Pickleball and dining: Why courts are the new food destinations

Chicago, Illinois — Ask any pickleballer what the kitchen is, and they’ll tell you it’s the 7ft (2.1-metre) nonvolley zone on either side of the net - and why you should stay out of it. But restaurateurs and investors hope the general public will come to associate pickleball with a more literal kitchen - one serving food before, during and after the game.

The pickleball court is no longer only for before lunch or after dinner. In recent years, pickleball "eatertainment" venues have taken off alongside eatertainment venues as a whole, an industry that Rex Reservations estimates at $120bn globally.

What is an eatertainment concept? It’s a venue where patrons come to participate in an activity - bowling, golf simulators, axe throwing, pickleball, darts - while ordering food and drinks. Think TopGolf or Lucky Strike.

Pickleball was the fastest-growing sport in the United States from 2022 to 2025, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, with participation rising by 171.8 percent. Last year, 24.3 million Americans played pickleball, a 22.8 percent increase from 2024. Ease of play, low barrier to entry and the low-impact nature of the sport are frequently cited as reasons for its popularity.

“The smaller court size and lightweight equipment make it accessible across generations and skill levels, so we can play with family and friends who aren’t pickleball regulars,” says regular pickleballer Emily Oprins, 35, of Naperville, Illinois.

And those same reasons are what make pickleball attractive to more casual players who may be intimidated by their local leagues but find an eatertainment venue to be the perfect speed.

From court to kitchen

When it comes to pairing recreation with food and beverages, pickleball is almost tailor-made for the eatertainment model, especially for novices or less-serious players. Games last 15 to 30 minutes, fitting naturally into ordering drinks between matches. Four-person games encourage larger groups. Players rotate in and out, creating downtime for eating and drinking, and the sport doesn’t require special athletic ability or expensive equipment.

Schuyler Seper, 34, of Goodyear, Arizona, had family coming to visit and wanted an activity that everyone could do together. He made a court reservation at the dine-in pickleball chain Chicken N Pickle’s Glendale location for his group, which included his grandmother, aunt, cousins and wife.

“I’d say that’s probably the most comfortable setting you can have if you’re playing for the first time,” Seper said. “When you walk in, it’s not in-your-face pickleball or athletics. It’s a restaurant first. You see people mingling, having drinks, eating. Then they’ll get you set up on your courts.”

The venue suits casual pickleball players like Seper, who plays monthly or when friends and family come to town but has no plans to join a league.

There is no industry standard for tracking dine-in pickleball establishments. Pickleball court locator Pickleheads lists more than 100 US establishments with both courts and food while USAPickleball reports 18,258 places to play nationwide as of last year. The larger figure includes public courts and recreation facilities without restaurants.

Some dine-in pickleball venues are chains. Crush Yard and Pickle & Social join Chicken N Pickle and Electric Pickle as concepts with multiple locations. Others are local one-offs, such as The Sandy Pickle in Dallas, Texas; SPF Chicago, which paired up with the Illinois city’s popular Honey Butter Fried Chicken restaurant for its food programme; Sip & Pickle in Miami, Florida; and The Exchange in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Housing dinner and an activity under the same roof is not a new concept, as any bowling alley operator will attest. But if consumers are going to be dropping hundreds of dollars on a night out, hot dogs and nachos aren’t going to cut it.

“We’ve never viewed ourselves as a pickleball venue with a restaurant attached. From the beginning, we set out to build a chef-driven restaurant that also offers incredible experiences,” says Kelli Alldredge, president of Chicken N Pickle.

The chain opened its first location in North Kansas City, Missouri, in 2016, well ahead of the modern pickleball boom, and now operates 13 locations across Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada.

For Chicken N Pickle, the goal is that the food, hospitality, entertainment and atmosphere all work together to create a place people want to return to, even if they never pick up a paddle, Alldredge says.

Indeed, many dine-in pickleball establishments tout chef-driven menus, scratch kitchens or a robust cocktail programme.

