Delightfully kitschy pub games and competitive fun abound at West Midtown’s Painted Duck

If Buckhead’s The Painted Pin is an homage to traditional bowling and classic bar games of ping pong, bocce ball and ski ball, its new sister concept, The Painted Duck, is a quirky, esoteric counterpart.

Helmed by Justin Amick and William Stallworth, founders and principles of Painted Hospitality, The Painted Duck brings duckpin bowling (played with smaller pins and balls) and non-traditional pub games to Atlanta’s Westside.

“It’s that winning formula The Painted Pin has, just presented in a different rendition for the Westside,” says Amick. “The Westside was kind of that next big area we wanted to be part of.” Housed in the Stockyards Atlanta development, the boutique gaming parlor includes 16 duckpin bowling lanes, two Belgian feather bowling lanes, two indoor horseshoe pits, two deck shuffleboard courts, two 10-foot basketball goals, toad in the hole, air hockey and snookball, which Amick describes as “a hybrid sport merging pool and soccer.”

While gaming options are abundant, Amick notes that The Painted Duck is “a bar and a gaming lair and emporium.” Guests can choose from a menu of “backyard bar fare” produced by Chef Thomas Collins that includes everything from wood-fired meats to quintessential party dips. The beverage program, led by Trip Sandifer, includes a signature Frosted Duck L’Orange, an alcoholic riff on The Varsity’s classic frosted orange.

The space itself feels “almost like ‘Game of Thrones’ meets like a WASP-y hunting lodge,” says Amick of the natural distressed wood and stone, leather and South American fabrics. A 50-foot mural of migrating ducks by one of Amick’s favorite artists, Todd Murphy, takes up the back wall of the bowling lanes.

“It really is a high-end, boutique experience, the same formula as The Painted Pin, but it definitely has its own identity,” Amick says.

thepaintedduckatl.com

STORY: Claire Ruhlin