Mangoes Key West - If your idea of great nightlife is dancing the night away, then Mangoes Key West on Duval Street is the place to
be on Saturday nights. By day, Mangoes is a pretty good restaurant with pleasant cafe tables set out on a patio
overlooking Duval. Saturday night, the entire upstairs of the Mangoes building is the hottest place in town for
dancing to techno and other Euro-style music. The dance floor at Mangoes Key West is big enough to
accommodate lots of people, and the bar is large, spanning half the west wall of the building. If you are
lucky, you'll be there when dancers do their moves on raised platforms in front of silhouette-making lights,
adding much to the ambiance.
Dancing at Mangoes is for nightowls, since they don't even bother turning on the music until around 11 pm or
so. The energy starts after midnight, with full swing in motion around 2am. They close at 4am so you have
plenty of time to dance or hang out at one of the booths in the back. There are also some chill=out sofas
lining the dance floor. The front of the club upstairs is a small porch with bar tables, where you can sit and
watch the action on Duval below. Mangoes nightlife in Key West is very popular with the younger, European
crowd, consisting largely of waitstaff and other seasonal workers who may not get off work until 11pm, which
helps explain the absolute calm of the club before that hour. You can arrive early for drinks, or dinner
downstairs, but you will be the only person there!
Upstairs at Mangoes Key West is a very different club experience than say Rick's Key West, the biggest
club in town, or the Green Parrot, another spot that's popular for dancing. Rick's tends to play lots of
Hip-Hop, especially on Friday and Saturday nights, when the DJ is live on the air, so he has to play one-hundred
percent hip-hop. The crowd is different, too. Rick's draws locals and feels a bit like a mini=Miami scene.
Mangoes on the other hand seems to draw almost entirely all European seasonal workers, very fashionably dressed.
It seems like almost everyone who comes to Mangoes dances, whereas at Rick's, there are lots of people on the
sidelines who don't dance.
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