.Trivia nights keep bars alive

It’s a Tuesday night in Berkeley, and Dom Barrientos, Great Notion Brewing’s tap-room coordinator, is mingling. The bespectacled impresario is welcoming every guest to Fourth Street’s liveliest living room. Great Notion, a Portland-based brewery upstart, set up shop two years ago in the shell of Berkeley’s old Sierra Nevada Torpedo tap room—and like a hermit crab in a full-length mink coat, its rocking its new digs with a menu full of flashy fruit-forward brews, solid IPAs and snappy pilsners.

Danger Longoria is an affable, bearded MC, and since May 2024, he’s been the energetic host and organizer of “Figure It Out”—Great Notion’s weekly trivia night. Most Tuesdays, Longoria, usually attired in shorts no matter the weather, a hoodie, ball cap and fresh Nikes, hosts a Gen X-fueled, nostalgia-filled evening with clues based mainly on TV, music, games and films. His frequent collaborator is Lucas Waters, a.k.a. “Manun,” an actor-turned-DJ bent on sonically bathing the crowd in his personal love productions.

Longoria, also a musician, can get super specific with his trivia clues. He often plays snippets of songs and asks, “Who did the cover?” or “Who made the original?”

“It gives me an outlet to express my creativity,” Longoria says. “It’s for my community. They get to keep it casual.” And come out they do. Great Notion has a steady crowd most Tuesdays.

According to Longoria, Great Notion has had two different hosts with two very different community bases composed mainly of their friends and coworkers. Between hosts and until Longoria started in May, trivia “completely died off.” Barrientos points to patrons huddled closely, arms over shoulders, crowding the 10-seat bar. He takes pride in the fact that “every seat … knows each other”—in large part because he takes the care and attention to personally make the introductions.

Sports have long been central to the East Bay’s identity. The Super Bowl-champion Raiders of 1976 and 1980; the Warriors, who rose from ragtag to dominant NBA champions; the beloved A’s. But the Raiders left after the city couldn’t afford, justify or move quickly enough to provide the team venue. The Golden State Warriors left the East Bay for much the same reason. And Oakland’s beloved A’s will play the next season in the corporate housing of Sacramento’s minor league baseball stadium. Which begs the question: In a major region with only a handful of teams left, how do the bars that once catered to their fans survive?

It’s his 725th consecutive week emceeing Trivia Night at Cato’s on Piedmont in Oakland. Chuck Butler effortlessly navigates the brain-racking science of trivia. With a small squad of volunteers to grade the answers during rounds, the smoothness of the operation and the breadth of the categories is notable.

This evening Aaron Harbour, a.k.a. DJ Timber—who also plays a four-hour set on first Saturdays—helps with the tabulations. Philip Christy, whose Sinatra impersonations on karaoke nights are legendary, is also on tonights’ tabulation squad. He’s bartended here for 18 years and still manages to actively participate in programming shenanigans. Despite his previous team’s name, “Mu-Dang Clan Ain’t Nothing To Fuck With,” Christy did not win last week.

But maybe that’s the beauty of it all. Even those who don’t win at trivia can still feel smart. Playing trivia in a bar makes people form teams and talk to each other.

The category is: One-word song titles that start with “M.” Butler laughs, drinks pilsner and plays “Memories” from Cats. Darren E. and his friend have grabbed the last available corner of the bar—all the seats are gone by 7:30pm most Mondays—and are working their way through the clues. Butler plays “Milkshake” by Kelis, followed by Bruno Mars’ “Moonshine,” clues meant to be recognizable and relatable to a diverse crowd.

“We come here for trivia,” says Darren E. “It’s the best trivia night in the Bay. A lot of the other ones are corporate. This one is homegrown and homemade.”

The Bengals are playing the Cowboys on Monday Night Football, but no one is here for the game. They’re here for Butler and the community that this trivia night provides.

“What’s the oldest known tree in California and maybe the world?” Butler asks. The answer, Methuselah, has a lot in common with him. He laughs at the insight and says of his longevity, “Cato’s is cool. The crowd regenerates—so there are people who cycle in, people who were here a long time ago. New folk and old. And honestly, I keep doing it because I’m good at it!”

