For a good time
For a good time
Your 3rd Spot in Atlanta goes big — like really big — on experiences
Oh hey it’s the return of How Restaurants Work, a column that explores forward-thinking businesses: What’s going on? Why is it happening? And what does it mean for the future of hospitality?
I strongly dislike the word eatertainment. It’s a portmanteau describing venues that combine dining and amusement, or, literally, eating and entertainment.
But it’s hard to ignore their popularity. There are venues catering to golf fans and pickleball players, souped-up bowling alleys and indoor mini-golf, surfing (really!) and karaoke. They’re called family entertainment complexes, arcades, indoor playgrounds. And they all want to be like Chuck E. Cheese… but hipper.
Five years after the start of Covid feels like a long time to ascribe the continued growth in these venues to our pent-up desire to get out of the house and have fun. But Josh Rossmeisl, a restaurant industry veteran and founder of Your 3rd Spot in Atlanta, does.
“We’re big fans of psychology and the reactance theory: when you take something away from somebody, they want it that much more,” he said.
Rossmeisl opened the 1,000-person capacity venue in 2022. It features a menu of small plates like spicy tuna and crispy rice and vegan empanadas, offering games like skee-ball and bowling and cornhole and a host of others you’ve never tried, all in service of promoting new memories and human-to-human connection. (And thanks to an evening 21-years-and-over policy, it’s essentially adult-to-adult connection.” Like I said, hipper than a Chuck E. Cheese.)
“It’s panned out quite well,” Rossmeisl said. “2023 was our first full fiscal year, and it was literally the best sales year I’ve ever had in the 30 years that I’ve been doing this.”
These results aren’t an anomaly. In the second quarter of the year, visits to Dave & Buster’s, a nationwide chain of arcades on steroids and the preferred birthday party location for my second grader and all of her friends, increased about 7 percent from the year before.
While conditions might be right for opening the wildest experiential concept you can think of, a host of new concept openings does not portend success for all of them. Rossmeisl and team have big plans for Your 3rd Spot, including an eventual nationwide expansion, but he promises it won’t ever feel soulless. Here’s more on his plan to win experiential dining.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Expedite: There are so many, quote, entertainment concepts that are huge, behemoth, national chains. I know you have plans to expand, but tell me about the process of establishing one local concept.
Josh Rossmeisl, Your 3rd Spot: “I ran an entertainment concept for 15 years prior to forming this group, and when I left that role I basically drafted all the best people I worked with. I shared with them the vision of creating the next generation of experiential dining, leaning into technology and focusing on foundational efforts like culture and training, things that nobody ever finds sexy until it’s too late. We spent a good amount of time conceptualizing and plotting this during early Covid when the world was paused and watching Tiger King. It was a tumultuous two years leading up to the launch of the brand — and we’re in a new market. Most of us are from Boston, so we had to learn how the Atlanta market was different, especially post-Covid.”
I almost forgot about Tiger King.
“... that weird time in the beginning of Covid I think a lot of people can connect with.”
You mentioning it did bring me back to that time, which was awful for human connection. But obviously we learned there’s no real substitute for people, and that seems like a big impetus for this business.
“Everybody in the world said don’t do it, that the world is never going to be the same and people won’t connect the way they once did. But we are wired for connection, and it’s not going away because of what’s happening in the world. We focused on what it would be like when we came out of the worst of Covid. What will it feel like? What will be important for people?”
Walk me through the concept. I’ll admit I’m not a big… eatertainment person.
“We’re different from a lot of the one-size-fits-all entertainment concepts that are popping up all over the place. We lean into the experiential dining side as opposed to entertainment. It’s immersive — I know that’s a term often overused. But we have 85 different experiences. Guests enter into the ER — experience room — and we get to know you, then guide you through the space. For us to send you into this massive building that has so much going on — it could be overwhelming. We give you a card for unlimited access to every experience in the building for up to three hours, so it’s not based on points. Instead, all the games are curated for that millennial audience that we tend to attract — 33 is the average age. We’re 21-plus after five o’clock during the week and 6 on the weekends. Adults like that they can come in and have fun without a seven-year-old zooming by every 45 seconds.”
I have a seven-year-old, I get it. And with a group of second-graders in a place like this, three hours feels like forever. How much time does your average guest spend inside?
“Our average time is 148 minutes. We’re very reservation-heavy. That’s been one of the biggest post-pandemic changes; people want to make reservations so they can guarantee having a space. We’re all small plates, nothing that requires a knife and fork.”
The reservations piece is interesting. You take bookings for dining or for other things?
“We have different bookings, but everybody that comes in is required to get the experience pass. It’s something I wrestled a lot with in the beginning: How much do we enforce this? It’s not a casual, I’ll-sit-at-the-bar-and-ruminate cocktail lounge, or even a sports bar. If you’re coming here, you’re coming to have fun. We have very few TVs here. It’s a really good feeling and changes the vibe and energy inside the place for sure.”
I appreciate a business that is deeply committed to a vision and a theme and goes after it, as opposed to trying to be all things to all people, especially with a capacity of 1,000. What are the most popular experiences?
“The obvious ones like hoops and skee-ball, but we have so few of them by design. The goal here is not to have people play games they’re so familiar with. We put games we believe are really fun on the other side of the most popular games — if people are waiting to play skee-ball, they’ll turn around and try something new. When you try something new you make a memory.
“We do this with food, too. We’re in Atlanta, the chicken wing capital of the world1, and we have no chicken wings, no sliders. Our food is elevated, our spirits are all craft. Our team helps people get out of their comfort zones.”
Aside from being the chicken wing capital of the world, why did you land in Atlanta?
“It is a hotbed of talent. We knew that we were going to grow the brand, and where you start is so important to the culture and talent you can attract. Atlanta checked all the boxes. And one thing I’ve learned is that Atlanta supports Atlanta. I live a mile away, I walk to work every single day. I’m in the community… and when something new comes to town, Atlanta shows up.”
So it’s no problem filling a huge space?
“When we opened, most days of the week we had a line 100 people long to get in. We do buyouts and corporate events, and they’re huge groups. We had a party of 850 the other day, 500 two days before that.”
Tell me about your expansion plans… or dreams, as they are.
“The goal is to perfect the prototype before we replicate it, though I’m not known for my patience. But I’ve seen my competitors find success at one location in the first four months and then sign 15 leases, not realizing years later why the wheels are falling off.
“We’re working with a national brokerage firm to help map out our expansion plans. I just got back from New York City. I was in Houston the week before, Denver next week, Las Vegas the week after that, then Nashville. We’re focusing on larger markets that can support corporate business, the social business, and I guess you’d call them ‘transient’ convention markets that have people coming to town looking for fun experiences.”
Okay, I see it. Do you have a target growth number? Are we talking five, 10, more locations?
“I mean, we’ll open 100 of these locations. One thing we don’t do — I feel lucky in the way we chose to go about this — we’ve had offers with some private equity firms willing to back us. But we want to retain control of growth and make sure we don’t grow too fast too early.”
I cover startups and technology and in my world, private equity and venture capital can cause people to make some unfortunate decisions about growth and size and timing.
“There’s no arbitrary number of locations we’re opening, though I’ll say our target is one to two a year for the first four to five years. Then we can go a little faster.
“Each location is going to be different from the next. The idea is to create a great third place people can go to. We are introducing and rolling out a new membership program which gives our locals who live within a five-mile radius basically unlimited access to the facility. We’re able to really invest in our neighborhoods — when you’re in transient markets you definitely want to take care of your locals.”
Ed note: this is the first time I’ve heard this but for sake of conversation, I’ll buy it.