Restaurants With Dinner Entertainment

With the growth and expansion of restaurants across the country, there has been a trend of restaurants coming up with innovative ways to attract customers. This has lead many restaurants to add more features than just serving great meals. One method of attracting customers is to offer entertainment along with the dining experience.

The following are some entertainment concepts that have been implemented in restaurants:

1. Live music is a very popular attraction at restaurants. Types of live music performances include violinists, single instrument performer such as guitar soloist, harpist, saxophone players...etc. Restaurants can also have musical groups such as jazz bands, country bands...etc. There are restaurants that use live music to enhance the theme of their restaurant. An example would be using mariachi bands for a Mexican restaurant.
There are many musical styles to suit everyone's tastes. People can relax, dine, and enjoy the fantastic music.

2. Dinner Theaters are a very popular concept. The restaurant incorporates the meal with the musical theater show. There can be particular themes such as the pop music genre, medieval times...etc. It can very interactive with the performers including the diners in the show. Most are musicals mixed with comedy.

3. There are also restaurant/ entertainment activity restaurants. For instance, there are restaurants designed for kids that have a number of entertainment activities such as carnival type games, video games, slides, jungle gyms, indoor miniature golf, and much more. Chuck E. Cheese restaurants are an example of this type of entertainment restaurant.

4. There are restaurants that specialize in murder mystery entertainment. Along with dinner, guests can become a part of a murder mystery where they have to solve clues to identify the murderer. Some of these restaurants offer murder mystery weekend packages.

5. There are restaurants that host magic shows for their guests. A magician or group of magicians will perform magic tricks while the guests dine.

6. There are also single entertainers that perform at restaurant. Types of entertainers can include comedians, balloon twisters...etc.

7. There are adult orientated restaurants such as Dave and Busters which provides adult orientated games for groups such as team building activities for work related groups (corporate management skills), solving adult games such as puzzles, races, corporate leadership games, themed parties, scavenger hunts, billiards, shuffleboard, bowling, and much more. As well, these types of restaurants can offer buffets and party platters.

8. There is now a growing trend of a theater-restaurant concept that offers sit-down dinner theaters that double as restaurants so moviegoers can enjoy a meal while watching a movie.

If you are looking for a fun night out on the town, there are now restaurants that offer great entertainment, activities, and much more with their meals. It gives customers more of a choice of places to entertain friends and family. You can have a fun filled evening at a place that offers both dinner and entertainment in the same location. Because of the growth of the restaurant industry, there is now something fun and delicious for everyone.

See what the City of Toronto has to offer by dining at a Toronto restaurant this weekend. If you're in Quebec, then a restaurant Montreal is a great way to spend some quality time.

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Austin, Texas - The Live Music Capital of the World

Austin, Texas is renowned as the live music capital of the world touted as having the most musicians per capita of any city in the nation. With over one hundred live performance places there are always dozens of Austin, Texas bands to see any time you want of all various styles from country to rock, to a variety of eclectic styles that can be heard no where else.

Austin, TX is also the host of the South By Southwest music conference which is a nationally known music festival showcasing 1,800 bands of all styles booked from across the whole world in over 80 clubs in Austin over a 5 day period. South By Southwest was originally just a small music festival that grew into an event with the most live bands in one festival in the state and continues to grow as the years roll by. There are other world renowned emerging music festivals in Austin as well, such as the Austin City Limits Music Festival, Urban Music Festival, and the Fun Fun Fun Fest. The Austin City Limits Music Festival occurs annually in the fall and is a three day music festival with over 130 bands of all genres on eight stages. This concert has been known to attract over 65,000 visitors and bands from all over the world. The Urban Music Festival started in 2006 and drew a crowd in excess of 10,000 to listen to some of the top Urban Music bands. Some of the performers of the Urban Music Fest have been Cameo, Boyz to Men, and the Sugar Hill Gang. The Fun Fun Fun Fest Is another yearly music festival that started in 2005 and has had a wide range of artists over two days on four stages. A few celebrated artists of the Fun Fun Fun Fest have been the Bad Brains, All and The Dead Milkmen.

