Developer Turns to Pickleball for Next ‘Eatertainment’ Venture

Robert Thompson found himself in a pickle.

The pandemic nearly obliterated his Punch Bowl Social, the family-friendly “eatertainment” chain with bowling lanes that he started a decade ago. And before that business, Thompson faced struggles with two French restaurants he had started in Denver, the first after some great success he would later characterize as failing and the second he'd say in hindsight he shouldn't have taken on.

Looking for his next endeavor, he's made a bet on serving up sports and games with dining, especially with social interaction on the rise as pandemic restrictions fade and people venture out more.

And so Camp Pickle, a new concept geared around the fast-growing sport of pickleball, was born.

Thompson’s New Orleans-based Angevin & Co. has location arrangements in place for the first two locations of Camp Pickle, with a leased venue spanning more than 50,000 square feet in the works at the MidCity mixed-use development in Huntsville, Alabama, set for a 2024 opening. That is slated to be followed by a 75,000-square-foot location in the Denver suburb of Centennial, where Thompson is near completion on a development site purchase.

He said he is in talks with developers in several other cities to establish Camp Pickle, slated to feature multiple indoor and outdoor pickleball courts, which are much smaller than tennis courts and deploy a less-bouncy ball, in a rustic-themed setting that he said evokes a national park or 1940s-vintage summer camp.

“Pickleball is going to be the activation here,” Thompson told CoStar News. “We want to capture what’s making this such a fast-growing sport, but we want to make this the place where 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds will want to come and spend some time.”

Pickleball has been around since the mid-1960s but is now finding growing popularity nationwide, increasingly showing up as an amenity at office properties, apartments and industrial parks. Thompson said the game is a prime example of what he calls “the protein on the plate” when combining sports and other activities with dining.

Of course, the pandemic's disruption of the Punchbowl Social concept in 2020 shows that any business concept can get hit with an unexpected challenge. And there's no guarantee pickleball won't end up as a fad and be abandoned in coming years. But Thompson is taking a cautious approach, reflecting an attitude now common among those embarking on new restaurant ventures in the wake of the pandemic.

Thompson, 51, was born on a military base in Germany but raised in Mississippi. He’s looking to combine elements of the Southern hospitality on which he was raised with the experiences of working in multiple restaurant jobs — front and back of the house — starting in his teens.

In 1997, when he was 25, Thompson opened his first restaurant, Buffalo Billiards & Havana Lounge in Nashville. This launched a career in hospitality that eventually expanded to Denver.

In Denver, he tried his hand at French brasseries. The first, Brasserie Rouge, earned acclaim as one of the city's best restaurants, but it closed in 2004 in what Thompson characterized as the "only restaurant I've ever opened that failed," according to the publication Eater Denver in 2012. He went on to open his second French brasserie, Le Grand Bistro and Oyster Bar, in 2011, only to close it in 2014 and say he shouldn't have taken it on.

"I want our customers to understand why this venture didn't work in the traditional sense: Ultimately, the fault lies with me. I should not have taken on a venture in a district that was so entirely dependent on theater and convention traffic," Thompson told Eater Denver in 2014. "I don't think I'm geared to manage that type of inconsistent up and down business."

Thompson started the family-friendly Punch Bowl Social chain in Denver in 2012, mixing bowling and other games with on-site casual dining. Punch Bowl Social grew to 20 locations nationwide and had several more in development by 2019, garnering nearly $120 million in annual revenue and a growing roster of big investors including the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel. That all changed when the pandemic hit in March 2020, severely hampering business and expansion at Punch Bowl Social.

“I laid off 2,400 people in a single day,” Thompson recalled. “Not a lot of CEOs had to do that. A lot of other people had to be laid off, and it was very tough for everyone at the company.”

Punch Bowl Social filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2020, a few weeks after Thompson left the company, and it was purchased out of bankruptcy by equity firm Crowd Out Capital, a former lender to Punch Bowl Social, in April 2021. It currently operates 15 locations nationwide.

“The company had more particular and unique struggles associated with COVID than did some others,” Thompson recalled. “And so in that period between March and August of 2020, I did nothing but try to solve those issues, but some of them were just not resolvable. And so I moved on to do other things.”

Those included acquiring and renovating two historic New Orleans hotels under his new company Angevin & CO., named for the 12th- and 13th-century empire of the English kings thanks to Thompson's longtime interest in English history and some distant British roots in his family tree. Last year, Angevin & Co. purchased and refurbished the historic Frenchmen Hotel, and it has a similar redevelopment underway with the Whitney Hotel in that city, slated to reopen as Hotel Fiona in April 2023.

Thompson nowadays is especially looking to capture special-event, party and group corporate business as customers steadily get back into social gatherings after more than two years of pandemic separation.

Thompson plans to open another recreational eatery next year called Jaguar Bolera, featuring Southern-style cuisine with more of a Southwestern flair and where the entertainment "protein" will include duckpin bowling, an old-style variation on traditional bowling that uses much smaller pins and balls and allows for three rolls per frame instead of two. The concept will also feature karaoke and “maker” events such as crafting and cooking classes in event spaces.

Angevin & Co. has a late 2023 opening planned at Raleigh, North Carolina’s Iron Works mixed-use development for Jaguar Bolera, with a name referencing the once much-wider range of the big cat throughout the South and Mexico. Thompson said the second opening of Jaguar is slated for New Orleans, with the concept highlighting high-end food and beverages in a space that has the feel of a lively food hall.

As with most of Thompson’s eat-play concepts, which started with an upscale billiards hall in Nashville, players in the new concept venues will be steps away from full-service and limited-service food, beverage and bar offerings.

With his next game-based ventures, Thompson is looking to serve customers including the growing flock of millennial and Generation Z professionals leaving more expensive regions in the West to take jobs with employers that are themselves moving to more affordable Sun Belt states, especially in the Southeast.

For instance, most of the cities where he is in “serious talks” about Camp Pickle with landlords are in the Sun Belt, places such as Atlanta, Georgia; Dallas, Texas; and Tampa and Jacksonville, Florida; along with Austin, Texas, and Charlotte, North Carolina. But because pickleball is now popular across geographies, he’s also in talks to locate in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. The first few locations are expected to be company-owned, with franchising being explored based on the performance of the earliest venues.

Pickleball is expected to keep locations activated from 8 a.m. to midnight on most days, which Thompson said is a point of interest for mixed-use developers he’s been speaking with.

“We are growing at a measured pace,” Thompson said. “We’re doing deals now, but I’m also going to be very patient with deal-making for these brands.”

His company is counting on continued improvement in the economy, with consumers wanting to get out of the house for experiences and landlords increasingly looking for nonshopping tenants whose business can’t be replicated online.

“Part of the reason I got back into this, is that the landlords and the capital were both calling me, asking me to get back into the game,” Thompson said. “Will we find the spaces? Well, based on how much my phone was ringing, the spaces are already there, and they’ve started asking us to get involved.”