West Park Lanes

Not crazy about the new school contemporary bowling alleys? Partial to the traces of musty beer and tacky furnishings to compliment your game?
If The Dude lived in Ottawa, this is where he would bowl. Check out one of the Cap-City’s classic old school alleys — they are a fading breed, but they do exist if you know where to look.
I had a terrific time during an office Christmas party — this may have been heavily influenced by the my 50 years young colleague, who experienced bowling for the first time. His virginal experience was like watching a baby delight in the simple things we take for granted every day.
The place screams retro — something I definitely appreciated. The dated feel did not bother me at all & should not be surprising as it is located in an old established neighbourhood: Hintonburg. The neighbourhood has a long history of being a working-​class, residential neighbourhood.
This is Ottawa’s only centretown bowling alley that is found along a revitalized commercial strip located along Wellington Street West, just west of downtown.
Secretly, I would love for Lucky Strike to come to Ottawa and renovate the place… but I digress.
Sure, it’s not upscale bowling, but they get the job done. My division took over the place for our office party — so my review is completely based on that one experience.
I am an occasional bowler and that might be a little strong. Nothing wows you about the place. Let’s call it a classic bowling alley, with lots of old world charm.
We enjoyed 5-​pin bowling, and I can’t comment on the food, as I came in on a full stomach and wasn’t interested in any of the old world bowling alley staples here.
⁴⁄₃₀ — Unilocal Ottawa’s 30 Day Challenge!

Wow. Where to start?
Firstly — look at the dates for these other reviews preceding mine. This place must have seriously gone downhill, because we had a terrible, terrible experience.
Okay, so there are two bars in this place — one in the bowling alley and one on the other side of the bathrooms. The «regular» bar was tiny and had a lone guitar player «performing» to a crowd of zero people. It was — sincerely — extremely sad.
The bathrooms were filthy and it would probably be an honour for one of their toilets to harbour one’s poo. Half the time there is no bartender in the bowling alley, so you need to go through the washrooms to the other side of the building to get to the «regular» bar. It’s ridiculous. Sometimes I’d order something at the bowling alley bar (when the bartender was there) and he’d say, «We don’t have that at this bar, be right back, it’s at the other bar,» and he’d go through the bathroom, presumably get my drink, and then come back. It was absurd. I also don’t want my bartender touching bathroom doors constantly while working. I might as well just get it myself at that point. Do you seriously want a tip after that? I also asked to pay with my debit card when I ran out of cash at one point and he said, «Just go to the other bar, there’s no Interac machine at this bar.» So please tell me again what the point of the bar in the bowling alley is then? And obviously, like every bowling alley ever, a pitcher of beer costs you at least $ 20 no matter how domesticated that beer is and no matter how many cans of that beer you have in your fridge that you got for $ 12.
The bartender was also the «bowling guy» (for lack of a better term) who ran the bowling side of everything. So we paid, we got our bowling shoes, etc. First off, this is 5 pin bowling, with the small balls, so be ready to be disappointed the moment you come in if you don’t already know that. Secondly, the operating system for the electronic score board is circa 1993 and runs on MS-​DOS or something — I’ve seen Ataris run faster and with better graphics. Some seriously scary stick figures run across that screen when you get a strike.
Alright, so it got messy at some point when one of my buddy’s friends threw two bowling balls at the same time down the alley. I saw «bowling guy» and he didn’t react. He just stared. He kept staring as the dude did it over and over and over and over. At one point he got fed up and got up and told the guy to stop it or we’d all get kicked out. I pointed out that it was in a different lane and that I had nothing to do with it. He said it wasn’t his problem, and that to fix it I’d essentially have to control someone’s behaviour — someone who I had just met that night. So you know how the story goes at bowling alleys — the guy kept throwing several balls at once of course. Bowling guy didn’t want to approach a large group of people and warn them anymore so he just turned off the bowling game for all of us. Yeah, all of us, including yours truly. I mentioned to him that I paid for 3 games and I only got 2, and asked him to turn it back on. He smiled and claimed that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I told him he knew damn well what I was talking about.
Then he said, «I’ll be right back.» He then disappeared forever. Well, not forever, just for the next thirty minutes at least. We finished our pitchers and waited and waited and he never came out again. He wasn’t in the bathrooms or in the other bar or anywhere. So we left. No idea what happened to him. Perhaps he spontaneously combusted from anxiety, or perhaps he ran away and joined a cult, or perhaps he circumnavigated the world on a raft. I will never know. All I know is that this place stinks, they ripped me off, my cell phone is 10 000 times more powerful than their electronic scoreboard and I’m never inviting bowling guy to my birthday party.

Great central place to go bowling. They have electronic systems for scoring and they are attached the O’connell’s pub/​fils diner so you can get pretty much anything you want to drink and eat.
Great place to have a birthday party or group/​office activity. The food is pretty regular (pub fare) but it’s nice to have such a good selection available, as well as the wide selection of beer on tap.
If you need to rent shoes, the price is discounted with the number of games and if you buy more games they also give a discount, so try and figure out how many you want to play before hand.
make sure you bring SOCKS. this is always a problem in the summer when everyone is wearing sandals and they have to wear the shoes without socks. They do disinfect the shoes between rentals though so I don’t think it’s totally unsanitary.
It’s always interesting to see the mish mash of people who are here because there will be some really serious people, kids and then people who are more there to drink than to actually bowl. But there is plenty of room for everyone, the place is not usually packed.

This is a great spot to go bowling. Kids love it and it is thankfully free of a bunch of the distracting gimmicks that takes away from the bowling experience. Food from Fil’s diner and a licensed menu mean that a fun night awaits anyone who decides to check out these lanes.

I have two kids and I am always looking for good ways to entertain them — and by «good» I mean cheap and cheerful. So, when I spotted West Park Bowling one day as I was shopping along Wellington, I decided to pop in and give it a looksee. Well, West Park Bowling is a blast from the past — a real vintage bowling alley. I am not sure my kids would like it — they have become accustomed to the moder bowling centre (complete with neon, blacklights, loud music and weird coloured balls). So, a straight ahead bowling alley might not be their thing. I did find it very reasonable. You can pay per game, or they have night bowling specials where you pay a flat fee for three hours of fun. There is a cool 50s diner next door, so it could be part a of cool day for your family!