Casino Connection Atlantic City

It's Showtime

Showtime Tabou Resots Atlantic City • 609-344-6000

by Frank Legato

The cavernous room on the second-floor dining level of Resorts Atlantic City was for years home to that most traditional of casino hotel offerings, the steakhouse. But these days, the space that was once Camelot Steakhouse at Resorts is home to a venue that is anything but traditional. It’s called Showtime Tabou, and it’s the fourth nightclub in a chain begun in Québec City by Stéphan Genest, a French Canadian Québec native who owned a nightclub and happened to get a great idea one slow night. “I had one employee in my nightclub who was a singer and performer,” Genest recalls. “One night, it wasn’t very busy, and I told him to grab his guitar and sing. It turned on a light in my head, and I started to work on the idea of using a performer both behind the bar and up on a stage.” Three and a half years ago, Genest’s concept came together with the opening of the first Showtime Tabou in Québec. The idea is simple: Everyone who works in the place, from the porter who clears tables to the bartenders and servers to the restaurant manager, is also a performer. You will be served a drink by a bartender, turn your head, and when you look back, the bartender can be up on the stage singing a number while someone fills in for him behind the bar. The concept caught on like wildfire in Canada, with three Showtime Tabou locations open and prospering in just over three years. Last year, Genest shopped the concept around Atlantic City, and finally found a perfect match at Resorts, which is still in the process of re-defining itself within a newly renovated and re-designed property. “Resorts was the only casino that took the time to sit with me and understand very well what we are doing,” says Genest. “The other casinos thought we were selling the show. We’re not—it’s a nightclub, and a concept.” Showtime Tabou opened in August with a large central stage, complete with professional lighting and sound system, and started doing the employee performances at 10 p.m. nightly. A DJ fills in between the performances. This month, the space will become the first restaurant in the Showtime Tabou chain, opening at 5 p.m. for dinner and transforming to the innovative club at 10 p.m. Genest says cuisine will be American, “but we’ll put our French flavor inside.” Soon, all the décor left over from the room’s former incarnation as Camelot will be gone as well. The club and restaurant will receive a complete makeover, consistent with the design of other Showtime Tabou locations. Genest says there is nothing left to chance for an evening’s performances; the entire production is laid out beforehand, with a predetermined succession of performers and songs. And you’ll be surprised that people can do so well at both performing and serving customers. “The hard part is to take a performer and train him to be a bartender,” he says. “That’s the hard part, because if you put too much energy on the stage show, you’ve lost the job of bartending. It takes a few years to find the way to work in this kind of concept—you don’t lose sales, you don’t lose the show. You find the middle ground.” Genest notes that you should not try Showtime Tabou for just an hour or two—you should try it for the entire night. “I have a lot of different kinds of performers,” he says. “We have no taboo about kind of music. We respect every kind of music—rock and roll, hip-hop, dance ballads, jazz, Beatles—it’s different every hour. You can stay in the same nightclub and enjoy the ambience and hear the kind of music you love. We just try to respect all kinds of performers.”

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