Yesterday we went to a suburban California outpost of the American restaurant chain Dave and Buster’s. It was a dizzying, nauseating sensory-overloading experience that left us feeling ill.
Was it because of the food? No. The food was fine. Not “fine,” as in “fine dining” fine, but fine as in passable, serviceable, competent, and what you’d expect from a massive, popular chain restaurant that successfully produces and serves food and drink at an industrial retail scale.
The problem was the space itself and what it’s really about, which is not food and drink. What it’s really about is arcade games. Lots of them.
Dave and Buster’s “restaurants” have dozens upon dozens upon dozens of arcade video games and amusements. More square footage of the restaurant is devoted to the arcade part of the premises than the bar and dining areas. It feels less like a restaurant that happens to have a few pinball machines and more like a huge game arcade that also happens to serve food and allow people to get wasted at socially-acceptable levels with friends and family.
Walking into the restaurant we already had an idea of what the concept was. We had seen Dave and Buster’s TV commercials for years. But we had never actually set foot in one before. We had never expected to visit one.
We first started seeing their TV ads while living in downtown New York City, where the messaging seemed irrelevant, since the overwhelming number of the restaurant-arcade chain’s locations are in America’s suburbs. In a place like NYC’s Manhattan, there are so many more — and better — options for food and drink and even arcade gaming. In fact, there’s only one Dave and Buster’s in NYC, and it’s in Times Square, of course. In other words, it’s there for the tourists who are visiting NYC from places in the U.S. that likely do have a Dave and Buster’s. In other words, it’s familiar.
Anyway, we hated it. Is “hated” too strong a word here? Maybe. Call it “a severe aversion” to Dave and Buster’s and its concept-restaurant ilk.
That said, the customers at Dave and Buster’s were having fun. There were a lot of young, middle-class, suburban families and couples seeming to have genuine good times together, playing skee-ball, playing air hockey, dancing to one of those Dance Dance Revolution things, sitting in the faux cockpits of planes and seats of ersatz race cars, playing all manner of first-person shooter games.
Some of the games were large, elaborate architectural build-outs with footprints that if any larger might require a redefinition of the arcade as an amusement park. The staff were friendly, nice, professional, proactively helpful even. The dining areas were attractive and clean, if bland and with the air of a newly renovated bar in a newly renovated terminal at a major international airport. The bar area had just the right number of large-screen TVs showing pro sports. Dave and Buster’s is a brilliant business concept that has been well executed. Put simply, it’s giving people what they want.
We leaned in. We played a few games and it was fun. Though after each game ended, we felt kind of cheap and a pang of micro-depression. The pay-off for an arcade game is a teeny-tiny fraction of that you can get from playing better-designed, more interactive videogames on an XBox at home for as long as you want. The latter is exponentially more rewarding on almost every vector.
The whole Dave and Buster’s experience is aesthetically electronic-grotesque and amounts to a visual and aural assault. It’s cacophonous and loud, with all sorts of sounds — music, jingles, electronic bleeps, bells, rings, audio FX and pings — emanating from all directions, mashed-up into an invisible orgiastic ball of cultural noise. The same with the lights and flashing, animated screens. The effect is like floating through a dystopian electronic coral reef teeming with fast-moving blue-light life forms. Standing in the deepest, gravitationally-buzzy center of the arcade, we felt intellectually and emotionally hollowed out.
After our dizzying walk-through the arcade, we retreated back to a private function room for a friend’s birthday party, our whole reason for coming to a Dave and Buster’s in the first place. We sat down, ate a chicken nugget from the catered buffet, and vowed never to come back here ever again if we can help it.
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 