Bowling City
Hackensack, NJ
We were here one evening for a bowling birthday get-together for one of DJKung's coworkers. For your money, Bowling City is an above-average bowling joint.
But first, the food. There is a little diner-style restaurant within the building (which I thought was pretty cool) that served your usual burgers and fries. Of course, you can bring your food out to the bowling area as well, so the place was humming with a lot of kids having their pizza with their bowling.
Hearty minestrone soup for a cold winter night.
DJKung got a cheeseburger with fries, which he said was adequate. We also had some nachos later on, but they were uneventful chips covered in yellow cheese.
Apart from the diner and the bowling area, there was also an enclosed bar with a couple of small pool tables, and an arcade area which was surprisingly busy with young kids. I guess bowling can be too low-tech for the younger generation? But no, the bowling alleys were also full of youngsters showing their skills.
The bowling itself was quite nice... the lanes were very smooth and even. After you enter everybody's names on the scoreboard, their computers take care of the scoring and all that. This was nice because not everybody knows the special rules that apply with strikes, and how you get that extra bonus throw with the last set.
Let's go bowling!
DJKung and his winning leftward-curve throw. He was the high scorer of the group that night. Go DJKung!
At a certain time, Bowling City has disco bowling, where the lights go down and the music goes up a bit. What's exciting about this is that you get a chance to win one free game redeemable at any time. So say you go bowling once a year and you score and get lucky, you can show up next year and claim your free game! All you have to do is throw a strike when the magic red pin shows up in your lane.
This, unfortunately, was not as easy as the anouncement made it sound like. One of the little rules was that the magic red pin had to be the lead pin, i.e., the pin closest to you. So it did not happen all that often. Further, before you throw that winning ball, you had to get one of the staff to personally observe you. Which was a bit of a pain given that there were quite a lot of lanes and it was very noisy and fired up with everybody waiting for that special pin. So alas, we missed a few chances at getting that free game, but everybody had a swell time.
