Trivia nights are helping Bay Area pubs, taprooms recover after COVID

It’s trivia night at the New Parkway Theater, Oakland’s cult fave pub-meets-theater, and the room is packed. People are dressed in animal costumes. One man wears a shirt reading “The Nineties” in “Simpsons” font. And amid the chaos, a woman spills her drink, lamenting, “Oh no! I got beer in my Birkenstocks.”

“Let’s meet our teams!” says theater manager and trivia host J Moses Ceasar, getting the party started. “There’s the Go-Go’s, Trivial Fursuit, Misfits, Stranger Danger, Femme Factales and Don’t Cry Over Spilled Beer. Yeah, I saw that you spilled.”

The theme on this particular Thursday is Japan, inspired by the recent G7 summit, and competitors are fielding questions such as “What is Ronald McDonald’s name in Japan?” (Donald McDonald, in case you wondered.) The winner gets a free pitcher of beer or movie tickets.

But the real prize is something much more: a sense of community — and an infusion of cash.

For the taprooms, pubs and bars that stage these events, trivia night is a guaranteed payday after three years of grappling with layoffs, staffing shortages, supply chain issues and a lockdown that kept many Bay Area drinking establishments — including bars and taprooms without food service — shuttered until March 2021. It’s been a long road back.

We took a beating, says Jenny Lewis, co-founder of San Jose’s Strike Brewing. “Things are still making their way back to what it used to be. Trivia took a few months to catch on, but it has definitely improved the Thursday night sales and customer flow.”

Bar trivia rose out of Great Britain’s pub culture in the 1970s, but has since become integral to the nightlife and economics of breweries, taprooms and other booze-slinging establishments in the Bay Area and across the United States. The games bring in consistent crowds, who stick around longer and order more rounds, turning what might have been a mediocre weekday into a bonanza.

Ceasar calls it “the single most important weekly event” at the theater. “We know we’re going to generate at least $1,000 and probably closer to $1,500 in food and drink revenue every Thursday night. That’s not nothing.”

It’s plenty to Oakland’s Two Pitchers Brewing, which runs trivia nights on Wednesdays. “We have some good Thursdays and Tuesdays, but if it’s cold or raining, who knows what’s going to happen?” says co-founder Tommy Hester. On trivia night it could be raining fireballs outside, and people will still show up.

“That’s the biggest benefit for us — consistency and getting people in the door,” Hester says. “Sometimes I’ll be finishing work and come down, and all the tables are full a lot earlier than usual. I’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s trivia night!’”

Things were dire at Barebottle Brewing in Santa Clara, which had been open less than a month when the pandemic lockdown hit. “We went from this bustling taproom to absolutely nothing,” says taproom manager Stephanie Grieger. “We scaled all the way down to to-go sales for the longest time, then had a minimal outdoor area for the majority of COVID.”

The brewery started hosting trivia nights about a year ago. On a recent Thursday, the taproom was packed with more than 100 players, many dancing to Madonna by the end of the evening. “It’s absolutely helped us get back to normal,” Grieger says. “The crowds are so large, it doubles our business on a weekday.”

A trivia support network has expanded rapidly, as dozens of companies — Geeks Who Drink, Brainstormer Trivia, Risky Quizness and more — have popped up to provide questions, multimedia and sometimes even hosts for trivia nights. Mike Moyer, owner of Santa Barbara-based Head Games Trivia, which stages events in the Bay Area at Concord’s Hop Grenade, Richmond’s East Brother Beer and more, stumbled into the business as a high school history teacher reviewing test material with his students.

“I would make PowerPoints with lots of multimedia, and kids that normally wanted to fall asleep would be jumping out of their chairs getting excited about learning,” Moyer says. “The joke was, ‘If only these kids were 10 to 15 years older and drinking heavily, I’d really have something here.’”

Moyer founded his company at the end of the pandemic and now runs a stable of 50 independent trivia hosts, charging breweries a flat fee to stage a trivia night. “I’m surprised when I reach out to a brewery, and they don’t have trivia,” he says. “Even with mediocre trivia — and I think there’s a lot out there — people still eat it up.”

The economics are undeniable, but there’s more to it than that, says San Jose resident Bernie Sinsay, a trivia host and real estate agent who helped start Barebottle’s trivia nights. Quiz nights are safe places to gather and rebuild community.

“We were all shut-ins, so people were just champing at the bit to get out there and become part of the world again. Trivia’s just a good way to ease into it,” he says. “COVID impacted a lot of people more than they want to admit. They don’t get emotional, but they can get competitive, and if they get a round of applause, it makes them feel really good.”

Trivia’s about more than prizes, says Emeryville resident Caroline Pranckevicius, who’s been coming to trivia nights at the Parkway for the last nine months.

“It comes down to the idea of having a third space, where everyone can see each other and hang out, and it doesn’t really cost much,” Pranckevicius says. “I actually met my partner through trivia. It was very much Romeo and Juliet — we were on competing teams.”

“Ultimately, winning isn’t so important. It’s about meeting people,” says her partner, Lucas Masch.

“And just learning random facts that I can tell people,” adds their friend Ashton Castro. “Even if they didn’t ask.”

That sense of discovery is a delight for Parkway trivia host Ceasar, too.

“One of my favorite questions is, ‘Close to the time of his death, Elvis was eating as many calories a day as two fully grown Asian elephants. How many calories was he consuming?’” he says. “People will talk about how some athletes take in 10,000 calories a day, or about the fried bacon sandwiches Elvis would eat. And that’s nice for me — for people to sit around and talk and laugh and connect with each other.”