought us together. There is no ego now.”
Well, maybe some ego. Together, Hamod and Mejia plan to turn the Vault into the most luxurious lounge in Northern California, with a mostly VIP membership clientele. They hope to woo corporate clients from big tech firms away from holding their events and conferences in Mountain View or San Francisco, and Hamod says he’s already booked Intel for a 450-person soiree at WET later this month.
“The plan is to make this the first real powerful group coming out of NorCal, instead of Southern California,” says Hamod when he returns, comparing the idea to the SBE and Dolce groups out of Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of people that built a lot of clubs here and owned multiple venues at a time, but it was all local. I’m talking WET as a brand is known on a national level.”
Hamod represents a new generation of club owners on the scene, and seems, in addition to his flashy portfolio, to be enjoying the fruits of that success. Hamod has developed tastes for expensive clothes and Italian automobiles and lives in a luxury highrise with city views, though he demurs from discussing his lifestyle. (He will say his apartment is “not the penthouse. In the middle.”)
The old guard club-owners are observing his ascendency cautiously. “He reminds me of myself when I was a kid,” says Harry Evans, the 72-year-old former owner of Miami Beach Club who entered the business at 26, and says he once dreamed of remaking downtown San Jose. “I just don’t do business in San Jose. Basically at my age I don’t need the headache. I want to be in a city where people are welcome.”
Ray Shafazand, who owns Sabor, has a slightly more optimistic view, given what he perceives as a friendlier police force downtown. “Downtown is moving in a better direction in terms of policing. We’re not under attack,” he says. “With a good business plan, I think he’ll do a good job.”
While Lt. Marozick and the city manager’s downtown coordinator, Lee Wilcox, express a similar cautious optimism (even excitement about seeing WET’s transformation), District 3 City Councilmember Sam Liccardo says he’s still got his eye on the club. “To me the bigger question is, are they in over their heads,” he says. Evans says that kind of skepticism from the city will hold Hamod back. “He’s too classy for San Jose, too progressive,” he says. “In San Francisco they would love him.”
But that’s just the point of staying, in Hamod’s view. “Why would I want to do business there? Here, I like it. It’s brand new. Take advantage of it, embrace it,” he says.
“Moving forward is not being scared, packing up and leaving. I’m more stubborn. No, we can pull this off, and we can actually witness change for the better.”
396 S. First Street, San Jose CA 95113
