Love bowling but hate, loathe, and detest wearing actual bowling shoes?

Of course you do and you do!

I mean who wants to have to shove their feet into those hideous looking clown shoes you have to rent at the alley? Gah.

As one of the housewives on Bravo's Real Housewives of OC said, after being invited to a girls' night at a bowling alley - "Why can't Gucci make bowling shoes?" 

Luckily, there's no need to stress over being seen in embarrassingly bad footwear, that's probably been worn by thousands of other people, because there's Breaktime Bowl And Bar at the Hope Artiste Village on Main Street in Pawtucket. Open 6 days with a full bar (The bartender was a sweetheart and filled me in on the history of the place too, about the lanes being installed to try to convince turn of the century factory workers not to unionize, etc.), Breaktime features 100+ year old lanes, original to the space, and pin people (also known as pinners or pin boys) to reset the duckpins, something you just don't see anywhere else.

And again, as you can see from the pictures above, BT does NOT require you to wear the dreaded shoesies. Yeah, it's totally ok to wear your sneakers and probably most other street shoes. Not so sure about heels tho because I just saw something online about a 'no heels' policy, but no one there made a peep about my wearing my beloved peep toe Stuart's (That's Stuart Weitzman.) while bowling a pretty decent game - especially for someone who literally hasn't bowled in ages.

More To Heart About Breaktime

• For all of you out there who still love and adore paper and pencils, you'll be thrilled to know that's how you'll be keeping track of your score.
• It's a great place to sneak off to before, or during, a show at The Met downstairs. 
• Definitely tip the people who reset the pins for you. We tipped our guy $20. (Maybe that's why they let me wear my Stuart's?)
• Almost everything I've read about BT says it's hipster which, quite honestly, intimidated the heck out of me. Don't know about you, but I've had my share of run-ins with a few peeps who might be considered hipsters and they were sorta smug and dismissive. Not cool. But so NOT the case at Breaktime; happy to report that everyone there, from patrons to staff, was super friendly and nice.

Ciao for Now,

Patty J

*The original version of this post ran on the blog in July 2015.

**Photo Credits: All photos courtesy of Ashley Farney