Flicks and Food

The Alamo Drafthouse

Posted on 04. Jun, 2010 by sarahjintexas in Theaters

Last night, a group of us went to the Alamo Drafthouse Theater in San Antonio. We all lived on different sides of town and we thought it would be  good central location, as well as the fact that it was supposed to be very adult friendly, with no unsupervised kids running around. We were with a Childfree meetup group, so that was also an important consideration. Just an FYI. they have mother and baby day on Tuesday and kids can go the rest of the week, they just have to be supervised by an adult.

Walking in, there was indeed a large selection of beers on tap. We headed straight to the theatre to watch Robin Hood. Under each row, there was menus and a row of lights to read them by. To place your order, you have to put a piece of paper up like a flag for the waiter to see.

Now, I’m going to admit that most of what happens next is probably only going to affect short people. I’m only 4’11″ so it may be unique to us little people. However, the chairs are not comfortable for little people. They’re like racing car seats for extremely tall people. I wasn’t comfortable the entire movie. When I put my “flag” up, I couldn’t see the movie screen. Any time a waiter came to check on us, I couldn’t see the screen.

Now back to normal people. The lights under the bench in front of us never dim. You can’t turn them off. I had a sweater with me that I had to use to cover them, as they were really irritating my husband. One of my tall friends sat with her legs crossed in such a fashion to cover them. But, the light from ALL the lights together kinda lit up the whole room, so it wasn’t a nice dark movie theatre.

Food came out in random order. Granted, there were 8 of us, and we all ordered on separate checks. However, since my husband and I ordered at the same time on the same ticket, you’d think the meals would come out at relatively the same time. No. He got his meal, finished it and then we had to inquire about mine. It came about 20 mins after that. Everyone’s drinks came out sporadically. Which also meant there was a constant procession of wait staff bobbing around in front of us, asking who had ordered what.

We live over by the Rialto theater at 410 and 35 on the NE side. They’ve being doing the dinner movie thing for several years now. I guess a lot of people don’t know it’s there, or they don’t want to go to that side of town. However, I’d say the Rialto is WAY better than the yuppie Alamo Drafthouse.

I won’t be going back to the Alamo Drafthouse. It wasn’t comfortable, the lighting sucked and the constant procession of staff walking through was distracting.

Tags: alamo drafthouse, San Antonio, TX