Boardwalk Bar

I just went to Boardwalk bar for the first time. I could not stop raving about it! The atmosphere at this outdoor bar is phenomenal. You feel like you could be anywhere! I would totally recommend this place to anyone!

Skeeball Tournament and decent beer prices — yes please. I liked the outdoor area a ton also. Nice little firepit and benches. Kind of like sitting in my backyard — only nicer. MUCH nicer.
The day I went was at the end of September and they had EXCELLENT beer specials on some of their summer seasonals. $ 3 – 4 on some decent craft beer selections. Even if it was them simply cleaning out their summer stock — it felt a lot like #winning.
I am looking forward to checking this place out when it’s warm. Seems like a good alternative to the Piazza.

I feel compelled to write a review in hopes that the owner sees this and is open to suggestions. The food is a solid 4. The service is somewhere around a 1.5−2.
I visited with my husband and son on a Sunday night for AYCE seafood. I think it’s a steal at $ 25 — including one lobster per person (if available). Our waitress was very nice, actually all the waitresses were very nice as they came over and talked to my son. I love the outside seating area — it’s well decorated and nicely lit. The boardwalk games inside are really fun.
Here’s where things get dicey — the AYCE seafood is 1 dish per person at a time. No problem, right? You order one dish and you are not permitted to order another until your first arrives. Ok, I can deal with that. We order our drinks — a draft beer and margarita… guess how long it takes to get them — 15 minutes! Ok, so on a Sunday there may be 25 people there, tops. There are 2 bartenders. 15 minutes! I was terribly confused by this as it appeared one of the bartenders was talking to people at the bar instead of helping with drinks for the wait staff’s tables. I should have known that would indicate how long our food would take. We were at the restaurant for almost 2 hours and in that time only 3 dishes for the AYCE seafood came out. All of the dishes are steamed and let’s face it, steamed seafood takes what, 5 – 10 minutes tops? I finally had to give up eating! I didn’t have the time to sit for hours and eat. Besides, I had my son with me.
I understand if it’s strategy on the owner’s part — the longer people sit the more they drink or if they sit a long time, they eventually give up and stop eating. However, my husband and I would like to come back here but both agreed it couldn’t be on AYCE seafood night because the time it takes to eat just does not exist in our lives typically. So they lost our business there. I’m willing to try another night with friends for Happy Hour or something of the like, but I doubt my husband and I will be returning as a family unit because the wait is just too long for our little guy.

Friendly service, games to play and food was ok. Fried Oysters were good, fries needed some seasoning. Flounder sandwich tasted ok, but came back later on me.
Music is pretty loud.

Just went to Boardwalk Bar this past Wednesday and had a great time! Friends of mine had a gift card, so we decided to try it out. Their outside area is perfect… with plenty of seating, a firepit and a ping pong table and the inside has all kinds of boardwalk games. This place is great for anyone with a competitive spirit. Their drinks are on the cheaper side and our server was extremely friendly. Our only complaint was that the music was lacking, but I will definitely be visiting this place again this summer.

The concept is good and the beer is cheap. The problem is you get what you pay for. The bartenders are horrible. I ordered off the drink menu and they gave me a shout that cost as much as the drink they were supposed to make with the shot! Also i ordered the pork and sweet potato fries. The pork was bland. They also overcharged my tab! This is a place to grab a few beers then move on.

I saw Boardwalk Bar one day while walking to Emmanuelle (this is probably the first and only time BB and Emmanuelle will ever be mentioned in the same sentence) and decided to stop in one day. That day came yesterday, and I was able to conclude relatively quickly that this is not my scene.
I think I was the only person in the crowd old enough to grow a beard. They were checking IDs, or I would have estimated the average age to be 16 or so. I was amused by the «VIP area» they had in the corner. It was literally a vinyl strap roping off the area in front of a diner booth. There were a dozen people packed into this 60 square feet. The rest of the place was nearly empty. I marveled at this as I attempted to unstick my feet from the floor so that I could reunite with people my own age at another bar.
There were a couple of positives, though:
1) the beer is ridiculously cheap. I think I paid $ 13 for 4 beers! If I ever fall on hard times and find it a good deal to have cheap beer in exchange for being immersed in the social milieu of brahs and woo girls, and I will keep this in mind.
2) the doorman/​bouncer was quite nice. We chatted with him for awhile, after he escorted us across the River Styx. I will remember him fondly until I am able to drink from the River Lethe and forget this entire experience.
Again, I’m joking around a lot here, but I really think I’m just too old for this place and that it’s not my scene in particular. If you are close to 21, you might like it.

Update: seems it’s turned into a DJ bar. This is VERY sad! I loved the arcade feel so much more than Barcade’s feel but it’s completely changed. Likely not going back.

This place sounds like a poor mans Dave and Busters, but its even a step down from there. Games are way overpriced and the atmosphere is a little weird. The beer is cheap cheap cheap tho. Worth a stop in to grab a few before moving elsewhere.

