Amped - A Bars & Recreation Experience — Restaurant in Milwaukee

I'm mixed.

tl;dr customer service is GOAT. Song selection is decent but would love it if it was more varied. Wish there was more than just chipmunk food.

I want to emphasize praise of the customer service. They were great. I accidentally booked incorrectly and Juan and management were able to seamlessly correct my error. I was assured and taken care of well. Check-in was easy and the bartenders/workers were efficient and friendly.

The facility is clean and neat.

AMPED is fulfilling a niche that I think Milwaukee really needed, a place solely for karaoke. It's a pain having to search the schedules of every bar trying to find a night for karaoke with the right crowd ambiance. And even if you find one, you're guaranteed only a handful of songs waiting for your turn. At a noraebang, or karaoke room, you can get your more introverted friends to step up to the mic, you don't have to fight for your turn, and since you have your friends with you, you get all the hype you want and need.

I've been to quite a few karaoke rooms, so I have a bit of a biased expectation. First, I would have liked mic covers. Idk what their maintenance routine is between room rentals, but I feel like disposable mic covers should be a basic for cleanliness reassurance. Second, the user interface for song selection has a bit of a learning curve, so we wasted quite a bit of our time just trying to figure it out. Some button selections didn't do what they said they did. You'd queue up a song and it'd repeat over and over again until you had to manually skip over the song and remove the originally played song. Third, song selection is decent with classics and newer songs but limited in its foreign selection, so if you're looking for non-mainstream foreign songs you're SOL. I tried playing one IU song (they only had one song available) and even though it queued up, it had a bug that prevented it from playing. I tried playing a Japanese song and it also refused to queue. I tried playing a Spanish song that wasn't Selena and it also refused to queue. So one should come here if they mainly wanna sing what's been played on US radios, weddings, or oktoberfests, ALTHOUGH they had a delightfully surprising repertoire of rap and hiphop songs. Fourth, the sound system was kinda eh. Most of the time using a mic felt unnecessary as just belting out without the mic would overpower the song even at the highest volume setting. Fifth, queueing up songs, there's a food and drink ad between each song that interrupted the flow and I gauge that if they had been completely eliminated, someone could have sang an extra song, adding more bang for our buck.

Lastly, food selection is limited to charcuterie type foods. Nothing filling for a good base to drink or help sponge your drunk back from the brink of blackout. If they won't provide food, it'd be nice if they'd allow ppl to order in food to cooperate with local businesses. A pizza or tacos would...

The location was not the best. Parking is difficult unless you opt for structure parking, but that just meant I had to walk two blocks after paying for parking. Party time 6:15-9:15 We visited on the first Saturday after opening and my daughter loved it! We spent her 17th birthday crooning the oldies And some new. The food selection is charcuterie style and ok. We were a party of 10 from 2-53 and this is not for people under 6 (later discover) so I ended up paying $120 for my two 2yo, 3yo and 6yo. There’s no phone to call And no publication online defining age range or cost associated so I couldn’t ask prior. Anywho if you’re into urban music prepare to be disappointed. We love all music so it was easy to fill with other choices but undoubtably the RNB, hip hop and rap selection is very limited. Basically like Nicki Minaj was available but Beyoncé, lil Wayne, any Baby’s, Chris Brown, avant and music within the last 15 years was limited. We spent quite a bit of time doing oldies, pop and Disney but again the older kids and myself loved it.

Food: the platters are $15-$16 And feeds about 5 we ordered one of each but the Buffalo chicken was the best so we got another. The others were edible but designed for individuals drinking liquor. Fell short here.

Staff: For the most part we stayed in a room so there wasn’t much interaction And the privacy was nice but there were times I would just stand at the counter waiting for service while they shuffle about. I then realized fairly quickly the one with purple hair was ignoring me purposefully, they just opened, how could she be unhappy already 🤷🏾‍♀️.

All in all $500 for a 3 hour karaoke party for 10 with 5 platters, 3 mugs of beverage with limited songs, food and service was a bust for mom. But again my daughter loved it!

This is more comfortable for pre-teens and up. Do not expect it to be like the karaoke bar in Las Vegas. There is no photos of the rooms online but they did not comfortably seat 10, so 12 is a stretch. Go bigger for parties of 10 or more. Try to plan ahead so you can preorder from pizza shuttle, thank me later😉...

Went to Amped last night with a few colleagues who were in town from out of state. It was my first time going. First, the positives - all of the staff were extremely kind and accommodating with the one acception of the manager. The suites themselves were clean and the equipment was easy to use. Overall it was a very fun night. Cons: my colleague booked the room for us via the online site. The dropdown to select number of people was greyed out and completely missed. When we arrived the manager asked how many were with us and we proceeded to our room - no indication of additional fees. Once finished and I went to get my credit card (which they kept upfront the entire time - not ideal) the staff member said total cost was 2X what the site had indicated on booking. After questioning it the manager came over, and said sorry you did it wrong my hands are tied. $80 for 2 hours of karaoke which we found out later is by the person not room. My friend ordered beers for us and their system overcharged her card by $250. That error was corrected but overall I wouldn’t likely return due to the inflexible nature of the manager on the website that wasn’t clear with pricing. It’s unfortunate because we host clients often in the city and this would have been one of our go to places if management had...