Brooklyn Bowl finds success as it celebrates 5th anniversary

After 108,560 pounds of chicken and 898 shows, Peter Shapiro can finally exhale.

Sort of.

Every day is a work in progress for the Brooklyn Bowl owner, though clearly progress has been made as the venue celebrates its fifth anniversary today with the Silent Haus Party Charity Event and a photo exhibit.

It wasn’t easy getting here.

You can hear it in Shapiro’s voice, this mixture of pride and wariness.

“It was just a long climb up a mountain,” the 46-year-old acknowledges. “When we opened, we started at zero.”

From zero to more than 535,000 tickets sold since The Roots christened the room on March 14, 2014, the 2,500-capacity, 80,000-square-foot venue has distinguished itself as a concert hall not quite like any other in the increasingly competitive Las Vegas market, luring big names such as Robert Plant, Jack White, Beck and hundreds more.

Getting them there, though — and establishing the Brooklyn Bowl brand in Las Vegas, 2,500 miles away from the original — was no given.

Just ask Shapiro.

“Everyone thought I was pretty nuts,” he acknowledges.

No casino, no problem?

It was the lack of nearby slot machines that led plenty to question Shapiro’s sanity.

The reason: Brooklyn Bowl is the rare room of its size not embedded in a casino, which can underwrite losses and essentially subsidize a venue by getting people to spend money on gambling, among other things.

“When he opened this up, I pulled him aside and I said, ‘I admire how ambitious you are,’ ” says Jason Strauss, managing director at Marquee Las Vegas, who’s known Shapiro since high school in their native New York. “It was because of the sheer size of it, and the fact that he was going to be doing a live music platform not inside a casino.

“Live music and entertainment, when it comes to a casino, is really looked at as a property PnL (profit and loss), because it’s grabbing market share and driving a volume of targeted guests through the casino’s doors,” he continues. “When he didn’t have an overall property above him at the scope it was, it was a very, very ambitious project — not to mention it was in a new sector of Vegas, The Linq. I think he had a lot of learning curves to understand the market the first couple of years.”

Shapiro acknowledges as much.

“By not being in a casino, doing it on our own, doing live music and not DJs, that all made it hard, but it’s also what made it work,” he says. “You feel like you’re in a different world by not being in a casino. But it also made it hard at first because casinos feed these things.”

So how did Brooklyn Bowl do it?

Multipronged plan

Fried chicken and gutter balls are an unlikely combination, to be sure, but one that worked in building the Brooklyn Bowl name in Vegas.

Doing so demanded a number of steps.

First, it was necessary to establish a different feel for the place, with its Cajun-y, Blue Ribbon food menu, namesake bowling, expansive layout and outdoor patio overlooking The Linq shops below — “That outdoor deck, it feels like you’re at a festival. There’s a community there,” Shapiro says.

Secondly, the programming was done with a bit of a jam band twist, cementing a following in one of music’s most die-hard fan bases, one that’s eager and willing to travel.

While Brooklyn Bowl has booked acts from across the musical spectrum from day one, from metal to hip-hop to electronica to indie rock, it embraced jam bands in particular, booking multiple-night stints from acts such as The String Cheese Incident, The Disco Biscuits, Moe., Umphrey’s McGee and many more, including New Orleans’ funk-heavy Galactic, who’ve played the venue more (19 times) than any other act.

“We love Vegas, but it’s nice to have some place like Brooklyn Bowl that feels like it’s a little bit of a different taste than other things there,” say Galactic drummer Stanton Moore, whose band played the original Brooklyn Bowl regularly before the Vegas version opened. “When Peter told us he was going to do a Brooklyn Bowl in Vegas, we had seen him and his vision and his tenacity with the original Brooklyn Bowl, so we knew that he was going to be able to make it into something really unique and comfortable, too. We love playing there, because there’s a familiar vibe for us.”

Finally, and perhaps most crucially from a financial perspective, Brooklyn Bowl found success within the lucrative corporate and private event market.

“We’ve done well now with privates, which are essential to making it work in Vegas,” Shapiro explains. “The concert business isn’t where you just make it in Vegas. It’s the private events. You can be the best in concerts, but if you don’t have the privates, I don’t think you make it.”

Brooklyn Bowl has managed to do just that — 1,376 pounds of confetti and counting.

“It’s been a magical experience,” Shapiro says. “It was hard. But we made it.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.