At the nearby Prosecco Bar, two elderly gentlemen sipped from plastic flutes of sparkling wine; at Ibiza, a seafront nightclub, a DJ played insistent house beats.
It was possible for a moment to imagine that this was just the start of a normal summer night in this southern Ukrainian resort city, which usually draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, and where the partying used to go on until breakfast.
But an hour later the bars shut, and soon after, the city's residents were told to head to bomb shelters for a fourth successive night, the culmination of a week in which Russian forces pounded the city with hypersonic missiles and drones in repeated attacks aimed at destroying Odesa's grain exporting facilities.
This week has been the most trying for Odesa since the nervous first days of Putin's full-scale war on Ukraine, and the terror after dark made a particularly incongruous contrast with the vestiges of summer resort life that remain in the beach areas and in the city's impressive historical centre.
"There are two types of people," said Olha Rohozhnykova, a 34-year-old English teacher who was out in Thursday evening's soupy summer air taking what she described as her "daily mental health walk" past the bars and beaches of Arcadia. "There are those who are trying to save every penny to spend when better days come, and those who want to spend everything and have fun because maybe these are their last days."
With venues such as Ibiza, Hawaii Aquapark and Santorini Cafe, Arcadia has always been in part about escapism, but the war has made that urge more pressing.
"It's hard to call this a tourist season," said the mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, in an interview. "It's more about internally displaced people, or people who are coming here to breathe some sea air and at least have some kind of change of scenery."
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