Nana Plaza / A painting of Detlev Foth
Nana Plaza (officially Nana Entertainment Plaza; shortened NEP) is a red-light district in Bangkok. It lies on Sukhumvit Road Soi 4 across from the Nana Hotel. The name originates from Lek Nana who owned property in the area.
Along with Soi Cowboy and Patpong, Nana Plaza is one of the Bangkok red-light districts which serve primarily European and American customers. However, in recent years more Japanese men have found their way here due to the extremely high prices in the Japanese-oriented nightclubs in Bangkok[citation needed].
The Plaza is in the shape of a square, with a single opening on the western side, and consists of a ground floor and two additional floors. It started out as a restaurant area in the late 1970s. During the early 1980s go-go bars began to appear and gradually replaced the restaurants. The composition of those bars has changed over the past few years; the last non-go-go bar in the enclosed area, the Woodstock Pub was sold in 2005 to the Rainbow Group and reopened as “Rainbow 4.” A few bars offer a more pub-like or beer bar format without dancing; as of 2007 these are the Cathouse and the Big Mango bars. Three short-time hotels operate on the top floor.
The open centre of the ground floor, once simply a car park, is now occupied by beer bars.
Most bargirls working at bars in Nana Plaza are willing to leave with customers upon payment of a bar fine. While many bars in Nana Plaza do not employ kathoeys at all, a few do so exclusively. As of early 2007 these venues are Obsession (ground floor), Casanova, Temptations (middle floor) and Cascade (top floor). The “female” staff at these bars are almost all pre-operative, as opposed to the kathoey bars in Patpong.
A number of post-operative kathoeys can be found at other bars in Nana, largely at the bars managed by the Crown Group, namely Lollipop, Voodoo, Hollywood Rock, Fantasia, G-Spot and Carnival as well as the independently run Erotica.
Nana Plaza is within walking distance of the SkyTrain’s “Nana Station”.
