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The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene. This week, guest artist — and competitive league bowler — Raynato Castro joined the fray.
A few minutes before 9 o’clock on a recent Saturday night, the line of prospective customers that looped around the Castro Village Bowl parking lot was as long and as energized as any nightclub queue. Inside, a pair of burly armed guards in full tactical gear scanned each person with metal detectors with the brusque efficiency of a TSA screening.
Once we got past the security checkpoint, though, the vibe could scarcely have been more cheerful and family-friendly — your typical bowling alley mix of young couples, chatty teens and heavy-set dudes in baseball caps. We’d all come for the Castro Valley bowling alley’s Friday and Saturday night “unlimited bowling” promotion: a $20 cover charge, shoe-rental inclusive, to bowl as many games as we could squeeze in between 9 and 11 p.m…