It's a hefty, twice-weekly offer you don't find at other nightspots: If you and three friends together weigh more than 360kg, you get a free bottle of whiskey.
Welcome to the Ichub Club, Bangkok's fat-themed karaoke bar. Paintings of fleshy nudes line the walls, and pillars are plastered with pictures of a chubby comic book character. The chairs are metal, to withstand the weight of the clientele.
"We used to have wooden chairs, but the amount of money we spent on repairs was tremendous," said Ken Chan, one of the owners of Ichub, which is pronounced "I Chub."
Chan, a 35-year-old who weighs 92kg, and his partners are all weighty by Asian standards. They opened the club as a place where fat people would feel comfortable, "where they don't feel like freaks."
But Ichub doesn't discriminate against the slim, he added. While the club's heaviest regular customer weighs 160kg, the slimmest is 50kg.
The year-old karaoke bar relocated in June because it needed more space. In addition to the sturdy chairs, the owners chose concrete instead of the parquet floors that used to creak under the weight of customers, Chan said.
During its recent twice-weekly "chubby nights," the bar doled out about 20 free bottles of whiskey to mammoth quartets.
On a recent night, the bar was packed, mostly with large men -- foreigners and Thais. Uninhibited, they crooned schmaltzy Thai tunes and Western karaoke favorites in Asia like Desperado and New York, New York.
The patrons get a chance to relax away from a modern world seemingly obsessed with thinness.
It's not often you hear a group of four men cheer when they added up their weights for a grand total of 370kg. They weren't vying for the club's free whiskey, but merely seeing if they could make the 360kg goal.
"We have a scale here," said Chan, sitting at a table chatting with his three chubby friends. The scale can weigh only up to 140kg. "So if they [the customers] say they are anything over 140, we trust them."
One of those at the table, Robert Biscontri, 115kg, added: "If it's anything beyond me, it's obvious."
Biscontri, a 33-year-old Australian who teaches in Hong Kong, comes to Thailand often. He said he prefers Ichub to the "glitz and glamor, sticky floors and crusty seats" of other clubs in Bangkok.
"In a perfect world, you don't need [Ichub], but we don't live in a perfect world," he said.
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