If you’re headed to Drillers(15135 North Fwy., No. 800) anytime soon, know this: Diana Rivas will not tolerate your disorderly attitude.

The 27-year-old dental assistant is a regular at the north Houston lounge and dance club and, by all accounts, a gem of a person. But when a patron recently got a smidge too testy for Rivas’s liking, she (ahem) politely asked her to please calm down.

“This girl didn’t want to pay her tab,” says Rivas, referring to a previous weekend night at Drillers. “So she was arguing and screaming at the girl behind me [general manager LeaErin Hurley]. She was coming right towards me, and I got scared. My first reaction was to punch her, so I did.”

Fantastic.

But as much as we hoped to report other­wise after hearing this promising tale — we’ve now been to 40-plus venues as the Nightfly, and have yet to see an actual fight break out — this type of face-punching high jinks is an extremely rare occurrence at Drillers.

More often than not, those who spend their evening at the two-year-old venue will find Top 40 mixes, cheap drinks and an impressively eclectic crowd — in other words, a cut above what you might expect at a club located in a strip center.

Strip-center clubs are where the nightlife junior varsity hangs out: poorly constructed imitations of real nightclubs hoping to fool you into forgetting that you’re paying $9 for a mojito inside a former Cold Stone Creamery or Philly Connection. Trekking to one with the audacity to exist 20 whole minutes away from the Washington corridor is like biting your own tongue or moving to Austin: a pain entirely of your own doing.

But to its credit, Drillers, so named because it’s owned by several oil-­industry magnates, gives the northern exurbs a venue with Midtown style. Some patrons prefer it to ostensibly hipper Inner Loop nightspots.

“I really like it,” says Mandy Johnson, who drove down from Huntsville to celebrate her birthday. (We only discovered it was her birthday upon asking why someone in her party had just leaned across the table and licked Johnson’s face.) “I’ve been to a lot of clubs all over Houston — I just went to RocBar [530 Texas] not too long ago and it was kinda ‘ehh.’ I just like the feel of this place better.”

Even if the exterior isn’t, the club’s interior is on par with most of Houston’s glossier venues. The ceiling is open and painted black, making the space feel larger than it actually is. The floors are stained concrete, save for a wooden dance floor that entertains more and more people as the evening progresses. And four separate VIP sections — bottle service required — skirt the perimeter, while a large, circular bar dominates the center of the room.

But for such a fancy room, Drillers stands out because it’s down to earth. Sure, there’s the occasional A-hole in tattered jeans, but for the majority of the night, white girls dancing inappropriately and old black couples commingled with Latina girls in fedoras and guys in embossed T-shirts with no awkwardness whatsoever.

Other times, the crowd veers towards being predominantly black (Friday nights) or whiter (weekday happy hours), but GM Hurley says this sort of variety is typical for a Saturday night. While we’re chatting, a less-than-forthcoming Drillers regular — he requested to be quoted as “Daddy” before allowing us to call him “Matthew T.” — walks over and cosigns her statement.

“There are 8,000 other clubs [where] I could be,” says Matthew, who might not fare so well in one of those contests where you have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar. “But I come here. It’s a great place.”

Meh. We wouldn’t classify Drillers as “great,” but you can certainly have a good time there. Just watch your mouth, or Diana Rivas will watch it for you.

LAST CALL

The strip center that houses Drillers also hosts two other nightlife venues: serviceable sports bar Time Out #4 and Swig Lounge. Though Swig is only a couple of doors down from Drillers, we initially walked right past it without giving a second glance. Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” was blaring out onto their patio, so we were pretty much obligated to ignore the lounge on principle alone.

We did poke around a bit at the end of the evening — it’s very much a larger, less charming version of the cabin-ish Kobain (3720 Raymond). Apparently Swig does a solid happy-hour trade, particularly on Fridays with the area’s teacher population. Something about that struck us as odd.

This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2009.