The style police keep a constant presence outside TaTu, a new bar on Belfast's Lisburn Road. While the Italian gentleman in the steel-grey mac may look like just another bouncer, in fact he is what is known in the business as a door picker. Fabrizio Belluschi knows his Versace from his Ellesse: his job is to give punters the once-over as they approach the cavernous drinking emporium. If they don't pass his fashion test, they will be drinking somewhere else tonight.
It is not as bad as it sounds, Belluschi insists. "No football shirts, no sportswear, no dirty clothes, no tattoos," he explains. Hang on, The Irish Times points out, there is a woman inside sporting a Mel C-type tattoo. "OK, no tattoos with `I Love Mum' or spiders' webs or anything like that on," he says, hastily amending his code. "This isn't Milan or New York, Belfast is a small place and if you were too strict you wouldn't get any customers."
It's all about keeping out the riff-raff, so? "You have to have the right, positive attitude to get in," he says enigmatically. Management at TaTu, which doubles as a restaurant, are upfront about this policy, but dismiss as mischievous gossip a story doing the rounds that suggests people have been turned away from the bar for not being handsome enough. "I have heard that from journalists in Dublin, Derry and London," says restaurant manager Ronan Sweeney. Dress is an issue, looks are not, he says.
"The dress code is there to create an ambience where our customers can feel comfortable . . . it is elitist and we are not ashamed of that," he says. "Every company has the right to select its clients." Are poor people welcome in TaTu? "I'm not going to answer that." He describes TaTu as a lifestyle bar, similar to those which have sprung up around Europe in the past decade. "It's a sociable bar . . . there is an industrial feel with the concrete, but then there is a warmth with the walnut features."
TaTu is vast, with seating and design features that leave everyone on display. Even in the toilets there is no escape - a carefully designed gap in the mirrors between both facilities means girly gossip is inadvisable if you don't want the boys to hear.
The bar is one of the latest of a new breed of watering holes where interior design is as important as the designer beers. Dressed to impress, though not always succeeding (fashionable does not always mean flattering, after all) Belfast's young and not-so-young affluent flock in, desperate to see and be seen. In Belfast, if you've got it, this is the place to flaunt it. Celebrity couple Patrick Kielty and Amanda Byram were spotted having dinner there recently, while a steady stream of expensive cars pulls up outside.
A few years ago there was far less choice in the city. When the Kremlin on Donegall Street opened 18 months ago, PR manager Arron Pile said the locals found the stark, minimalist interior, not to mention the statue of Lenin over the door, took a bit of getting used. Along with the Chelsea Bar on the Lisburn Road, the Kremlin was one of the first to embrace a different kind of pub style. A gay bar, it is stuffed with propaganda posters from 1930s Russia, the only colour invading the bare, concrete space. Owned by New Zealander Andre Graham and Donegal man Seamus Sweeney, it was seen as the antithesis of bars such as The Fly, Madison's and McHugh's, traditional pubs in the city centre.
"The aim of those pubs is to cater for everybody's taste - which they do - whereas here we were trying to educate people both with the design and the diversity of music our DJs play," he says. There are plans to expand the bar and the nightclub and this year the Kremlin won an award for being the best gay venue in Ireland. Kylie Minogue was due to visit last night. Jimmy Somerville and Holly Johnson have already been.
A more recent addition to the city's nightlife is Milk on Tomb Street, which opened last month in the Cathedral Quarter, an area being developed as Belfast's answer to Temple Bar, to cater for a 20 28-year-old crowd. The lighting is low, as are the seats, while the tables are chocolate-brown squares. Monday night is gay night at Milk: super-trendy girls and boys come to watch a drag-queen cabaret and have their fortunes told. The rest of the week sees an endless variety of music being pumped out of the state-of-the-art sound-system in the nightclub upstairs. It's worth a look just for the bars - downstairs is zinc while upstairs is a riot of flashing multi-coloured bubble-lights.
Owner Mark Beirne says Belfast is moving away from the traditional style of pub. "We went for 1970s retro design with a modern twist. It is the type of thing you will see in any cosmopolitan city in the world: we did research for about a year in places like Dublin, Paris and New York to see how things were changing," he says.
A former warehouse, Milk's ceilings are super-tall and the venue can hold up to 600 people. "There are a few more bars like this going to open more centrally in the city over the next couple of years," says Beirne, who plans to open a couple more himself with his company, Life Inns. "TaTu is already helping us as a feeder bar, people are going there for drinks and then coming here to dance." The social scene is more relaxed in Belfast these days, he adds, citing better policing and the improving political situation as reasons why people are coming back into the city and feeling safe.
"In 10 years, Belfast will rival Dublin or London for night life," he says. "It is only a matter of time."