Out, About: Is bowling a thing?

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I don’t know about you, but I’m only just getting to know the Nashville that sprung up during the pandemic. I can feel totally lost in neighborhoods I’ve known or years — because absolutely everything has changed.

I went with my wife and daughter to Pins Mechanical Company in The Gulch Monday night. It’s in a building on Grundy Street, previously owned by Gibson Guitars (around the corner from what was once restaurateur Jody Faison’s little empire of 12th and Porter, Pub of Love and Café 123).

They have duckpin bowling — along with cornhole, trashcan beer pong, ping pong, giant Jenga, pinball and old-school arcade games straight out of Stranger Things. (I scored my personal best in Galaga.) It’s a bar, but kids are welcome before 8 p.m. My kid loves it.

Despite all the signage overusing every known double-entendre with the word “balls” (c’mon people, low hanging fruit), Pins is a blast, and duckpin bowling is charmingly retro and fun.

At first blush, duckpin just looks like standard bowling on a smaller scale. But there are key differences that make it deceivingly tricky. The balls are about the size of bocce balls, and the also-small pins don’t tend to knock each other over the way they do in standard bowling. But, you get three rolls per turn. And the lanes are short, so aiming is easier. (Also, you don’t have to change into clown shoes.)

Between Pins, Pinewood Social, Eastside Bowl and Brooklyn Bowl, it seems bowling is having a moment in Nashville. Is this the reversal of a trend? Melrose Lanes on 8th Avenue was popular when I was growing up, but it closed in 2005. Others followed, like Madison Bowling — and just this spring, Donelson Bowl. Yet, we have a new crop that caters not to the bowling leagues and birthdays of yesteryear, but to the young and hip of today.

After bowling, we had dinner at Chauhan Ale and Masala House. It’s the bomb.