By CAMERON BOLTON
The newest restaurant in the Drake University neighborhood, Papa Keno’s, held it’s very first trivia night on Wednesday, Nov. 14th. Now, on certain nights, patrons can come with a group of friends to enjoy pizza, drinks, trivia or some combination thereof. According to co-owner Alec Davis, having a trivia night is not common amongst all Papa Kenos’. Davis said that he thinks there’s at least one other location that also does it for its customers.
According to Davis, deciding to hold a trivia night was a group decision between the three owners of the Des Moines chain. He said they thought it would be a good way to get some people involved in the restaurant in the middle of the week and the evening. They also looked around at the other businesses in the immediate area and noticed that no one else was offering trivia in the neighborhood.
“We actually had some students in here for a different event and we mentioned it and they got really excited,” Davis said. “So we thought ‘okay, then maybe we should really do this and go forward with it.”
The event, which started at 7:30 pm, held six rounds and multiple teams competing for the prize. With the event featuring questions that ranged from the movies of Quentin Tarantino, the singer of a played song, and what was the name of the Blues Brother that John Belushi played. One of the people who had participated that night was Alex Gilmore, a 1L law student at Drake. Gilmore would later say that the event was a lot of fun.
“A bunch of us go to Drake law school and um, we have finals coming up in a couple weeks and decided to come over here for trivia night, just as a quick way to relax for the evening and uh, hang out with each other before we start getting too serious before finals,” Gilmore said. “My favorite part of the evening was that there was a bunch of random people there, which made it a lot of fun.“
The event was hosted by a Drake graduate Alex, who, according to Davis, really liked trivia and had offered to host for them.
“So he put together a series of questions for us and kind of structured basically the whole thing for us and hosted and read questions and tallied up the winners and all that last night,” Davis said. Gilmore was in fact on the team that won that night.
“Yeah, trivia is always a blast, especially here, it was a lot of fun. We had a couple key players, which helped us with the victory, but it was good, it was all good. Definitely contributions across the board,” Gilmore said..
According to Davis, he considered the first trivia night of the year to be a success.
“We had almost the perfect number of teams, because the entire place was full, but we didn’t have to turn anyone away,” Davis said. “So, for the first week we definitely considered it a big success.”
PHOTO BY CAMERON BOLTON
