With the incredible success of golf- and pickleball-related eatertainment concepts, such as Topgolf, Puttshack and Chicken N Pickle, it was inevitable that other versions of the activity/dining experience have been popping up that revolve around other sports, whether it be car racing, baseball, basketball or even cricket. Each of these new concepts hopes to become the “next hot thing” in the active eatertainment industry. The buzzed-about sports/dining fusions currently gaining traction include F1 Arcade, Home Run Dugout, JumpShot and Sixes Social Cricket.
By March of 2024, F1 Arcade, a Formula 1 Grand Prix-themed car race simulation concept that also features premium dining and drinks, will open its first unit in the states with a 16,000-s.f. space in the Seaport area of Boston. The pier-adjacent street-front spot is in a retail-heavy tourist section of the city near hotels, museums and boat cruise ports, and is down the street from a Puttshack.
This would be the second F1 Arcade in the world, with the first location in a 16,000-s.f. venue in London, which opened in November. Thanks to a $32M investment round led by Liberty Media Corporation, F1 Arcade expects to expand in the U.S. at a rate of about four new sites per year over the next four years. New regions considered include those that are Grand Prix-hosted cities, such as Miami, Indianapolis, Phoenix and Las Vegas, as well as other metros, such as Columbus, Ohio, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Charlotte, N.C., Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and New York City. The upcoming Boston venue will feature 60 racing simulators with huge viewing screens that each have motion and audio-visual immersive effects. Guests have the option of competing individually, as a team or against everyone else in the venue.
Home Run Dugout, a baseball eatertainment experience, opened a 46,000-s.f. standalone location in late March in Katy, Texas, featuring 12 tech-enabled batting bays, a full-service restaurant, three bars, indoor/outdoor seating, and an outdoor turf field for wiffle ball games, kickball, private tournaments or concerts. The site is next to another entertainment concept, Andretti Indoor Karting & Games, and is down the street from Popstroke. This is the second location for the restaurant/baseball fusion concept, which opened its original site in an end cap space, with only two batting bays, as part of the Dell Diamond minor league baseball stadium in Round Rock, Texas, a suburb of Austin. The founders are now researching sites in San Antonio for a third location, and hope to continue growing the brand in the future, potentially in other family friendly markets in the South.
The Home Run Dugout’s batting bays allow a patron to hit a baseball served from a soft-toss pitching machine into a virtual screen that shows a pre-selected visual of an actual baseball stadium. There is a computer that indicates the velocity of the hit, and also computes what base was achieved, including a home run. The former professional baseball player, Nolan Ryan, is an investor in Home Run Dugout, along with BCS Capital Group and Lagniappe Capital Partners.
The founders of JumpShot, a basketball-themed eatertainment concept, announced that the first U.S. venue will be in Atlanta, hopefully by mid-2024. Locations for upcoming venues could also include Dallas and Phoenix, with Houston, Orlando, Fla., Miami, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Boston, Philadelphia and Memphis, Tenn., also being given serious consideration. The upcoming venue is expected to be in the 30,000- to 50,000-s.f. range and will be a standalone building site. Investors in the concept include the former CEO of Topgolf, and Eberg Capital, known for investing in sports gaming concepts. JumpShot will provide multiple tech-enabled hoops basketball game play along the perimeter of the venue, with the center portion dedicated to a dining/bar lounge.
With July being the kick-off month that professional Major League Cricket teams will compete for the first time ever in the U.S., the British-based Sixes Social Cricket, an immersive cricket-themed restaurant/bar concept with seven locations in the U.K., chose that month to open its very first venue in the States. The 8,000-s.f. second-generation restaurant space is in Grandscape, the entertainment-heavy shopping mall in The Colony, Texas, which houses other entertainment tenants, including Immersive Gamebox, Andretti Indoor Karting & Games and Galaxy Theatres. Situated in a suburb of Dallas, the site is also 30 miles away from the country’s very first professional cricket stadium, in Grand Prairie, Texas.
Depending on the success of its first venue, and aided by an infusion of capital from 4CAST Investment Group, an England-based investment entity, Sixes Social Cricket may expand into other U.S. metros that now have professional cricket teams, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York City. The preferred sites should have entertainment-oriented co-tenants, contain an ethnically diverse demographic, and be in a popular tourist destination. Sixes Social Cricket features netted-up areas in which patrons can hit a tech-enabled soft cricket ball into a screen, and receive points based on hitting targets.