Yoni Matatyaou, an artist, has poured drinks at The Good Hop Bar & Bottle Shop for eight years. His tender portraits of neighborhood regulars and dogs fill the walls of the space, along with a recent exhibition of work by the artists from the tattoo shop up the street. Other walls are lined with customer-accessible refrigerators, loaded with an impressive variety of individual servings of carbonated alcoholic beverages, from cider to sours to barrel-aged stouts. There’s also a newer-looking photo booth.

It’s Tuesday, but Trivia Night isn’t happening. Matatyaou tells me that when the former host, Emily Novick, returns, trivia will resume once a month. Regarding the previous trivia iteration, Matatyaou confesses, “I watched it just die. Sometimes people would come and not be cool … bring a crew and not tip.”

The bar has plenty of nonalcoholic options like hop water, but a fair amount of people came and played trivia without drinking, which didn’t help the bar’s or the bartender’s bottom line. Trivia Night used to be very popular pre-pandemic, but business has slowed down over the years and Matatyaou wonders if an over-saturation of trivia nights is a contributing factor. 

“A bunch of people stopped by last week looking for it,” Matatyaou says. “So obviously there’s interest.”

The Good Hop is under new management. The new owners, who were old regulars, have made small changes, including a new bathroom and office doors, and lowered some draft prices. “The new owners didn’t want to mess with it,” Matatyaou says. “They wanted to save it.” 

Matatyaou is not a pessimist. He’s just bartended in Oakland for the past few years. “We used to love playing to Warriors here. We’d have them on every TV,” he says. But as bars eliminated staff to reduce cost and/or underestimated the safety of the neighborhood where the business was based, he experienced periods where he functioned as both bartender and doorman/security.

As I turn to leave, Novick cruises in and greets friends, transitioning from her job as a high school science teacher. Her “hands-on” rounds revolve around the five senses and include competitive pumpkin carving, decorating and sculpting with Play-Doh.

“I try to make it not just ‘what do you know,’ not just the facts,” Novick says, “but stuff to hook in other people that have other interests. I’ve always enjoyed doing it, but I felt like I was running out of new ideas. Now we’re back to once a month, and it feels like it can be fun and different each time.” 

Novick says they are three times busier than non-trivia Tuesdays at the Good. Busy here looks like 6-7 teams of 3-4 people each.

Today Matatyaou’s bar is full of regulars, lots of whom live upstairs and lots of neighborhood folks who live or work close by. “When I’m here, I’m talking to friends; they’re helping me, I’m helping them,” Matatyaou says. “It’s a tight community. I’m thankful for that.”

It’s game three of five of the Dodgers vs. the Padres in the playoffs, and Great Notion is again packed. This time, the patrons are here for a double dose of trivia and heated sports rivalry. Every space is also taken in most of the standing room, as strollers and dogs fill the space. The atmosphere is convivial but competitive. 

In the battle of the great Southern California baseball houses, the great teams of Northern California—the San Francisco Giants and the former Oakland A’s—are notably absent. Neither team made the playoffs this year. And while the discussion has turned to how and if the Giants need to rebuild this off-season, it has become a verbal wake-up as those who still loved the Oakland A’s hang their heads. 

In the last throes of deindustrialization, the village of the bar still serves as the community’s living room. In a region where the major professional teams are across a large body of water or are still in the origin-story phase, it’s the sense of community and welcoming, and the bartenders and event organizers who invest in fostering a sense of belonging, that keep the area’s bars afloat.

“I’ve made a lot of new friends,” Matatyaou says. And maybe that’s the secret equation in the formula of the East Bay’s bars staying alive. Community + Beer = Survival.

Trivia Nights in the East Bay

Monday

• Beer Baron
• Portal
• Cato’s

Tuesday

• Rosenblum Cellars
• Mad Oak
• Plank
• Great Notion
• The Alley
• The Good Hop
• Ben & Necks 
• The Den
• The Fireside Lounge
• Night Heron

Wednesday

• Buck Wild
• Drake Dealership
• Zachary Chicago Pizza (Grand Lake)
• Original Pattern
• Grand Avenue Social Club
• Seawolf Public House
• Binny’s
• The Terrace
• Two Pitchers

Thursday

• The New Parkway
• Make Westing