This past Saturday night, I celebrated my 40^th birthday with a party at Boardwalk Bar, and we couldn’t have picked a better place. There were a lot of places I’d thought about having this party, but none of them were too appealing to me. I wanted somewhere fun, where I hadn’t already been for other people’s parties and special events. When I learned Boardwalk Bar had deep-​fried Oreos and air hockey, I knew this was the place. We had about 40 or so people there for the party throughout the night. All the bartenders, especially Jesse, were so helpful and accommodating, and before the party, Nicole helped us figure everything out in terms of food to order and times to hold the event. If you’re looking for a space for a fun special event, definitely consider the Boardwalk Bar. I’m glad I did.

I came to this bar with about 25 friends for my birthday on a Saturday night. We all had one drink and couldn’t wait to leave. It took at least 40 minutes to get a drink because the bartenders were all too busy counting their tips. The menu they had didn’t match the one in pictures, which doesn’t matter anyway because they were out of what seemed like everything. I finally just settled on french fries and funnel cake. The fries were bland and the funnel cake was dry. Absolutely awful.

God awful.
Bartender’s might have difficulty putting their shoes on the morning (to be fair, the tall older guy with glasses was great and friendly, the younger bearded guy and blonde should have their hands flayed). I ordered a whiskey sour and watched the blonde attempt to figure it out. She came pretty close by pouring whiskey and nuking the rest of the glass with seltzer water – oh wait that’s not a whiskey sour at all. You know, one of the easiest drinks to make.
Ordered pretzel bites thinking, «well that’s impossible to fuck up» and boy was I wrong. I was handed some misshapen clumps of dough that were still white (aren’t pretzels brown, or have some sort of crust?) and somewhere between the sizes of a dime and quarter. Salt? Ha, you wish sucker. This sad excuse took almost 40 minutes to even come out.
$ 10 shots of Jim Bean. I don’t even… what?!
If you’re going to run an «arcade», make sure your coin machine gives out coins. If it’s going to eat a $ 5 bill, put a fucking sign on it to warn people.
Seriously though, this place should be nuked from upper orbit and the blonde should be placed in traffic.

The bartenders here might be the absolutely worst in Philadelphia. I’ve never experienced anything quite so shitty.
Also, anyone that charges more than $ 6 for a shot of Jim Beam deserves to be sucker punched.

We come here for the $ 1 tacos on Wednesdays and free shuffle board. The few times we’ve been here the staff has been friendly and drinks are reasonable. Once we came and they were out of a lot of the menu items but then compensated us with free wings. Each time we’ve been here the place has basically been emptied, but the staff assured us that a crowd comes in later at night. The space is huge and there’s an outdoor area that looks great, but it hasn’t been warm enough for us to capitalize on it yet. Definitely check their facebook page for specials prior to coming. Overall, I think this place is a nice addition to the neighborhood.

A fellow Unilocaler had a free happy hour for ten, so after grabbing a burger at PYT made my way there. I was excited about the prospect of playing the games, and while they were fun, they were expensive. I played some skee ball, some basketball, and some air hockey. The bartender was very friendly, and made my man friend a crazy colored drink with lots of alcohol in it. The shuffleboard table is miniaturized. It was really cold in there, and we were basically the only people there. Definitely would be a good spot for a local, but I wouldn’t make the trek to No Libs to go there specifically.

Thanks to Sue G.‘s ROTD I am reminded of a very drunken afternoon spent here on what has become a monthly meeting of the Brunch Club. We started our morning at One Shot for some eats and quickly decided that the day was too nice to call it quits and so we forged onward with many beers at many locations in Northern Liberties spending the majority of our time at the Piazza. When it started to fill up, we decided to take a little walk and found ourselves was this awesome place called Boardwalk Bar. Keep in mind that this is attached to the North Shore Swim Club, but no membership is required to booze and bro-​out if that’s your agenda.
We walked in to find quite a quiet scene; with mild trepidation we kind of peaked around until Jesse (our bartender) invited us to come in, grab a drink and keep him company. Over the course of the next few hours we enjoyed very budget friendly priced craft beers, air hockey, some serious foosball action, TOTS!, skee-​ball, and great music. Now I don’t know about you, but that is one hell of a winning combination if ever I drunkenly stumbled upon one.
This was the last stop on our NoLibs brunch/​bar crawl, but it will not be my last time stopping by. Like Neal N., my only gripe is the serving of great beers in crappy plastic cups, but I kind of get it seeing as they serve North Shore and it would be problematic having people break glass on the pool deck. Other than that, it’s a solid 4-​stars and two thumbs up from me.

Wow. What a gem!
Free:
foosball
shuffleboard/​sliders
outdoor corn hole
other entertainment:
air hockey
Golden Tee 2013 — 18 holes for only $ 4
claw game
skeeball
basketball
Fast and the Furious racing game
Big Buck Hunter
and some others
bonuses:
½ price beer during Happy Hour, including a respectable craft beer list
outdoor area with firepit
friendly bartender, Kevin
Need I say more?
oh… PS The only complaint is that they were serving beer from a plastic cup. How do you have a craft beer list, but serve in plastic? Still… this place gets 5 stars.