Eat, drink, play: Doral’s new high-tech sports lounge opens
The huge new play-eat-drink venue at CityPlace Doral started with a simple question: How do we take Top Golf indoors — and make it bigger?
Founders and longtime collaborators Terry Lee and Adam Flierl loved the concept of the popular sports technology simulator, where guests can rent an open-air bay and swing away. But Lee, whose background is in real estate, had a practical question: How do we develop a different sort of sports tech concept without needing “10 acres of dirt and $30 million?”
That question inspired the birth of the high-tech indoor Play Sporting Lounge, which just opened at CityPlace with an elevated food and beverage menu, a huge outdoor covered patio and a wider variety of sports for guests to explore, including football, soccer, basketball, golf, darts, even a virtual shooting range and a dodgeball game where you throw the ball at zombies.
The new Play Sporting Lounge isn’t the first of its kind. Lee and Flierl opened the original (called Play Sporting Lounge) at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood in early 2020 just before the Super Bowl. It was the perfect time, they believed, to introduce their vision to the world.
“We came out swinging and thought we had hit the home run of home runs,” Flierl recalls ruefully. “Six weeks later, COVID shut the world down.”
Like many businesses, they floundered until they were able to reopen. The following year was rough, they acknowledge. But the break allowed them to think about ways to improve the venue and growing the brand — and, eventually the Doral venue was born.
Bigger and better
Located in the former Brimstone restaurant and a neighboring empty space, the new Play Sporting Lounge is more than three times as big as the original, with 12,000 square feet of dining and entertainment space. There’s a covered patio with backyard games (corn hole and bocce) as well as three digital darts lanes and seven live sports simulator suites that rent by the hour and can hold up to 10 people.
But if you want to sit at the bar, catch a game on one of the 60 televisions, or order food or a cocktail and watch bolder would-be athletes flail away at the games, you can do that, too. The venue is designed allows guests to people-watch easily, encouraging social interaction.
“We have many guests who don’t want to swing a golf club or throw a football, but they love watching other people play,” Lee explains. “And it’s great theater to watch other people swing and miss the golf ball.”
Upscale menu and sports bar favorites
Executive chef Manny Saavedra and corporate chef Justin Fields collaborated on the menu, which includes the expected sports bar fare — burgers, wings, tacos, pretzel bites — as well as seafood towers with shrimp, lump crab, tuna poke, chimichurri oysters and scallop and shrimp ceviche. There’s a sashimi platter and truffled lobster pearl pasta mac with Maine lobster.
“I don’t know of any sports bar where you can order a seafood tower,” Flierl says. “But most items are between $10 and $20. There are a handful of expensive things, but we also have a happy hour and late night menu. We’re about value and quality. I think it’s our secret weapon.”
Lee and Flierl looked at a number of cities around South Florida for their expansion before settling on Doral. They liked the city for its demographic, traffic and clientele, including the number of corporate offices in the area. In addition to luring large parties for bachelor and bachelorette gatherings, Play Sporting Lounge plans to host a variety of corporate events as well.
That said, the venue is kid-friendly, at least until the later hours. They haven’t hit on a time when it becomes 21 and up, but Lee expects that to happen sometime after 10 p.m.
“Kids love us, but later in the evening, we become more adult,” he says. “We’re still a bar. We want adults to be adults, and you know the colorful language that comes out when you miss a shot.”
‘Good friends’
Although Play Sporting Lounge is located next to King’s Dining & Entertainment, which features bowling lanes, and sits under Copper Blues, which has a comedy club and live music, neither Lee nor Flierl considers those venues competition, preferring instead to think of CityPlace as one giant entertainment venue.
“The experience of partnering and being good friends with what most people would think of as our competitors, we think of that differently,” Flierl says. “You may go to dinner at Novocento or Tap 42, then come over to us for some fun. Or you may dine with us on the patio and say, ‘Hey, let’s go bowling at Kings.’ We love that. We love everything we can do to keep people in the center and not have to go back to their car.”
And if the Doral venue succeeds, there’s a strong chance the brand will expand further. Lee and Flierl are looking at other “extreme weather” cities. Indoor play becomes more crucial in the heat and rain of a Miami summer as well as the frigid wind of a Chicago winter. They are considering spots like Dallas and Fort Worth as well as Sarasota and West Palm Beach and plan to open at the upcoming Hard Rock in Las Vegas, due to open in 2027.
“We think what we’ve built in Doral can translate to many communities across the country,” Lee says.
Play Sporting Lounge
Where: 3450 NW 83rd Ave., Suite 145, Doral
Hours: 4 p.m.-1 a.m. Monday-Thursday; 4 p.m.-2:30 a.m. Friday; 11 a.m.-2:30 a.m. Saturday; 11 a.m.-1 a.m. Sunday. Brunch served 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday
More information: www.playsportinglounge.com