Let me admit up front, in a spirit of full disclosure, that my impressions of Antics Grill and Games were colored by the shameless and mean-spirited way in which I was cheated at Whack-A-Mole. I hit every one of the little bastards that stuck its head out of its hole. It’s not my fault that one of the rats was missing and I couldn’t get to the armature inside the hole with my oversized mallet. I deserved far more than two tickets.
Antics is the kind of place you take your nephew to fill him with sugar and really hype him up before returning him to his mother (in my case, at any rate). It’s a sort of hyper-thyroid Chuck E. Cheese’s, filled with roughly an acre and a half of video games, laser-tag, ski-ball and a full playground. Roughly half of the arcade games dispense tickets which can be redeemed for crappy, carnival-like prizes – the kind young children would eagerly drive over the twitching bodies of their parents to get at.
Raised as I was on Donkey Kong and Pong, I was pretty intimidated by the variety of video games – largely laser gun-based games called things like “Time Crisis II”, “Monster Killer Zombies of Death” and “For God’s Sake, Shoot It Before They Make it into a Movie”. My six year-old nephew didn’t share my sense of foreboding, however. By the time we’d completed a quick exploratory circuit of the place, he had entered a state of active frenzy. His eyes were actually vibrating. I was worried that he might do himself an injury, so I released him.
As he ran off, shrieking like a weasel on Angel Dust to terrorize the other six year-olds on the slides, I went into the “grill” portion of the facility. The restaurant itself is a two-floor family-style place, decorated with old movie posters downstairs and a large patio upstairs for in-house birthday parties. On the Sunday afternoon we were there, every available picnic table upstairs was filled with wide-eyed, slightly frantic children. The downstairs restaurant, by contrast was surprisingly quiet – a sort of oasis of calm in the middle of a blinking, howling sandstorm of video anarchy.
The food at Antics spans the junk food spectrum, from nachos and cheese burgers to fried mozzarella sticks and pizza. It is a testament to the variety of things you can do with cheese. You’d have to be very creative in your ordering to get anything there that wasn’t covered, floating on or filled with melted cheese. It’s rather awe-inspiring, really.
Somewhat inexplicably, there is a separate “Kids Menu” available.
In a gesture to pop-eyed overwhelmed “parents” like me, there is a small notice on the bottom of the laminated menu which reads, “Ask about our beer selection”. They must do very well with that.
I decided to play it safe and ordered a plain cheese pizza, then went to retrieve my nephew from the playground. I was given a pager to let me know when our pizza was ready, so I had plenty of time to buy way, way too many game tokens, which the two of us blew mostly on ski-ball, with a brief detour at the aforementioned crooked Whack-A-Mole game.
When we finally got to it, the pizza itself was surprisingly good, if a bit too cheesy. It was nicely browned on top and had roughly twice the amount of cheese as crust. It tasted…
Okay, let’s stop fooling ourselves. Nobody goes to Antics for the food. The food is basic fuel to propel children back to playing games. It is basic, inoffensive (chewy) junk food. It tastes about how you’d expect it to taste, which is just exactly what young children like in food – more cheese than taste.
All in all, it was a pretty successful afternoon. My nephew earned a few hundred thousand game tickets which he was able to exchange for two superballs and a pencil eraser, so he was happy.
I, in turn, was happy that I was able to kick his butt at air hockey.
