First Visit – Button Mash

I am not big into video games. I played the old-school games like Donkey Kong, Qbert, Dragon’s Lair and the now hillarious Track & Field game but I never kept up with all the upgrades and new games and Halos and John Madden’s.

Now I can order a beer and play (badly) some of the games from the past. It is quite a nostalgia trip at Button Mash. To see Frogger and Pac Man and an NBA game that featured NBA players from a long ago era was fun.

The space that has a sort of Denny’s layout and shape to it is broken up into four parts. There is a bar, a restaurant sit down area, a pinball machine grouping and then the classic video games in another area. On the night I was there, it was hopping with activity. A birthday party had commandeered one table and the Game of Thrones pinball machine was occupied whenever I looked.

Playing my favorite Star Wars games with the graphics more suited to pre-visualization for big budget movies was a blast. And the tap list was well done. Nice variety with IPA’s to choose from as well as the excellent Amburana Porter from Three Weavers. Cans were also available though at a heftier mark-up than the taps which I consider a skosh on the high side.

Two problems that I see that could be improved upon are that if you buy tokens from the bar, you have to buy in $5 increments. Which is fine in some cases but I don’t see why you couldn’t do any increment at all. Also, if you order at the bar and take a seat at one of the tables, the attentive wait staff can’t take an order until you close out the bar tab and then open up a table tab. There probably is a reason for it but I felt bad for the waitress who could have easily gotten my order and a tip.

Those tweaks aside it is a fun spot for a party and to blow off steam after work by destroying all the Tie Fighters that you can.