WXYZ Lounge

I travel a lot for work and this is the first hotel bar in which I’ve actually felt… comfortable. Sure, some nights it has a more club-​like feeling, but others they are playing music like Bön Iver. The customer service is comparable to other high quality hotel chains without introducing the weird servant-​master über formal fancy customer service distance that I always find so awkward. Moreover, the food here is actually very high quality! Like, you can get food that is actually delicious and nutritious (at a hotel! I know, you don’t believe me… but it’s true!). Anyhow, this is one of the best hotel bars I’ve visited.

The food here is surprisingly really good! I had the crab tacos and bacon wrapped salmon, and I’m not a big bacon eater, but this was legit! Nice atmosphere too.

I am almost sad for Aloft every time we’re there, because the OKC scene hasn’t quite picked up on it yet. While my boyfriend and I haven’t stayed at the actual hotel yet, we’ve been to WXYZ three times. Twice to drink, once to eat. First off, the setup is pretty amazing. They have a spiral staircase leading to the second bar level, and I love it. Their upstairs bar top lights up in different colors, and their girly cocktails are delicious. Girls, try the Miami Vice — omg so good. Pink, creamy, and comes in a martini glass. Cocktails are kind of pricey – $ 9-​$ 12 apiece, but that’s pretty standard, I guess. We had dinner there one night when the weather was bad, and they old had one guy bartending/​serving and one cooking. They were worn out. The food was just okay. I was pretty disappointed in the crab tacos – first off, they are listed as an appetizer, but there are only two, so I don’t really consider that an appetizer. They were also too salty. My shrimp-​based entrée was good, but the fried cheesecake we had for dessert was to-​die-​for!!! Overall atmosphere, I would give WXYZ three-​stars, but only because it’s so empty it’s depressing. I am giving them four here because that’s what they deserve.

WXYZ is a hip hotel bar that is very visually appealing on some fronts, and misses the mark on others.
After our penultimate stop for the evening, we returned to our hotel. Since Jen D. was staying over at Aloft, we walked over with her to have a drink in the WXYZ Bar. While the aesthetics of the bar and the lobby are very visually appealing at first blush, there are small elements that show cracks in the veneer on closer inspection. As we were just about to enter the bar, I noticed two tablet computers mounted on reticulating arms that were there possibly checking e-​mail or internet information… except that they both had messages that they could not connect to the network, and one arm was broken, making the tablet unusable unless you used a second hand to steady it. This was the first small detraction.
We head up to the bar and order drinks. Jen D and Mrs. R order vodka ginger ale. It’s a half-​assed Moscow Mule, but it’s still a simple well drink. I ordered a beer, a local pale ale. As we’re waiting on our drinks, we notice the bar — there is a very substantial white motif in a lot of the bar area, and the top of the bar is a little sparkly, and it looks like some small squares of the surface are connected to others because covering up some spots causes others to darken, as if they were catching some of the light in the bar and were brightened via a fiber-​optic effect. As we are noticing this, the bartender tells us that the bar-​top was supposed to have this really cool effect — the whole surface was supposed to light up, and would run through a rainbow of colors from one end to the other, and that the surface was also supposed to be thermo-​reactive, and would change colors if a cold drink or a warm hand were on a place. This is something that sounds really neat, right? But the bartender informs us it wasn’t wired right, so it has never worked. So, instead of having the coolest bar-​top in town, the bar instead has a white bar-​top that only has a negligibly neat effect if you are very close to it and notice how the lighting might have worked if it were set up correctly.
Further on the small-​problems train, the television that was next to our seating area was using four LED (2×2) screens to make up one image, except that the settings were off and too much of the image was being thrown to adjacent screens, thus distorting faces an images that bridged two screens or met at the middle axis. Again, small things that color the experience. It was also when we were watching these screens that Jen and Mrs. R. discovered that the ginger ale or whatever had been put into their drinks was flat and a little bitter. As we were already capping the evening, they didn’t want to take the drinks back but chalked it up as another un-​great thing about WXYZ.
The final thing that disappointed me greatly was a little bit of furniture. I’ve always coveted modern furniture designs, and on our way in I spotted two eero aarnio ball chair knock offs in the lobby (I say knock offs as the real things are multiple thousands of dollars, and that’s not the type of thing that you would go for authentic in a hotel when a knock-​off can be had for under nine hundred). I’ve always wanted a chair like this just because of the modern design and its iconic status. All I wanted was to sit in it, spin around, and take a picture. But they wouldn’t spin, or at least they wouldn’t spin well. And maybe that’s how I would characterize the experience at the WXYZ — from a distance it looks like something that is really cool that you totally would want to have fun in, but up close it’s broken and doesn’t work right and you’re disappointed.
This is the fourth of a series of ~13 reviews about a weekend getaway in Tulsa.

Nice clean non threatening bar. I liked the tall tables and the hip chairs. Halloween is right around the corner and I give their decorating an A+! Give it a try!

The bar was a bit tiny, but plenty of room outside of bar to chill outdoor seating, live band was alright, took forever to get our drinks, thus the 3 stars. Very trendy and clean environment.

Absolutely terrible. When I say slow, I mean… we have been waiting for our food for over an hour. I’m not even hungry anymore.
Edit: Finally got our food. It was delicious, but due to the wait I’ll never be back.