All pub quizzes are not created equal

January 8th, 2006 · No Comments

The day after Christmas, my family and I, all six of us, headed down to The Old Toad, my favorite bar in Rochester, for a pint or two. It’s close to home, and I knew my brother and dad would appreciate their cask-conditioned ale, and it’s got a pretty close approximation of the feel and atmosphere of an English pub, enough so that I’d take any out-of-town visitor there who appreciates the concept of the pub.

It so happened that the Monday night we chose was a pub quiz night, something I soon discovered happened on both Sundays and Mondays at the Toad. Though we lacked a table, we gamely joined in, and did fairly well, answering only three fewer questions correctly than the winning team. I even won a free beer, by shouting out “Chris van Allsburg” when asked “Who wrote The Polar Express?” for the “beer question.” We were asked twenty questions on random topics, and fun was had by all, half in figuring out the answers, and half in interpreting the thick North Yorkshire accent of the quizmaster.

We’d been talking at school for a few weeks about going to The Old Toad for the pub quiz, and this weekend, we decided to do it. Five of us met at the bar this evening for the nine o’clock quiz – Aimee and I had dinner there beforehand to guarantee a table, another helping of ‘Hunter’s Chicken’ for me… – and we prepared for a challenging round of questions. What we got, though, was a frustratingly random set of questions based on current events and overly-specific nonsense, delivered by someone who didn’t seem to know anything about the context of the questions and answers. It’s pronounced “cryosurgery,” not “chirosurgery,” please. There’s a difference. And one of them may not even exist.

As we sat through the single round of questions, we were immediately brought back to the halcyon days of pub quizzes at P. J. Ryan’s in Somerville, where the quizmaster lovingly created each quiz, provided background information on each question, scored everyone’s answers between rounds (and had multiple rounds to begin with), and really challenged a huge group of enthused trivia buffs with a great set of questions. It doesn’t hurt that I won a Pabst Blue Ribbon mousepad once, but I honestly think the Old Toad quiz was really lacking in a lot of areas. Our new goal is to find a really great pub quiz somewhere in Rochester before the year is up.

Tags: Rochester