Ten years ago the space was a JCPenney. Racks of khakis, fluorescent light, that particular department-store quiet. On Tuesday, September 15, 2026, a bleached-blond chef in sunglasses stood in front of the same footprint with a pair of oversized scissors while the Myrtle Beach mayor, a row of first responders and a crowd of people holding souvenir cups watched him cut a ribbon.¹

What sits there now is Guy Fieri’s Downtown Flavortown, fifty thousand square feet of restaurant, arcade and duckpin bowling built into the old anchor slot at the Myrtle Beach Mall. Inside, the sound is bowling pins and a hundred arcade cabinets and sixty-odd televisions going at once, and the smell is fryer oil and smoked pork. It opened quietly in early June and has been packed most nights since. The September ribbon cutting was the official version of a party that had already been happening for three months.²

Here is the part most visitors miss: this is not down in the Broadway at the Beach cluster. It sits at Highway 17 and Highway 22, at the north end of the Myrtle Beach corridor, which makes it the closest large indoor entertainment complex to a North Myrtle Beach rental. For families staying in Windy Hill or Crescent Beach, it is a ten-minute drive instead of a thirty-minute one — a distinction that matters a great deal at nine in the evening with tired kids in the back seat.

Below is what is actually in the building, what the food is like, how the bowling works, and how to fit an afternoon there into a beach week without giving up a day of sand.

Downtown Flavortown at a Glance

This is the second Downtown Flavortown in the country. The first opened in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a mountain tourist town with a similar rhythm to the Grand Strand — long summers, families in rental houses, rainy afternoons that need somewhere to go. The Myrtle Beach build is the larger of the two, developed through a partnership between Fieri and FACE Amusement Group, the Tennessee company behind the original.³

Hours and seating figures reported by news outlets vary slightly and can change seasonally. Confirm current hours on the venue’s own site before you make the drive.

The September Ribbon Cutting

Fieri came to Myrtle Beach in person for the September 15 ceremony, along with the FACE Amusement leadership team: chief executive Bucky Mabe, chief experience officer Rusty Mabe and co-founder Clarence Mabe. Myrtle Beach Mayor Mark Kruea took part, as did a contingent of local first responders.¹

Bucky Mabe framed the event less as a launch than as a thank-you, saying the response since the doors opened had been tremendous and that the ribbon cutting was a chance to recognize the people who built the place. Fieri, for his part, had set the tone back in June with a message to the market that ran roughly to this: if you like big flavor, scratch-made food and serious cocktails, come on down.^1,3

Holding the official ceremony three months after opening is a Grand Strand tradition of sorts. Summer here is for making money, not for logistics. September, once the crowds thin and Highway 17 loosens up, is when businesses along this coast get around to the formal part. The same instinct explains why so many local festivals land in the weeks right after Labor Day, a pattern we walked through in our look at a fall vacation in North Myrtle Beach.

Inside 50,000 Square Feet

The old JCPenney came down in February 2025, and what replaced it does not read like a mall tenant. The design leans hard into Fieri’s visual language: red and black, chrome, flame graphics, neon, the aesthetic of a diner that decided to become a nightclub. The restaurant occupies the bulk of the front of the house with roughly 460 seats, and the entertainment side runs behind and alongside it, so you can hear the arcade from your booth without sitting inside it.^2,4

Scale is the real difference from the Tennessee original. Pigeon Forge runs a little over forty thousand square feet with a three-hundred-seat dining room. Myrtle Beach got the bigger version, which FACE has described as the right fit for a high-traffic tourism market with room to grow into.³

The lounge area is built around televisions — more than sixty of them — which turns the place into a legitimate option on a football Saturday or during a weeknight ball game. That is not a small thing on a coast where a lot of visiting families spend October weekends trying to find a room with their team on the screen.