Amrita Bhasin, a consumer behaviour expert and cofounder and CEO of food service logistics company Sotira, recently met a group of friends to play at Electric Pickle. It’s a dine-in pickleball chain with locations in Nevada and Arizona and, soon, California. The company emphasises its food programme. “It’s a restaurant first. The food is top priority,” its website says. “Leave your paddles at home and find out.”

Bhasin, who frequently plays pickleball at eatertainment venues, was surprised to see many patrons were seemingly there just to grab a bite.

“It was hot and the courts were outdoors, and these people drove and parked and they were there just to eat the food,” Bhasin says.

The business of staying longer

Her observation reflects the broader strategy of many eatertainment operators: The activity gets customers through the door while the food and drink persuade them to stay.

“Every one of these concepts makes its real money on the activity: the court fee, the lane, the simulator,” says Ray Camillo, founder and CEO of Blue Orbit Restaurant Consulting, a national restaurant consulting firm. “The F&B [food and beverage] programme exists to stretch how long someone stays and increase what they spend while they’re there.”

For eatertainment concepts, increasing dwell time, the length of a guest’s visit from entry to exit, is important for profitability. At these venues, guests stay 90 to 120 minutes on average, Rex Reservations says, compared with 45 to 60 minutes at a casual restaurant, according to Resos.

“With these combined eating and entertainment concepts, people end up spending significantly more time at the establishment,” Bhasin says. “They have the food and the activity right there, so they stay longer. Courts are often priced by the hour. The more they stay, the more they eat and drink. Alcohol can subsidise the food cost at these kinds of places as the margin on alcohol can be so much higher.”

Serving alcohol courtside can make it more difficult for an eatertainment venue to obtain insurance coverage than a traditional restaurant, explains Guido Trevisan, an insurance broker at Menlo Insurance Services, whose accounts include restaurants and hospitality venues.

“What underwriters focus on is alcohol consumed during active play because impairment combined with athletic movement on a hard court raises both the frequency and the severity of claims compared with a restaurant where guests stay at a table,” Trevisan says. But this is more of an “operational hurdle” than a barrier to growth, he adds. Underwriters want to see venues design their waiver flow (such as, tying waivers to court bookings), train up alcohol service staff and provide real separation between the bar area and play area.

Betting on the experience

Investors, however, are more bullish on the eatertainment model than they are on traditional restaurants, Camillo says.

“A padel [another racket sport rising in popularity] court or a bowling lane is a much more durable, less trend-driven revenue stream than a dining room seat, and it comes with better real estate economics. It’s not competing purely on per-seat turns. F&B just juices the model on top of that.”

Private equity isn’t just investing in dine-in pickleball concepts because the sport is popular among Americans. Landlords are eager to lease to pickleball concepts for multiple reasons. Large indoor pickleball facilities can absorb anywhere from 30,000sq ft (2,800sq metres) to 70,000sq ft (6,500sq metres), giving new leases of life to former sites of shuttered big-box retail stores, department stores and grocery stores. Look at where many of these pickleball venues are located on a map, and you’ll see that they frequently correlate with suburban developments needing traffic.

Pickleball is “a draw for strip centres and malls as well as it brings in traffic where people will shop and eat after they are finished”, says Jeff Lichtenstein, CEO and broker at Echo Commercial Properties. “In South Florida, there is a lot of demand for this, especially in the summertime or when it rains as the country clubs and other communities don't have indoor facilities. People need AC to play in the summer.”

In other words, investors aren’t simply betting on pickleball remaining popular. They’re betting that these venues can generate recurring revenue while helping revive struggling retail corridors. The business appeals to landlords and investors for the same reason it appeals to customers: It keeps people in one place longer.

For consumers, that extra time translates into something that has become increasingly difficult to find in the restaurant industry: value. Indeed, when dinner is paired with a fun activity, patrons are happier to hand over their credit card: 21 percent of Americans said they were willing to pay more at an eatertainment venue than at a traditional restaurant, according to a 2019 study conducted by SevenRooms, a data-driven hospitality platform.

