I don’t really care to drink at places where everyone knows my name. If they know my name it means they know my reputation as a dart master, and board or no board, inevitably I will be challenged to “huck some sharps.” I do, however, like to drink where the bartender knows my name. If the bartenders know my name it means they probably know my drink, “whisky banana hammock,“ and I don’t have to go through the painful explanation. Both Rachel and Rabbit at the Hob Nob Side Door Lounge pour me the stiffest hammocks in town, they do it before I even order it and don’t even blush when it appears at my table. 

Recently the Hob Nob Side Door Lounge has made some improvements to its reputation by adding a large flat screen television in between the two old school cubic ones hanging on either end of the non mirrored wall. They have turned their Friday nights into an eclectic mix of “good music” featuring DJ Robby Jon and DJ Brainswife. Having a love for good music and a stiff BH, I attended last Friday’s Side Door extravaganza and found myself having the good time I’d been looking for all week.

A new sort of shooter-style drink called the Red Rocket was introduced to me, it seems to be a sort of watermelon-innards colored thick slushy jolly rancher of a drink. Sandwiched between rock stars, record producers and hair stylists, I sipped the tail end of this fruit-booter fantasy and found it to be a passable means of inebriation. However, amidst the Red Rockets and the Jagger Bombs my WBH rose like a yellow tower of transparent hydrational rapture, and I smiled right before I mysteriously lost the fake glasses I was borrowing from DJ Robby Jon ... which sucks, ’cause I guess he bought them in London. 

I must say that the Hob Nob is a mixing bowl of culture. If people were songs, this juke box of a corner bar has every genre. Here it does not matter if you are gay, straight, trans, white, black, yellow, hung, stripped, rich, medium rich, homeless or even heartbroken. Everyone somehow manages to find their way in and have their music pumped through the Mackies. In order to reach every layer of this slice of the Tacoma pie with the correct beverage, the staff must have some sort of elephantine memory system granted to them by the Gods of the Nob.

[Hob Nob Side Door Lounge, 716 Sixth Ave., across the street from Wright Park,  Tacoma, 253.272.3200]