What Comes Out of the Kitchen

The menu is the Flavortown catalog, built around the dishes that made Fieri’s restaurants famous before the television show did. The signature is Trash Can Nachos, which arrive under a metal can that the server lifts at the table to let the pile collapse onto the platter. It is theater, and it works on a seven-year-old exactly the way you would expect.⁴

Beyond that, the kitchen runs on burgers and comfort food done heavy. The Bacon Mac ‘N’ Cheeseburger is the one people order twice. Cajun Chicken Alfredo covers the pasta side. Appetizers include Philly cheesesteak egg rolls, and the brunch-adjacent end of the menu brings hot chicken and waffle sliders. Much of it is made from scratch in house, which is the claim the brand has always rested on.^4,5

The bar program is genuinely ambitious for a venue with bowling in it. Craft cocktails, local and national beer, and the kind of oversized specialty drinks that exist partly to be photographed. Set your expectations accordingly: portions are large, prices are in line with the Grand Strand’s entertainment-district restaurants rather than its family diners, and you will almost certainly leave with a box.

If your week is going to include one big loud dinner and one quiet local one, this is the loud one. For the other, something like The Grove House in Cherry Grove sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, closer to the water and far closer to a whisper.

Fourteen Lanes of Duckpin Bowling

Worth knowing before you go: this is duckpin bowling, not the ten-pin game most people grew up with. The balls are small enough to hold in one hand, with no finger holes at all. The pins are shorter and squatter. You get three rolls per frame instead of two.⁵

The practical effect is that duckpin flattens the playing field in a way regular bowling never does. Nobody’s league average helps them. A grandmother who has not bowled since the Carter administration has roughly the same odds as her college-age grandson, and the small ball means kids under ten can actually throw it themselves instead of rolling it down a plastic ramp. Fourteen lanes is enough that a group of three families can take adjacent lanes and turn it into an event.

A strike in duckpin is rare enough that the whole row will turn around when somebody gets one. That is the appeal. Expect a wait for lanes on a rainy afternoon in July, and expect almost none on a Tuesday in October.

The Arcade and the Freaky Tiki Bar

The arcade holds more than a hundred games across the usual three categories: video cabinets, redemption games that spit out tickets, and virtual reality rigs. It runs on a card system rather than tokens, which is standard now and which parents should plan for — load a fixed amount and hand the card over, because the refill kiosk is designed to be easy to find.^1,5

Then there is the Freaky Tiki Bar, which is exactly what the name promises: a tropical bar dropped into the middle of a Guy Fieri restaurant inside a South Carolina shopping mall. The logic is not obvious and the execution is committed. It gives parents somewhere to sit within sight of the games, which may be the most genuinely useful design decision in the building.

Families who like this format have options up and down the coast, and our complete guide to things to do in Myrtle Beach lays out the rest of them, from the Broadway at the Beach attractions to the oceanfront amusement parks.

Birthdays, Team Outings and Private Rooms

The private event side is built for real volume. Party rooms can handle groups of eighty and up, which puts this in a different category from most Grand Strand birthday venues.¹ Reunions, youth sports teams, church groups, corporate outings from the conference hotels down the beach — all of that fits here in a way it does not fit in a hundred-seat restaurant.

This matters for the extended-family beach week, which is the format a great many North Myrtle Beach rentals are booked for. Twenty-two people in one oceanfront house eventually need one night where nobody cooks and nobody has to agree on a restaurant. Bowling, an arcade, a bar and a menu broad enough to satisfy a four-year-old and a seventy-year-old at the same table solves that night. Call ahead in summer; the rooms book out.

