What’s Fueling the Success of New-Wave Eatertainment?

I learned too late that axe throwing is a serious game — in my mind it had always been a concept; a bit of lumberjack cosplay. But there I was at Smash Park in suburban Roseville, Minnesota, knee-deep in an arduous lunge, arcing a dull-edged hatchet behind my head; eyes narrowed. To my left, our assigned coach, Wolfgang, was lunging beside me, rocking back and forth in his fat-tongued hiking boots, demonstrating the art of a devastating throw. My axe hit the outer rings of the bullseye, a red-and-white screen image projected onto a sensor-calibrated plywood board. My avatar, a lion wearing a red flannel shirt, flashed onto the screen: two points.

Smash Park offers far more than axe throwing: At 30,000 square feet, it’s a multiplex of duckpin bowling, party darts, shuffleboard, karaoke, cornhole, and pickleball. It’s one of the emergent brands in the “tainment” sector, a growing category of venues that offer both entertainment and (variably) restaurant-caliber food: Smash Park, for example, distinguishes itself from bowling alley burgers and the like with considered dishes like Frito pie, barbecue sampler platters, and Bang Bang Shrimp. Eatertainment has taken off nationally in the past few years, and in the Twin Cities, it’s having somewhat of a hyper-local boom: In the past year and a half, we’ve welcomed Smash Park; Puttery, a labyrinthine, adults-only mini-golf bar in the North Loop; and now Puttshack, a high-tech mini-golf complex freshly open in Edina, with another planned for Minneapolis. It’s a fair bet that more will follow: Eatertainment brands from Dave & Buster’s to Chicken N Pickle to Pinstripes are rapidly expanding, reshaping our eating, drinking, and entertainment landscapes as they inch toward ubiquity.

Smash Park’s flagship is in Des Moines, Iowa. Its founder, Monty Lockyear, is a former marketing executive and early pickleball prospector. Pickleball, of course, is the brand’s main attraction: The evening I visited, Smash Park was hosting a reunion for former players of the Minnesota Vikings and their families, and a quartet of graying ex-football players were deftly dinking back-and-forth across the nets in the indoor gymnasium. The building has the cavernous feel of a waterpark, but is partitioned into areas for eating, drinking and playing: There’s a small bowling alley; a narrow, neon-lit arcade packed with teenagers; an all-season cornhole green abutting a plush lounge area, where couples were mingling and clutching cocktails; a vast outdoor space with yard games where a happy hour crowd gathered. Kelly Sims, vice president of marketing at Smash Park, told me that the company’s target demographic is pretty broad, though it has three main archetypes: the athlete, the “21-plus” customer, and the family. Private events like bachelorette parties and corporate team-building are a big hit, too.

Eatertainment isn’t a new phenomenon: Its roots lie in the frenetic arcade ethos of Dave & Buster’s and Chuck E. Cheese; even the misty, fantastical universe of the Rainforest Cafe. But today’s tainment has an accelerated, self-serious feel, perhaps driven by increasing competition in the sector to up the ante — to offer an experience more flashy, more distinctly marketable than the next. Take the food: Level 99, a 40,000-square-foot puzzle room complex in Providence, Rhode Island, has a built-in “scratch kitchen” that serves, among other dishes, a brown-butter three-cheese popcorn. Simulated auto racing venue F1 Arcade offers an entire raw bar, including a $129 seafood tower. Even casual tainment menus have a studied feel: Puttshack, promising a “culinary journey of global flavors,” has an encyclopedic appetizer list of Lebanese hummus, poutine, Persian chicken skewers, Thai fried chicken, Korean barbecue buns, and chorizo empanadas. As far as entertainment goes, new-wave tainment seems to either lean into a garden-of-delights approach, like Smash Park, offering a slew of activities, or to augment classic games with technology: Puttshack, which comes from the founders of Topgolf, uses a similar “Trackaball” technology that automates scorekeeping; Hijingo in the U.K. offers “multi-sensory futuristic bingo” with light shows and live dancers. At ping pong social club Spin, customers can compete against a robot named “Spinny,” an AI opponent with an unfailing serve.

F1 Arcade

F1 Arcade

Hijingo

An astonishing amount of money has poured into tainment in the past few years: Investors run the gamut from nascent venture capital firms to restaurant industry executives to behemoth investment companies like Blackrock. Even pro athletes are cashing in: Puttery received a $10 million investment from pro golfer Rory McIlroy; Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes invested in Chicken N Pickle. Like the rest of the hospitality industry, tainment was majorly disrupted by pandemic shutdowns, but it has ballooned in the years since: Take entrepreneur Robert Thompson, who dipped out as CEO of Punch Bowl Social shortly before the business filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. Three years later, he secured no less than $200 million for his new pickleball venue, Camp Pickle. Then there’s the Emerging Fund, a growth capital fund backed by 30-some hospitality veterans that funds “early-stage” tainment and restaurant tech brands. After launching in March of 2023, it raised $52 million in its first six months.

