What a Startender Is, and Why Sunday Is Named After Them
A Startender is a bartender who is also part of the entertainment. It is Starlets' own word for its own staff, and it works in the singular too: one Startender, several Startenders. Startender Sundays is the weekly night built around them, and it starts at 11 PM.
What that means for tonight is a change of address inside the room. Most nights, the bar is where you go between things. On this one, it is one of the things.
Why the word exists at all
"Bartender" covers half of the job here. The other half is the reason a whole night ended up named after it. Starlets built a word for the combination instead of borrowing one, which tells you how the room thinks about the people working behind the bar.
You will see the word on the flyers and on the site. The Startenders page is where the faces are.
It is a useful word for you too. When somebody says they are going for the Startenders, you know which night they mean without asking, and you know roughly where in the room they intend to sit.
What Startender Sundays actually is
The Sunday night at Starlets, starting at eleven, built around the Startenders. The definition stops there, because the rest changes week to week and anything more specific would be a guess.
Six of the seven nights here carry a name, and all of them run out of the same room at Starlets, a gentlemen's club in Woodside, Queens.
Where that puts you in the room
Closer to the bar than you might sit otherwise. If a night is named for the people working it, ask for seating with a view of the bar when you book. Asking costs nothing. The alternative is realising at midnight that your table faces the wrong way.
Say it in plain words when you enquire: it is a Sunday, there are six of us, we want to be near the bar. Specific requests are easier to answer than vague ones.
What to actually put in the enquiry
The night. How many people. Whether it is a celebration. Where you want to sit.
Four answers, one message. A vague enquiry gets a vague answer back, and nobody reading it can guess that you meant six people near the bar for a birthday. Say the specific thing and you get a specific reply.
The birthday version of the same idea
Book a Birthday VIP Table and the Startenders carry the cake out onto the floor. There is a shout-out from the booth too, and the table itself is held for the whole group rather than for whoever gets there first.
That is the part everybody films, and it is the reason the birthday table exists as its own service rather than a note on an ordinary reservation. How to actually hold one is in booking the birthday VIP table.
Who is working on a given night
Nobody here is going to tell you, and you should be suspicious of any page that does. Rosters change, so a printed lineup would be wrong within a month and stay wrong for a lot longer.
The same goes for whatever is running this week. Check the events page for a specific date, or call (646) 301-6606 and ask a person. That is the honest version of an answer, and it beats reading four websites that are all guessing.
The thing you are going to ask about anyway
A night pointed at the bar means more trips to the bar. Tipping has its own post, tipping across a long night out, and it is worth reading before a night like this rather than after one.
Sort out how you are handling it on the way over. It is a much shorter conversation in a car than at a counter.
The night runs the same length as any other
Starlets is open daily 11 PM to 4 AM, and that window is identical every night of the week. Nothing shortens because of where the day sits in the calendar.
Most people picture the end of a weekend as a wind-down, so this is worth saying straight. What the week looks like from the staff's side of the bar is the longer version of the same point.
Booking, and what you are actually booking
Reserved seating with table service, arranged before you arrive, is on the service list. So are birthday tables, bachelor and bachelorette nights with a dedicated host, and full or partial venue buyouts for something bigger.
None of it carries a published figure. Every service here is quoted once you ask, which makes the enquiry the real first step rather than a formality. You can start a booking here.
Eleven o'clock, Woodside, Queens
Startender Sundays starts at eleven, and the Startenders are the reason it carries a name at all.
Starlets is at 49-09 25th Ave, Woodside, NY 11377, open daily 11 PM to 4 AM. Sit where you can see the bar.