What It Means for the Myrtle Beach Mall

The Myrtle Beach Mall opened in 1986 as Briarcliffe Mall, became Colonial Mall, and took its current name in 2007. It sits in tiny Briarcliffe Acres at the junction of Highway 17 and Highway 22, which is one of the better-positioned pieces of retail real estate on the northern Grand Strand and has been underused for years.⁶

The anchors that survived are strong ones. Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World is a destination in its own right and an easy hour for anyone in the family who fishes. AMC Theatres runs the multiplex. Belk holds two positions, and Books-A-Million and the comic-and-game shop Players Choice round out the interior. Downtown Flavortown now replaces the dead anchor, and the redevelopment intent is plainly to build the rest of the property back around it.^4,6

There is a working template for this on the Grand Strand. Margaritaville and Paula Deen’s Family Kitchen both proved that a celebrity-anchored restaurant with entertainment attached can pull traffic year-round in this market, not just in July.⁴ What is different here is the location. Those sit inside Broadway at the Beach, deep in the Myrtle Beach tourist core. This one sits at the top of the corridor, which changes who it is convenient for.

Closer to North Myrtle Beach Than You Think

The name says Myrtle Beach, and the address does too, so most visitors staying up north assume a long drive. It is not. The mall sits just south of the North Myrtle Beach line on Highway 17, a few minutes past Barefoot Landing coming from the north. From Windy Hill, at the south end of North Myrtle Beach, it is a short hop. From Cherry Grove at the far north end, it is still a manageable run down 17.

Compare that to Broadway at the Beach, which is another twenty minutes or so farther south through the heart of Myrtle Beach traffic. For a family staying in North Myrtle Beach, Downtown Flavortown is now the nearest large indoor entertainment complex by a wide margin. On an August afternoon when a thunderstorm parks over the coast, that gap in driving time is the difference between a plan and a lost day.

One practical note about the route: Highway 17 through Restaurant Row backs up badly between about five and seven in the evening in season. Going early, or going after eight, makes the trip noticeably shorter. Parking at the mall is surface lot and plentiful, which is not something you can say about the entertainment districts to the south.

Working It Into a Beach Week

The Rain Plan

Every beach week here gets at least one afternoon of weather, and the families who enjoy their vacations most are the ones who decided in advance where they would go when it happened. This is a strong answer: bowling and an arcade will absorb three hours, and the restaurant absorbs a fourth. Go at the first serious cloud rather than waiting for the rain, because so will everybody else on this end of the beach.

The Shoulder-Season Evening

In October and November the sun goes down early and the evenings get cool, and a lot of visitors find themselves with more indoor hours than they planned for. This is when the place is at its best anyway — no wait for a lane, no line at the host stand, the same food. Pair it with a daytime beach that has emptied out for the season, the way the off-season rules now allow, which we broke down in our guide to how beach rules change after Labor Day.

The Split-the-Group Day

The mall setting is an underrated advantage for mixed groups. Somebody can spend ninety minutes in Bass Pro looking at reels, somebody else can catch a matinee at the AMC, the teenagers can burn through an arcade card, and everyone reconvenes for dinner in the same building. Very few Grand Strand venues let a family of twelve split up and come back together without three separate drives.

For everything else on the calendar while you are here, our roundup of Myrtle Beach events tracks what is happening week to week, and pieces like our coverage of SeptemberFest at Barefoot Landing and the proposed Myrtle Beach surf park cover what is new along the coast.

Where to Stay Nearby

All four North Myrtle Beach sections are within easy reach of the Myrtle Beach Mall, and each one gives you a different beach to come home to when the arcade lights are behind you.

Windy Hill is the closest and the quietest of the four, with a wide beach and the shortest drive to both the mall and Barefoot Landing. Crescent Beach is residential and relaxed, the section families return to year after year for the amount of room on the sand. Ocean Drive puts you at Main Street, the shag clubs and the heart of North Myrtle Beach nightlife. Cherry Grove Beach, at the north end, has the pier, the marsh channels and the quietest mornings on this coast.

Large groups planning the kind of week that includes a big night out usually do best in one of our oceanfront home rentals, where there are enough bedrooms for three generations and a kitchen big enough for the nights you do cook. Couples and smaller families tend toward an oceanfront condo, with the balcony facing the water and a pool downstairs.

Frequently Asked Questions