What makes tainment such an attractive investment? There are the stats: People are dining out less these days, and tainment offers two-for-one brand appeal, giving consumers (ostensibly) more bang for their buck by pairing food with entertainment. There’s growing interest in the sector, with certain brands seeing anywhere from 20 to 50 percent traffic increases in the past few years, as Restaurant Business Magazine reports. Other factors make tainment a particularly viable business model: Some brands, like Puttshack and Pinstripes, manage to leverage deals with landlords, who are enticed by the venues’ large footprints and high foot traffic potential; others, depending on their model, are able to lower labor costs by employing counter service or self-serve models like beer walls. And, as Restaurant Business Magazine and Restaurant Dive have reported, tainment brands often benefit from a relatively high profit margin on the activity portion of the venue, augmenting the revenue earned from food and drink. Puttshack, for example, charges just $14 per person for a round of mini-golf, but Susan Walmesley, the company’s chief operating and marketing officer, confirmed for me that about half the brand’s revenue comes from the game. These factors give tainment an edge over traditional restaurant models, helping to facilitate their expansion into new markets.

Chick N Pickle

Smash Park

Tipsy Pickle

But there’s more to tainment’s success than enviable profit margins. The prevailing narrative I found in my reporting is that consumers, having emerged from the isolation and social misery of the pandemic, are craving experience: They want to feel, to connect, to “get a little weird and playful again” after a somber few years. The project of tainment, then, is to create an “experience economy,” or even, as Camp Pickle CEO Robert Thompson puts it, a “joy economy.” Eatertainment venues are more than destinations for date nights and office parties; far more than the rudimentary arcades and bowling alleys of eras past: Resting on three axes of pleasure (food, drink, and play), they offer a seamless, satisfying, and bonafide human “experience.” Sims and Smash Park operations director Kristin Kroeger, for example, emphasized to me that Smash Park’s true appeal lies not just in pickleball but in the brand’s combined activities, full bar, “scratch-made kitchen,” and premise of social interaction, all of which alchemize into a single “legendary experience.”

I saw what they meant — Smash Park was bumping Bruno Mars as we wandered past the bar and the cornhole green, carpeted with emerald turf; we sipped idly on boozy pink slushies and peered into the private karaoke rooms. The games seemed to me like an absurd and decadent assortment of candy; a manufactured sugar rush. When our axe-throwing time slot arrived, we were ushered to our designated lane. Hurling the axe at the target gave me a thrill at first — I hit a bullseye and screamed — but it waned to a lull as my arms tired; as my aim grew methodical and labored. Between throws, I found myself hypnotized by the flat screen TVs posted around the room, flashing through a Rolodex of event advertisements: Game of Thrones trivia; ’90s name-that-song; a glow-in-the-dark “Dink and Drink” party planned for Saturday night. A queasy feeling began to set in, an emptiness I remembered from playing The Sims as a kid — the sense that I, myself, had set foot in the game. On the outdoor pickleball court, we squinted against the hazy sunshine and batted the ball back-and-forth across the net, debating whether to order the “Big Mule,” a 192-ounce Moscow mule served in a pumpkin-sized copper mug.

I realized, gazing above the edge of the pickleball fence at the flat, powdery sky, that what unsettled me about Smash Park — about the tainment concept as a whole — was exactly the thing it advertises: its promise of fun; of play; of joy so seamlessly orchestrated, less an “experience” than the simulation of one. If tainment has boomed post-pandemic, I find it less likely that we are reimmersing ourselves in the world and more likely that we are retreating further from it, escaping into realities more palatable, more entertaining, than our own. That Friday night, we sat outside and listened to the live music provided for the evening: an affable, dad-aged guy with a guitar, a quarter-zip, and a honeyed voice. We hummed along to Pure Prairie League and munched on our garlic fries. Then he played Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and made a lyrical substitution: “And whatever happened / to Tuesday and so slow / going down to Smash Park with a / transistor radio.” He was being funny, and we laughed, but in my periphery I saw the sky cave a little; hardening like the edges of a snowglobe. At Smash Park, all roads lead to the same place.

Courtesy of Smash Park

Additional photo illustration credits: Mini golf image by Puttshack