Family Guy’s Drunken Clam Experience is open at 1604 Broadway in Times Square through August 23.
By Elazar Abrahams
I love a good TV-themed pop-up. Getting to step inside a famous fictional location is exactly the type of thing a guy that runs a website focusing on television and New York City would enjoy. The Central Perk coffee shop from Friends, MacLaren’s from How I Met Your Mother, or even Carrie Bradshaw’s Sex in the City stoop are all locales I’d love to frequent.
The new Family Guy Experience in Midtown promises that joy for fans of the long running adult animated program, recreating the famous Drunken Clam, the watering hole frequenting by Peter Griffin and his fellas.
The themed bar requires an $20 ticket for entry, although that includes a welcome cocktail. What awaits inside is themed drinks, food, merch, and photo-ops with iconography like the Griffin’s living room, Stewie’s time machine, and the bar itself. While the idea is strong, the execution is less so.
You enter through the ground floor, which is a Mexican restaurant just off Times Square, then take an elevator up into the experience. Once there, the whole thing feels more like a loosely themed bar area than a truly immersive Clam hangout. There are some mild recreations, a couch where you can take photos with character cutouts, screens playing clips from the show, and an area to buy merch. If you’re a diehard Family Guy fan, there is absolutely value in heading into the city to see the Drunken Clam brought to life, even in this limited form. I shudder to think how many Quagmire impressions are being done in this space on a nightly basis.
I fear non-fans will leave disappointed, though. There just isn’t much to do, and there’s zero interactive elements. The visuals are rather sparse and not fully realized to make this feel worthy of your time. The site bills the ticket as including a 90-minute reservation, but this does not feel like something that could naturally fill 90 minutes unless you were lingering over drinks.
Speaking of drinks, this where the experience really lost me. I tried the Quahog welcome cocktail and the Evil Monkey, and neither had any sort of fun presentation that can make these sort of things worth it even when the taste is just meh. And believe me, the taste was pretty meh. At other themed experiences from the same company, the cocktails often arrive with some kind of small theatrical flourish or strange glassware that leans into the theming. It can go a long way. Here, the drinks were served in plastic cups and tasted pretty rough. Considering that the bar is such a central part of what’s being offered here, that’s an issue.
Again, if you love Family Guy, want an easy Times Square happy hour activity, and are mainly looking to take a few photos with recognizable props, this can be a quick bit of fun. Still, as someone who has been to quite a few of these NYC pop-up bars, this one felt thin.
Find tickets and more information HERE.
