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Dinner Theatre
Not the play kind, but the movie kind. When we were in Wales, during one of the days that we had the guide, he said that a friend of his had said that they serve full meals in American theatres and asked us if it was true. We told him yes, in certain theatres they did. He was astounded. :)
So I figured, as we've just come back from seeing R.E.D. at a new one nearby, that I'd tell all my non-U.S. friends who might be unaware of their existence all about them. :)
In the basics, the theatres are much the same: you pay for admission to the theatre, which can be regular price or cost a bit more, and you have to pay separately for your food and drinks, which are served at your seats. The seats have some sort of table in front or nearby, and a way to summon a server to you to place your order. About 3/4 to 4/5 of the way through the movie, they drop your bill in front of you, and come back about 10 minutes later to collect them and run the cards.
Here's a photo of the one we went to today:
And if your monitor is a bit dark and you can't see, here's a lightened version:
This is the newly-built Movie Tavern just outside of downtown. The theatre was built expressly to be a dinner cinema, and is quite nice. The rows of seats are double-spaced, if not more, and each seat has its own little table, which adjusts to swing in front of you. The buttons you see are to call a server.
We're seated about midway in the theatre. There's a large aisle behind us separating us from more seats (and what looked like a couple of tables) that the servers can use to get from one side of the theatre to the other, and there's a small serving station to one side where the servers can stage food as they're getting ready to serve it to you.
The Studio Movie Grill in Arlington is another dinner theatre we go to frequently, and its setup is slightly different: while it's got regular movie seat row alternating with tables in the front half, the back half is taken up with chairs on wheels, a couple of rows of tables kind of like a breakfast bar, and some individual tables. They give you individual pager coasters like the sort you get in restaurants to notify you that your table is ready, and you activate them to call a server, and they find you by the lighted coaster.
The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin and Houston took over existing movie theatres, took out every other row of seats, and installed small tables where the removed seats went. And they also do not allow people under 21 for the evening shows, which is really nice if you want to go see, say, Harry Potter and don't want to deal with lots of noisy kids. The back edge of the tables has a place where you can put a white piece of paper that acts as a flag - you write what you want on the paper and put it up for the server to collect.
Any questions? :)
So I figured, as we've just come back from seeing R.E.D. at a new one nearby, that I'd tell all my non-U.S. friends who might be unaware of their existence all about them. :)
In the basics, the theatres are much the same: you pay for admission to the theatre, which can be regular price or cost a bit more, and you have to pay separately for your food and drinks, which are served at your seats. The seats have some sort of table in front or nearby, and a way to summon a server to you to place your order. About 3/4 to 4/5 of the way through the movie, they drop your bill in front of you, and come back about 10 minutes later to collect them and run the cards.
Here's a photo of the one we went to today:
And if your monitor is a bit dark and you can't see, here's a lightened version:
This is the newly-built Movie Tavern just outside of downtown. The theatre was built expressly to be a dinner cinema, and is quite nice. The rows of seats are double-spaced, if not more, and each seat has its own little table, which adjusts to swing in front of you. The buttons you see are to call a server.
We're seated about midway in the theatre. There's a large aisle behind us separating us from more seats (and what looked like a couple of tables) that the servers can use to get from one side of the theatre to the other, and there's a small serving station to one side where the servers can stage food as they're getting ready to serve it to you.
The Studio Movie Grill in Arlington is another dinner theatre we go to frequently, and its setup is slightly different: while it's got regular movie seat row alternating with tables in the front half, the back half is taken up with chairs on wheels, a couple of rows of tables kind of like a breakfast bar, and some individual tables. They give you individual pager coasters like the sort you get in restaurants to notify you that your table is ready, and you activate them to call a server, and they find you by the lighted coaster.
The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin and Houston took over existing movie theatres, took out every other row of seats, and installed small tables where the removed seats went. And they also do not allow people under 21 for the evening shows, which is really nice if you want to go see, say, Harry Potter and don't want to deal with lots of noisy kids. The back edge of the tables has a place where you can put a white piece of paper that acts as a flag - you write what you want on the paper and put it up for the server to collect.
Any questions? :)
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All we get is icecream.
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Sometimes we order a dessert after the meal, but in those cases we've usually already decided that we were going to do it, so it's a matter of hitting the button/coaster/flag, telling the server what we want, and waiting.
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