Hobnob Interview
Valentine’s Day is this Friday. And while you may or may not buy into pseudosecular holidays steeped in Roman bloodshed, if you’re looking for a place to take a date that has good vibes, good drinks, and good oysters, go to the Hobnob in Alameda. Scott is co owner of the Hobnob, along with wife and head chef, Amy. I sat down with Scott to talk about what makes Hobnob special.
The first thing that hits me is the sign. With a nostalgic retro flourish, a large metal sign cascades down the front of building with “Hobnob” in neon letters and a jaunty martini glass beside it. Scott tells me the sign was original to the previous bar Kelly’s. When the location was bought and turned into the Hobnob they preserved the sign but also transformed it, painstakingly replacing the letters.
Like the sign, the name itself is a little old fashioned. To “hobnob” is to associate familiarly, to cutloose in an informal setting, and Hobnob nails that feeling. The kind of place you can come for dinner, for brunch, or for just a drink. The kind of place you feel equally at ease with a group, with a date, or by yourself. The kind of place where the majority of people know Scott and Amy, it’s neighborly in the best sense of the word.
I gesture to the bookcase in the corner filled with board games, new and classic. The games encourage patrons to stay a while, it’s a nice feeling. Scott tells me Connect 4 is their most popular game right now and he’s considering a night for tabletop roleplaying games, rather than the usual trivia or karaoke nights.
Scott is an oyster man for sure, he loves them fresh, grilled, or even canned in the Christmas Eve oyster stew of his youth. He loves them gussied up with a mignonette sauce, sprinkled with lemon juice, dabbed with hot sauce, or in a raw unadulterated form. Hobnob oysters mostly come from Fanny Bay, a farm in Vancouver that produces an oyster with a beautifully fluted shell and a more mild flavor, a great oyster to start off with for the uninitiated. So if you find yourself in Alameda and are ready to take the plunge you should know oysters are half off on Wednesdays, so get your midweek mollusk on.
The Hobnob is a stalwart supporter of the Wild Oyster Project. Last year they donated a portion of all oyster sales for National Oyster Day on August 5th. For the past two years they have been donating shell from the shucked oysters they serve. I asked Scott how they came to be involved. Turns out it was one of our Wild Oyster volunteers who approached Hobnob about the Wild Oyster Project and got the ball rolling on a weekly shell collection. Every week we take that shell to Ploughshares Nursery on the other side of Alameda for it to cure. The first shell we collected from Hobnob is now two years old and soon it will go back into the waters surrounding Alameda as part of a new oyster reef.
Since opening its doors in 2007 the Hobnob has been part of the Alameda community and seen it grow and change. In helping to build reefs from recycled shells and restore Olympia oysters, the Hobnob is creating a welcome environment not just for the people of Alameda, but its native oysters too.