Restaurants & Eatertainment
In
the mid-1980s, an independent Burger King restaurant added a small soft-modular-play unit to the outside of its restaurant. Sales dramatically increased. Thus began what has become a major trend of adding children's play and entertainment areas to quick service restaurants.
Some restaurants concepts have successfully integrated food and entertainment into what is called restaurant-entertainment or eatertainment concepts. Perhaps one of the earliest examples of this eatertainment phenomenon are Chuck E. Cheese's restaurants. Another example of restaurant-entertainment that caters to an adult market is Dave & Buster's. What are known as pizza and games concepts, such as Peter Piper Pizza, fall into this category. The newest form of eatertainment venues is family pizza buffet/entertainment centers. These range in size from 25,000 to 80,000 square feet. When the entertainment is less interactive and more in the form of immersion theming, the facilities are referred to as "theme restaurants".
The White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group has broad-base experience and expertise in feasibility, design and full start-up of food and beverage facilities in entertainment and edutainment facilities, as well as stand-alone eatertainment or restaurant-entertainment facilities. Our development work has included the design of major food service components in entertainment and edutainment facililites:
  
- Yummy in Your Tummy Cafe in the 28,000 sf Bamboola children’s edutainment center in San Jose, California
- Charlies' Diner in the 32-lane Olathe Lanes East Bowling Center
- LouLou's Café in the 2,400 square meter LouLou Al Dugong's children's play and discovery center in Dubai, U.A.E.
- Paradise Café in the 36,000 square foot indoor and 15-acre outdoor Paradise Park in Lee's Summit, Missouri.
- BellaBoo’s Café in the 22,700 square foot children's play and discovery center in the Three Rivers Park in Lake Station/Gary Indiana that opened September 2009
- Max's Diner in the 5,000 square meter Dinotropolis children's entertainment center in Caracas, Venezuela
- Herd Rock Calfe at Davis' Farmland, a children's discovery farm in Sterling, Massachusetts
 
 
Our work includes name and brand development; full architectural, interior design and kitchen design; menu, recipe, product sourcing and full kitchen start-up and training and operational consulting.
We also design and produce stand-alone eatertainment (restaurant-entertainment) facilities. Our
work experiences with these facilities includes:
We have successfully translated our entertainment experience to the food
service industry with the design of entertainment and play features for
restaurants and food courts. Two of our projects were the design of a
unique, proprietary play area for a new Pizza Hut prototype restaurant
that included three types of children's play besides soft contained play
and a 4,000 sf children's play area called Funderland for the food court
at Foothills Mall in Tucson, Arizona.
Many of our children's projects include children's cooking
areas, where children prepare a food item to eat.
For existing food service facilities, we offer family
friendly audits to evaluate all aspects of the business as experienced
by families and children.
The Food Network's Unwrapped show filming the children's cooking
area
at Paradise Park, one of the projects our company designed and produced.
Pizza Today Magazine Features White Hutchinson
 The
August issue of Pizza Today magazine, the trade journal for the
pizza restaurant and pizzeria industry, includes an article entitled Courting
Kids. Both Randy White, our CEO,
and Vicki Stoecklin, our Education
& Child Development Director, were quoted as experts on making restaurants
child and family friendly. Read the article here.
Food Network "Unwrapped" Show
Features White Hutchinson
 "Environments
that make you say wow while you chow." That's how the Food
Network's January 3, 2004 Unwrapped television show on eatertainment described
the facilities our company produces for clients. To be exact, the show
featured an interview with Randy White, our CEO, who they introduced as
"an eatertainment expert," and reported that the White Hutchinson
Leisure & Learning Group was "a company that specializes in creating
environments designed to make you say wow while you chow." The show
also featured scenes from the children's discovery play center at
Paradise Park, which was shown as an example of an eatertainment facility.
We are very appreciative of the opportunity to have had this nationwide,
maybe worldwide, recognition and exposure. If you missed the show, the
Food Network will be rerunning it many times.
Additional reading:
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White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group
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Developed concept, mix and preliminary plans for the 130,000 square foot indoor