Alice + Mad Hatter NYE 2011 @ Wonderland December 31, 2010

With its Alice in Wonderland themed cocktails, rose garden, chess piece shaped bushes; you will feel like you’ve been dropped straight onto the movie set. With all that and the inaccurate clocks everywhere, and playing cards littering the walls and windows, Wonderland does a good job of not going overboard with the Disney theme.

Cahuenga is probably the busiest street in Hollywood right now," explained co-owner Mike Malin, talking by phone about why he thought the area just two blocks north of the crush of bars and clubs around Hollywood Boulevard was ripe for one more. "Our friend and business partner Shereen Arazm had a couple of clubs [in the Wonderland space], one being Concord, which was ultra-hot about five years ago. After that it was a club called Shag. There's a lot of parking in the area, which is also nice."

Malin and Arazm are both members of the Dolce Group, the Los Angeles hospitality team responsible for such hot spots as Geisha House, Les Deux and the restaurant Ketchup, which gained notoriety as a regular setting for MTV reality show "The Hills." The other members of the Dolce Group are Lonnie Moore, Sylvain Bitton and JT Torregiani. Malin brings Hollywood flair into the mix, as a former contestant on CBS reality show "Big Brother" in 2001 and the winner of the 2006 "Big Brother: All-Stars."

Despite that hot-spot pedigree -- or maybe because of it -- Wonderland doesn't go too over the top with the ;Alice motif.

It's a very loose 'Alice in Wonderland' theme, Malin said.We wanted it to be playful and whimsical but not beat people over the head with it. So it's not too kitschy or super colorful." The club's interior is by Tony Schubert of Event Eleven and cuts up the large-ish, 4,200-square-foot space, making it more intimate than party barn. We took out the dance floor because we wanted to make it more of a lounge.- Malin added.