Myth: Debunked · 11:00pm February 1st
So one of my nieces had a birthday last weekend. My brother and his girl (they never married) decided to celebrate in their usual way: Mr. Gatti’s. Seeing as I was home visiting my parents this past weekend, I too was invited.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with this chain, it’s a southern pizza restaurant aimed at children, popular for its game rooms and being dirt cheap. My parents used to take me there when I was a kid, but it’s been over two decades since I last went, probably close to three. I was not enthusiastic, but was at least curious to see what it would be like compared to my childhood.
First off, my brother and his girl are crazy. They had no less than nine kids at that party, most under the age of five, and they wanted to also cut a birthday cake and have the birthday girl open presents right there in the restaurant. Chaos, my friends, absolute chaos. My parents and I didn’t stick around for the whole thing, because there is only so much Discord we can take.
As for the restaurant itself… well, it lived up to its reputation, and that reputation is: cheap. The building was uninspiring, looking to have been maintained at bottom dollar for decades. The pizza itself was outright bland. I’ve never before had a pizza that didn’t make me immediately want to go back and get seconds, but somehow Mr. Gatti’s pulled it off. That's the debunked myth from the title, BTW: it is indeed possible to have bad pizza. I felt sick for the next two days after eating it too. The only thing that still looked to be worthwhile was the game room, where you could tell the majority of the company’s funds go, although I note it’s a lot smaller than it seemed to my little kid mind.
So yeah, not a great experience. At least now I know to duck and avoid next time I get invited there again.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Tune in next week for another re-do of the Friendship is Magic episodes, an older Rainbow Dash facing familial challenges, and a welcome return to the Seawall (after this weekend, I need it).
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The sub text at the bottom is beyond tempting...
for someone who has no money to spend and a plethora of unfinished projects untouched for months.
I want so bad, but I can't until my finances are more stable. 
One of these days, I really want to go back to like, chuck e cheese or cici's. These were some of my favorite places as a kid, but it's probably been almost two decades since I've been to either. Is the pizza garbage? are the games rigged? are these places still in business? All these questions and more...
Would you not have presents opened on site? Especially for a young child at that. I think, every time i had a birthday party like this, presents were opened on site. I wasn't the social one with the big friend group, but my brothers were and going to chuck e cheese or a similar place where children gather was a common theme. It wasn't until we moved to a much bigger house that we actually started inviting people over.
Disappointing pizza is always a sad thing.🍕
Cute picture
I can picture this pizza
I can feel it
As god is my witness, I dare say I can taste it, entirely from your description D:
You're unlocking memories from my childhood. The first time I saw Bambi was at a Mr. Gatti's pizza back when I was very, very little. We just so happened to be eating during the scary fire scene. I don't recall how I reacted, but that nugget is in there next to the only Super Mario World pinball machine I'd ever seen in-person.
I grew up around Houston, and there was a popular Main Event/Dave & Busters-styled Gatti Town that sprang up. It lasted maybe a little over a decade, but I remember going there a few times. No bowling, but it did have a large game center, laser tag, and I want to say go-carts? It became a church later after it went under. Did you ever expeirence a Gatti Town?
We had Chuck E Cheese for our kid-friendly go-to up in the Midwest. The last time I went was oh goodness over a decade and a half ago, probably more than that.
There was an adult variation on the theme we visited 2-3 years ago for a friend of my step-dad's birthday. I got a portable water jug with the movie Luck emblazoned on it.
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The only thing I know for sure about the other two is that Chuck-E-Cheese has almost-not-really retired the animatronics. Right after the release of the FNAF movie they announced that they were pulling said animatronics from all stores save a single location in California, where they'd be kept running like normal. Some believe that FNAF finally killed Chucky and the gang by merely existing, but the Theory crew note that the company has been trying to do this for a long time now. Who knows?
No, I would not open presents on-site. In my family, when my cousins and I were still kids and still got loads of presents for birthdays we would have them at either our parents' homes or, more often, our grandparents' home. We never had friends over for these kinds of things though, only family (because our family was big enough as it was). If a restaurant visit did happen, it was always a separate thing from the party, usually a day or two before/after.
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I used to have a golden rule about pizza: "Pizza is like sex: when it's good it's really good but when it's bad it's still kinda good." Alas, that rule was finally broken. My world has been rocked.
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Of course it is. It has Marble in it.
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Gatti Town became a thing in 1997. By that time I was thirteen and my parents weren't doing the Mr. Gatti's thing anymore with us. We'd sort of just grown out of it/lost interest. So no, I never experienced Gatti Town. I don't know that they still exist anymore, possibly being victims of when the company went bankrupt in 2019.
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An "adult version of the theme"? One must wonder what that would entail.
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I want to say it was Dave & Busters or something like that so basically a larger more whole family oriented place.
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In spite of having a relatively big immediate family (two brothers and one sister) extended family was all over the place and my cousins are much older than I am with an entire generation between my aunts and the nearest aged relative, their grandkids. My friend, who is more like a brother was basically a constant presence in my life and his family was more of a close cousins (and me) kind of thing, but I was never really near enough to know any of my closely aged cousins who lived on the opposite side of Texas. so, with a handful of friends (eight, max) presents were opened on site, and the trash, subsequently, didn't come home with us that way.
Legit, I don't think I ever saw an animatronic chuck e at any point I was ever in a chuck e cheese. By the time I was going, I think they'd switched to a dude in a costume, because I do remember that. The restaurant I remember going to was relatively new too (like, back in 2000)
so they may have already been trying to get rid of the bots. I don't think I was aware of animatronics at all until FNAF really became a thing.
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My family members on my Dad's side are spread all over the place, but on my Mom's side we all lived pretty close – most within a 5 minute drive. That includes a lot of second cousins too. Any family gathering was guaranteed to have at least 14 people, half of them kids, and that assumed only aunts, uncles, and first cousins showed up. And all of my generation of the family were fairly close in age, so my cousins essentially were my friends.
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I never went to one of those. There's one relatively close, but I was warned off from it by my cousins, mostly because they claimed it was for a younger crowd and I'd probably feel out of place.
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If Chuck E Cheese is for little kids D&B or whatever the place was called is for middle kids and up. We were there at Dinner time so the midday crowd was gone. Still busy but not as bad as a field trip to Chuck's if that makes sense.
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my condolences :C
I really like how versatile and yet clear your tiered system of review/proof/critique/edit is. Would you mind if I use it? I've never charged people for editing before, but I do need money.
I think I'll work out a similar system for the kind of editing I like to do, which is to critique a query letter. That is, the author should write what is basically the query letter he'd send to a publisher if he wanted to sell a novel, but before writing the story. It would explain what the story is about and what will make it work. I often find that it's too late, or at best wastes a lot of the author's time (and mine), to critique a story after it's written.
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By all means, go ahead!
The query letter sounds like a nice idea. Mayhap I could use it myself in the future. I've certainly had times where people would ask me to edit/critique a story that was... eh, I'll go with "not worth it". Out of politeness.