This review is for a private event held at Belmar Lanes--my husband's grandmother turned 90 and the family rented out the bowling alley for her birthday. (Yes, she still bowls!) We were able to bring in catered food and had a nice area with a large table for gifts, cake, etc. It seemed like they had assigned us about half of the bowling alley; I saw non-family members on one side when we first got there, and others coming in as we were leaving. That left us plenty of space and four or five lanes to bowl in. Bowling and shoes seemed to be included with the rental.
While it was a nice party, this place does have a couple of quirks. For one, I could not find a weight on any of the balls I tried. Isn't that kind of important information for bowlers? I had to just keep trying until I found one that fit my hand. Another weird thing was that they combined groups of bowlers and moved us across lanes. Like, I was bowling in a group assigned to lane 13, but the system would shuffle us in with lane 14 so sometimes you'd bowl on one side and sometimes on the other. This made it so that sometimes you bowled twice like one turn right after the other, and sometimes you sat and waited for a long time while everyone else cycled through. I really just did not understand the logic there at all; it did not seem to make the game go any faster or anything. Finally, Belmar has that classic bowling lane smell: decades of cigarette smoke seeped into the surroundings.
Perfectly fine, nothing outstandingly amazing or horribly awful. A solid 3 stars. read more