This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse: Fishtown Gets a Flair Bar

52,000 square foot bowling alley and entertainment complex is coming to Fishtown | Artist’s rendering

Later this month Revolutions, a bowling alley and entertainment venue will open as part of the Fillmore complex on Frankford Avenue, just off of Delaware Avenue. Revolutions will feature two levels, 26 bowling lanes and more ominously, two food and beverage concepts; Burger & Beer Joint and Flair Street.

Burger & Beer Joint is a rock-and-roll-themed sports and casual restaurant that has six locations in Florida plus one in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The centerpiece of the burger-centric menu is the 10-pound stunt “Mother Burger” which has been featured on the Travel Channel’s Man Vs Food show. That burger is meant for groups so don’t get any ideas of being a hero and tackling this solo. The restaurant will also feature wall-to-wall TVs and a live music stage.

A first for the Revolutions brand, which is being pitched as Revolutions at Penn Treaty, is Flair Street. The “club within a club” promises glass-tossing, bottle flipping, “equal parts culinary art and acrobatic skill.” The press release even boasts that Flair Street will draw the world’s premier flair bartenders to Revolutions for national competitions (we guess Hollywood is already prepping for a remake of Tom Cruise’s Cocktail).

What this will do the alway-changing dynamic of Fishtown remains to be seen. What does the ven diagram of people looking for flair cocktails and Band of Horses fans look like? Originally built on a hipster dynamic by local champions like William Reed and Paul Kimport at Johnny Brenda’s. Next came Stephen Starr at Frankford Hall and Fette Sau, and even now, locals like Philadelphia Distilling are setting up shop in the immediate area, but they are now being joined by national operations like Live Nation at the Fillmore and the upcoming Anheuser Busch owned Goose Island brewpub. Once upon a time we would call a flair bar the death knell for the neighborhood. But so far Fishtown and Frankford Avenue in particular has been able to accept all comers.

Revolutions is a sort of return home for parent company Frank Entertainment Companies. Samuel Frank founded the company in Philadelphia back in 1906 as a movie theater business. In the 1920s Frank opened the first “talkie” theater in the city and a second across the Delaware River in Berlin, NJ. The company, now based in Jupiter Florida, has owned, operated, developed, and managed over 150 entertainment venues including nickelodeons, motion picture theatres, arcades, restaurants, nightclubs, bowling centers, game centers, and family entertainment centers.

Revolutions at Penn Treaty is scheduled to open on September 30th.

Revolutions at Penn Treaty [Foobooz]