s you sit in the car, stopped at the intersection on Clinton Street one block south of the hipster hub that is the College Strip, a hum interrupts the quiet of the car, yielding a frozen moment of stillness in which the sounds of cultures surround you. You decide to roll down your window. The voices of strolling couples on the sidewalks trail off into what appears to be a neighbourhood bar. A sign remains fixed, glowing and singing its neon buzz. The Monarch, it says. But look again, there’s another sign; not as big, but that’s the one you want.

That sign directs you into Lounge 88. Enter, and time is erased with a warm, all-comforting presence that conforms to you and your all-consuming needs. With dark-stained beams and a solid oak bar, this piano-bar was modeled after the fuzzy naughehyde Rat Pack-type lounges that used to dot the city 40 years ago.

Lounge 88’s owners - Louie Cristello and James Russo - took a chance and began attracting young adventurers back to the piano-bar life. Over its three-year existence, the bar managed to maintain a low profile, but the piano-bar thing proved to be too simple, too tame for those adventurers.

Without missing a beat, the owners kicked things up a bit by bringing in seasoned djs to spin everything from ë70s to almost-recent funk and soul. They also kept the ëlive’ contingent up by bringing in Michael Clarke and his five-piece band, “Grooveyard,î which, on Saturdays, rock the little place in Otis Redding proportions.

That bit of tweaking is what the little bar needed; currently, Lounge 88 is pure cocktail lounge, even though sometimes it can be too playful for words. It has the perennially naughty childlike quality particular to that retro lounge group, a quality we, the customers, understand and come to expect.