Feather bowling is the new pickleball — one NYC bar has Gen Zers lining up to play
Fans of a feather flock together at Randolph Beer in DUMBO.
Those who feel sour about missing the pickleball craze can bowl over this new obscure pastime: feather bowling.
While few have heard of, let alone played, the niche sport before, it’s actually a classic at Rust Belt taverns where the curious game has been played for generations.
Randolph Beer owner Dave Plate only learned about the very old sport, said to have originated in Belgium, from watching a YouTube video and thought it was right up his customers’ alley.
“We went on total faith,” Plate told The Post about deciding to introduce the contest to New Yorkers.
Described as “a combination of curling, shuffleboard, bocce, and bowling” by the Randolph’s assistant general manager and de facto feather bowling commissioner Sarah Duval, the bar’s decision to try something different has clearly paid off.
Now, according to Plate, the bar’s feather bowling courts are consistently booked solid through almost every weekend, at the rate of $25 for half an hour and $50 for an hour.
The objective of the game is relatively simple. One team of two will toss their five-pound, wooden rolling devices — known as pucks — down a lengthy, curved alley towards a feather anchored into the floor.
The goal is to get as close to said upright feather’s base as possible. Careful throws get the best results — too much oomph behind your puck, and your chances of winning will wind up in the literal gutter behind the feather.
Like bocce, the feather bowler closest to the pin is awarded one point and more can be scored each round as well. Long story short, the game then becomes a test of precision, with the first team to reach 10 points declared the winner — sometimes after bartenders or neutral parties are called upon to intervene and see who got closer to the feather. (No extra points for actually touching the thing.)
Who invented feather bowling?
“Legend has it that many, many years ago on the fields of Belgium, farmers would get bored,” Plate, who opened his watering hole and game room back in May 2022, told The Post. “So they would grab wheels of cheese and they would bowl them down fields towards pigeon feathers — playing a game of who could get closest to the feather.”
The game remains extremely obscure — not only in the United States but in its alleged home country, too. In fact, just one bar in Detroit, where enough Belgians settled years ago that they even had their own neighborhood watering hole, has kept the flame alive in the fifty states.
It was five years ago when Plate first saw YouTube footage of the game being played in the vintage lanes at the Motor City’s Cadieux Cafe.
“We gotta have that in New York,” he recalled thinking to himself at the time.
There’s no standard version of feather bowling, Plate said, leaving him to get creative with the court design, while trying to remain faithful to the game as he observed it being played in Detroit. Two 65-foot-long, roughly nine-foot-wide courts cost the bar nearly $60,000 to install.
Plate also got specialized outdoor turf installed as the court’s surface, had pucks specially furnished, and repurposed bath mats to pad the backstops.
He even installed overhead cameras and TVs so teams could see where exactly their puck landed on the other side in real-time.
“These courts are about 70% do-it-yourself, you can’t get this stuff prepacked on Amazon,” the owner joked.
First-timers Leah DeVito, 24 and Olivia Miller, 24, had fun beating two friends at the game on a recent Thursday evening.
“It was fun, but we weren’t very good at it,” Miller confessed, remaining optimistic she’d improve her technique with time.
Could feather bowling be the next pickleball?
“I could see it, [especially] if it’s done at a bar setting,” Miller added.
The Post gets into the action
Plate said there’s usually a learning curve that takes three or four tries to get in a groove — but I got the hang shortly after a single practice round.
After all, you can’t teach instinct.
What I learned immediately: Careful, underhand tosses are key. The gutter won’t seem a factor for at least 62 out of the 65 feet — right before hearing a huge thud into the bathmat backstop.
Tossing at about 60% of the velocity you would throw a bowling ball was most efficient for ruffling the feather.
It’s best to feel the puck gently roll off your fingers as that’s most important to controlling speed and guided movement down the turf.
There are also pros and cons to which team goes first or second.
The team in the top of the inning gets the benefit of not just rolling close to the feather first but is also awarded the chance to “barricade” that close shot by clogging up the main court with other pucks.
As for the second team to go, they reap the benefit of being able to knock down the proverbial walls of Jericho.
With the right amount of skill and momentum, one can bump the other team’s pucks and into the gutter, where they’ll now be out of play.
The alternative approach of weaving around team one’s defense by using the court’s sloped sides really comes into play.
Although not easy for novices, rolling on that upward grade and creating a precise trajectory to slalom side to side through an opponent’s barricade is when the game’s true beauty is felt.
Your pals will definitely buy you a round if you pull it off properly.
