Friends Prague

Small town gay smoke-​filled club vibe in Prague, which is just fine with me, except for the ‘scam’ that happened to be there by the staff. On the plus, bartenders were pretty cute and it’s open till 6am.
Why 1 star? The bar promotes «free entry» every night on their signs. Aka, no cover or payment to get in. But as my husband and I came in a woman at the coat check said «there is a required coat check fee of 30CZK each». The odd thing was, only one of us had any type of jacket on! But, she explained we both had to pay the coat check fee… even if we didn’t check any coats! We rolled our eyes and paid, not wanting to get into an argument. The place was totally empty when we went in (9pm on a Friday, I think it gets busy later), we had a couple drinks and then left. As we left, there were people coming in, none who paid anything to the woman. Also, suspiciously, she made the change out of her wallet that she took from her purse.
Either she is running a side business ripping off tourists during her normal job, or the bar actually has the policy of forced-​coat-​check-​entry-​fee-​even-​with-​no-​coats and the «free entry» is a scam itself. Either way, it’s pretty scummy of the place.
I emailed the club when I got home, just to make sure that they were aware, since if I were the bar owner, I’d want my chance to stop it. It’s been 4 days with no response, so I’m assuming that its either sanctioned or they just don’t care that much about the employees taking a little extra on the side.
Either way, there are a ton of great gay and gay-​friendly bars in town where the staff have been awesome. In our 4 weeks so far living in Prague, this was the only incidence of anything dishonest happening to us.