‘A List of Chain Restaurants Whose Names Contain Unusual Structures’

When I first read this post from my friend Paul Kafasis last week — a One Foot Tsunami instant classic — I was hoping that I could think of an example that he missed. I can’t say I did.

The closest, though, is ShowBiz Pizza Place, a 1980s archrival to Chuck E. Cheese. (Instead of a pizza-cooking rat, ShowBiz had Billy Bob, a pizza-cooking hillbilly bear.) Place is an unusual noun to put in a restaurant name, but it isn’t a structure, so it doesn’t belong on Kafasis’s list. But what brings it to mind is that growing up, we had a ShowBiz Pizza Place near our mall, and I loved going there because it was a damn good arcade (and the pizza, I thought at the time, was pretty good — cut into small squares, not slices). They had the sit-down version of Star Wars, the best way to play the best coin-op game in history. (Two tokens to play that one, of course.) They had the sit-down version of Spy Hunter, too. Anyway, generally we all just referred to the joint as “ShowBiz”, but one thing that drove me nuts is that a few of my friends, when referring to it by its full name, called it ShowBiz Pizza Palace. It was like hearing someone call an iPod Touch an “iTouch”. And while I loved the place, trust me, it was not palatial — unless you’re familiar with palaces that are really dark and seedy, and had ball pits where bad things happened.

★ Wednesday, 25 March 2026