Yesterday I took a four hour tour of Los Angeles. We got to see everything, Stars homes, Rodeo Drive, Walk of Fame, etc... Even better, the restaurant / bar / arcade “Button Mash” was right on the way home so the guide dropped us off there for dinner at the end of the tour by request.
How cool a name is Button Mash, BTW? It automatically makes me think of little kids playing Street Fighter...I digress. Located in the Echo Park section of LA, this place is incredible. The dinner menu was legit. The food wasn’t your typical Dave & Busters mediocre fare, the Asian Fusion menu was created by real restaurant people. My family and I loved it.
So the food was great, the drinks were great and the ambiance was cool, but what about the most important stuff, the games? Button Mash’s arcade is incredible. It has the perfect mix of new pinball, older pinball and classic arcade games.
Starting with the pinball, they had all a ton of the newer Stern pins from Munsters to Metallica. My family and I played a couple of games of Deadpool. That’s been my go to newer pin lately. Right next to the Sterns was a surprise, Spooky Pinball’s Alice Cooper’s Nightmare Castle.
The pinball lineup also had four classics, the amazing Williams Banzai Run, Williams Bad Cats (Meow Again lol) and two wide-bodies Star Trek the Next Generation and Twilight Zone. This is where my family spent the bulk of our pinball time. Banzai Run is one of our favorites and I didn’t have any Pindigo score for Bad Cats yet. Perhaps most importantly, all of the pins that I played worked perfectly.
On to the arcade game section of Button Mash. There’s even more vids than pins there. The arcade selection was fantastic, including things like the monstrous 6-player X-Men, 4-player Turtles and all of the classics. We picked some less common games to play, Toobin and Timber. We were laughing our butts off watching my sons battle simultaneously on them. What fun, quirky games. We also fed a few quarters into one of my favorite classics from my youth, BurgerTime 🍔.
Speaking of feeding quarters into the games, Button Mash’s game prices were cheap! Every pin that I played was only two tokens and every vid was only one. I thought that the drinks and dinner were reasonably priced for a city restaurant as well. Unlike AYCE Gogi, kids are welcome in the entirety of Button Mash’s arcade until 9:00 PM. As someone who loves hanging out with his kids, that’s huge.
Overall I’d give Button Mash an A+. If you’re near Los Angeles it’s an awesome stop.