Question: How do local bars and restaurants drum up business on historically slow evenings? Answer: Gimmicks. But not like a Joaquin Phoenix “retiring” from movies gimmick, but participatory ones. Enter the trivia night.
The methodology is simple: on Mondays or Tuesdays restaurants and bars need to sweeten the deal to get people to abandon their ordinary routines of couches and reruns of Jerry Bruckheimer shows. But the trivia night is far from ordinary.
It’s the perfect storm. Combine a relatively nondescript evening with cheap drinks and random questions that test you to pull some forgotten fact from the Intro to Modern Film class you took sophomore year and suddenly you have a Wolfgang-Peterson-directed film starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg as fisherman.
Yes, trivia nights are potent attractions.
“It packs the house,” said Katie Courtney, of Eugene’s Cornucopia Bar & Burgers. @@name checked via linkedin, not contacted@@
It seems local restaurants and bars have tapped into an exclusive market, finding a group of people who actively seek out trivia nights.
“They only come in for trivia night,” said Courtney. “We never see them otherwise.”
Every Monday at 9pm Cornucopia transforms from a restaurant that serves burgers and beverages into a battlefield where obscure facts and/or elementary school age history books become the one ring to rule them all.
But trivia nights wouldn’t be anything special without a dose of charisma. Leading the charge of the Light Brigade at trivia nights are the hosts.
At Cornucopia’s trivia night the festivities are presided over by one “Dr. Seven Phoenix,” which according to Courtney, is the man’s actual legal name (yes, he’s a real doctor). Seven Phoenix is a powerhouse in the trivia field, even publishing a book on the topic, entitled “American Pub Trivia.”
At Rogue Ale’s Public House in Eugene, trivia nights are hosted by Mr. Bill, a traveling trivia host who, according to his website, host shows everywhere from Arizona, California, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington as well as Oregon.
And according to Hannah Jump, a bartender at Rogue, Bill is quite a character, who is “classy like the monopoly guy, but with a sense of humor.” @@contacted, name checked@@
The trivia night has infiltrated the University of Oregon campus too. On Wednesdays at 6 p.m., The Buzz hosts their own trivia night, and it’s not a cheap knockoff of the downtown versions.
With questions created by UO students, according to Shelly Pruitt, manager of The Buzz, it’s “super challenging, competitive, but also fun and relaxed.” @@not contacted@@
And it’s not for Frank Abagnales. Participants who try and use their phones to look up answers have to put money in basket labeled “no cheating.” And in order to avoid cheating, you’ve got have a wide range of random knowledge.
Rogue’s trivia night features themes ranging anywhere from TV, movies, music, politics, to sex.
Cornucopia’s features anything from Hollywood to Halloween, and occurrences like “gangster rap beats” and “pants off dance offs.”
Sounds like trivia night is giving Fridays and Saturdays a run for their money.
Speaking of money, most trivia nights feature some sort of monetary prize. The Top Gun at Cornucopia’s trivia night receives $40 cash-money; the “Goose,” or second place, gets $25.
And while most trivia nights inhabit the less desirable nights of the week, people have begun to recognize its appeal; at Rogue the trivia night seems to have transcended the existence of a “gimmick.”
Their trivia night takes place on Friday nights from 8 p.m.-11 p.m., a night and timeslot that usually needs no gimmick to draw crowds in; that’s because the trivia night are cool like Matthew McConaughey in “Dazed and Confused.” If the popularity of Eugene’s trivia nights is emblematic of their popularity everywhere, then they need not be pigeonholed as a fourth stringer brought in during garbage time.
Trivia nights are a thing, like Brad and Angelina in early 2005.