![]() Ordering the grilled Portobello and veggie mushroom sandwich was, admittedly, like asking the restaurant a trick question: That is, will it be treated with the same char and reverence as its beefy correlates? In this case, the answer was no, but its presence on the menu was appreciated nonetheless, and the salad alongside was much more than an afterthought, topped with tangy roasted tomatoes and a mild vinaigrette. We may have further upsized the game card for $2 extra. So that means we got the burger and fingers for $16.99 a piece and with them came a $10 game card. We got both of those from the Eat and Play combo section of the menu, which has 17 entree options and is available all day Sunday through Thursday and until 5 p.m. The Dave’s Double Cheeseburger was just slightly better than fast food. The Classic Goldfingers were just regular, almost certainly frozen, chicken strips. The menu at Dave & Buster’s is like any gut-busting chain, but with more bright colors and complicated gaming and food combo meals. Even near 1 p.m., there were few seats available our party of eight was relegated to the U-shaped bar. A kaleidoscope of flashing lights inspired a conversation about the symptoms of epilepsy and how they manifest themselves. Televisions, few of which would fit into any average-sized living room without requiring some demolition, lined all available wall space. Dozens (hundreds?) of school-age children were hollering and bouncing around. That turned out to be an appropriate soundtrack for what was waiting inside. “Who Let the Dogs Out?” was being piped out to the parking lot when we arrived on a hot weekday at lunchtime. It’s 30,000 square feet, which is massive as far as restaurants go, but somehow smaller than we had imagined based on marketing and word of mouth. The new Dave & Buster’s is way out southwest near the new outlet malls and the Bass Pro Shop. Corriveau and Corley got out of the business in the mid-2000s. The company, now traded on the Nasdaq, has more than 70 locations today. They took the concept to Dallas, where the first Dave & Buster’s opened in a 40,000-square-foot warehouse in 1982. In the early ’80s, Corriveau and Corley decided to combine Buster’s and Slick Willy’s and scale up (Garrison went on to own The White Water Tavern). A year later, Corriveau and Garrison put money in with Buster Corley to open Buster’s, a bar and cafe also in the train station that was “a favored haunt of politicians, bond daddies and cocaine whores,” as one businessman described it in Arkansas Business. It billed itself as “Little Rock’s funkiest game room” and helped spawn a derisive nickname for a future president. It was 10,000 square feet and full of air hockey, backgammon, billiards, foosball and snooker tables darts, pinball machines and a miniature golf course. Cheese for grown folks.” Can you still see its roots? We missed the ’70s and early ’80s in Little Rock, but something tells us you’d have to squint pretty hard to see through the layers of private-equity tinkering that have optimized every aspect of the chain to better separate you from your money.ĭave Corriveau and Larry “Goose” Garrison opened Slick Willy’s World of Entertainment in Union Station in 1977. More than 30 years after it was conceived in Little Rock and funded with Arkansas money, Little Rock (and Arkansas) has its first Dave & Buster’s, the supersized sports bar and arcade chain often described as “Chuck E.
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