“These eatertainment venues, pickleball or otherwise, are very popular now as people look for greater value when dining out,” says Maeve Webster, president of the food industry consultancy Menu Matters.

“Restaurants have been struggling with prices, quality, consistency and, as a result, their value proposition,” Webster added. “Places like this offer guests more than just a meal, which makes for a far greater value proposition. And all of this is coming at a time when people are placing a far greater emphasis on experiences and human connections.”

Increasingly, meeting up has become about more than just eating and drinking; people want to do something together. OpenTable, an online platform for learning about restaurants and booking reservations, reports a 46 percent year-over-year rise in experiential dining from 2024 to 2025, with 37 percent of consumers saying they wanted more of it in 2026.

The Physical Activity Council, which conducts an annual study to establish levels of personal activity and identify key trends in sports, fitness and recreational participation in the US, estimates that since 2020, the number of “inactive” Americans has dropped by 13.6 million, or 18 percent.

Those changing habits have helped eatertainment concepts attract private equity interest. But these firms must ensure return on their investment, which has increasingly taken the form of private corporate events and membership models. Monthly membership fees at the nation’s most popular dine-in pickleball venues range from $75 to $149 a month but include perks like food and beverage discounts and dedicated court times.

“From a recurring revenue perspective, when you make it a subscription, the business can forecast revenue more accurately,” Bhasin says. “They’re not making margin off the superusers. The users who only come in every couple weeks are where they make their margin.”

We’ve seen the recurring membership model become standard at country clubs, golf courses and bowling leagues. The more successful these businesses become financially, the more exclusive they risk becoming socially.

Bhasin hopes pickleball club operators can find ways to preserve affordability.

“My request to private equity companies is: Can we find a way to offer deals?” Bhasin says. “It’s meant to be a ubiquitous experience, but the prices are a barrier to entry.”

Still, a dine-in pickleball venue membership is much more affordable for the average American than, say, a country club, where monthly dues can range from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 on top of a hefty initiation fee.

Electric Pickle offers free court reservations every day until 4pm from June through August. The promotion makes the experience more affordable, but it’s also smart business strategy. If most guests visit in the evening, free daytime court reservations may generate food and beverage sales that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Outlasting the fad

Growing interest in pickleball eatertainment venues does not eliminate the risks of saturation, high upfront costs, uneven off-peak demand or simply the competition from free community courts.

So what happens if pickleball cools off? Could these venues adapt to new sports and events, or are they tied too closely to one cultural moment?

These venues, once built out, can fairly easily convert to accommodate an activity like padel, but less so tennis, which uses a court almost double the size. To guard against a potential pickleball downturn, many of these venues are bolstering their event capabilities, including renting their kitchens to outside caterers for events. And pickleball venues are certainly easier to reimagine than something that requires a highly specialised build and expensive technology, such as a Formula One virtual racing venue or indoor golf.

“I’d rather have a Chicken N Pickle and pivot than a Topgolf - a three-storey, 108-bay thing - and then golf goes away,” Chicken N Pickle founder Dave Johnson says.

Camillo identifies operator discipline as the biggest risk to the longevity of dine-in pickleball. When owners are enticed to build ambitious restaurants inside their entertainment concept, it destroys the labour model that made the concept work in the first place.

“The ones I’d bet on long term are the ones that stay disciplined: hoodless kitchens, tight menus built for one cook, self-pour or simplified bar programmes and a brand identity that knows exactly what it is,” Camillo says.

Dine-in pickleball concepts are betting that they can combine one of America’s fastest-growing sports with a restaurant model that increases dwell time and spending. But their long-term success may depend less on pickleball’s continued growth than on the choices operators make, experts say.

“I do worry about pickleball being a fad, and I just don’t know if it’s going to last,” Seper says. “But what Chicken N Pickle did is focus on the amenities and the experience, and the pickleball is just a backdrop. And so as long as they focus on more of the customer experience as far as the food quality, the drinks, then I think these places can maintain their presence.”