How this Texas city came to be the home base for so many Austin bands is still a mystery but as the live band scene grew over time in Austin, the stigma that it was the place to get found and make it to stardom started to attract a large base of gifted musicians from across the nation. The bands and musicians that came to Austin looking for superstardom soon found that there wasn't any industry to sign them there aside from the brief visit of industry professionals during South By Southwest music conference and the ample supply of musicians and Austin cover bands only made acquiring gigs even harder because of all of the stiff competition. The number of Austin, TX bands far outweighs the number of rooms offering gigs so only the most talented bands end up getting the jobs thereby furthering the popular perception that Austin bands tend to be the greatest in the state. Many musicians that had come to Austin hoping to make it in the local scene headed back where they came from to face less competition and found that being a big fish in a small pond was easier and more productive than slugging it out with hundreds of bands in one city for the few jobs there were in such a competitive music market.

There are many musicians that come from Austin, Texas including Robert Earl Keen, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Willie Nelson, George Strait, Pat Green and Los Lonely Boys to name a few. All these things add up to make Austin, Texas a town that has been renowned as the "Live Music Capital of the World".

Ron Ronhaar is the owner and band leader of the "The Grooves" which is one of the well-known Austin, Texas bands, well known for their ability to keep the dance floor packed all night with hit favorites from all genres. He has performed with his group for a living in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas and throughout Texas for weddings, corporate parties, society parties and fund raisers. After Ron started the band in 1991, the band rocketed to the peak of Austin musicians and then took the state of Texas by storm. Ron and the Grooves Band are now in strong demand across Texas and are considered the finest of all Austin bands available for any event.

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Is Live Music Dying?

We spent months preparing for the Gemini Soul tour, booking performances in Phoenix, Hollywood, Fresno, Santa Cruz and Orange County. We covered it all: a publicist, advertising, free ticket give-aways, flyers, posters, concert listings, postcards. We tried holding a charity benefit. We tried having an opening band. We tried free promotional concerts at colleges. We tried passing out free admission cards on the street. And still only a scattering of people came to each show.

The people who did show up always raved about the music, as did the doormen, the bartenders, the club managers. "You're the best band I've ever seen play here, and I've heard a lot of bands," was a typical response. So where was everyone?

Live music in the United States is dying. Several decades ago, a band could count on regular club dates. Unknown jazz bands could "do the circuit" and make at least some money. Not anymore. I talked to the manager of a two-thousand seat theater. She said everyone in the industry is talking about how difficult it has become to fill venues, and speculated that people have too many entertainment options at home -- the internet, iPods, cable TV, Netflix -- that there is less incentive to go out on the town. Fewer people are willing to take a chance on unknown music. As a consequence, many venues can't afford to pay bands and expect you to play for tips -- which is fine to get a career going, but how can you sustain that?

Live music as viable entertainment hangs on in some ways. Me'Shell Ndegeocello, thank goodness, can draw a large crowd on a Monday night to San Francisco's The Independent. Festivals and cruises still feature performers (although they are increasingly interested in musicians with national reputations - which begs the question, how does one get a national reputation?). But if talented guitarists like Mick Fleetwood (co-founder of one of the most successful bands of all time, Fleetwood Mac) can fill only half of that two-thousand seat venue, and if Yoshi's resorts to giving away free tickets to Lee Ritenour's second show, where does that leave us?

Have we become too accustomed to music at the press of a button, day and night, and worse yet, many of us now expect it for free? Radiohead released their latest CD online and asked buyers to choose how much to pay. Only 38% of those who downloaded the CD paid anything. The rest -- an unbelievable 62% -- felt they should get the album for free! [Forbes.com] Because of the band's stature, they still made a considerable amount of money on the sales, but at those percentages, a four-person band selling only 10,000 CDs at an average of $8 apiece would make just $30,400. That amounts to less than $8,000 per person, not including any deduction for production expenses.

I recently discovered a dozen inter-connected English-language websites based in Russia selling my music as well as music by big-name artists, unauthorized, for download for less than $1 per CD. If most musicians can't make money performing and can't even make money from CD sales online, how will our culture be able to nurture and sustain the next wave of musicians? Like climate change, we will glibly go about thinking nothing is wrong (or at least many of us will) until it is too late. We will have chopped down the tree that nurtured our music and gave it life.

More music articles at Song of Fire (obergh.net/songoffire) Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jon_O'Bergh

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