Six years at the Hobnob!

AMAZING! Tonight (May 15, 2019) marks a full six years of ‘Wine-down Wednesday’ at the Hobnob Corner Restaurant.

That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 gigs playing guitar music at the Hobnob on Wednesday evenings.

Here’s the story of my
longest extended engagement.

One afternoon back in 2013, Hobnob owner Warren Cole and I sat down at an empty booth to discuss launching a weekly promotional event. It was a pretty simple concept we came up with, combining three elements:

• Superior cuisine created by Warren’s son, Chef Eric Cole
• Select wines 1/3 off
• Relaxing fingerstyle guitar music provided by yours truly

We agreed to try it for the summer to see how well the hump-day promotion worked to bring diners in on what is typically a slow night in the restaurant business.

Now, usually restauranteurs book dinner gigs on weekends, an additional draw to get folks to choose their restaurant over all the others. But Hobnob was so well-established (Warren and wife Betsy opened the Hobnob way back in 1979) that more weekend patrons would simply mean more people being turned away for lack of seating. Not the worst problem to have… but peddling disappointment isn’t such a great idea either.

Myself, I was optimistic WDW would work. As a working guitarist, I’d been doing dinner gigs at fine dining establishments for decades. I’d seen first-hand how adding the wonderful sounds of a well-played nylon-string guitar to a fine dining experience could create an engaging, relaxing atmosphere benefiting the owner, the patrons, and the musician. This time I was looking for a nice mid-week engagement that left my weekends free and clear to play other gigs.

Well, obviously, the Summer 2013 promotion worked. As people began to catch on to this unique weekly event happening at its oldest, most iconic and popular restaurants in the heart of Nashville, more and more people dined with us, and so Warren decided to keep me on through the busy Fall season in Brown County. The public’s response continued to blossom, and as Christmas approached, Warren agreed to extend the engagement through the dark months of the approaching Brown County winter.

But by then, a core group of WDW regulars had made their hump-day dining a habit they didn’t want to break, weather be damned, and Wednesday evenings at the Hobnob continued to flourish.

Hobnob’s Wine-down Wednesday had become
a bonafide Brown County tradition.

For the most part, tonight will be like any other night at the Hobnob. My front-and-center table will have the same 8-12 regulars who always sit up close, applaud ever tune, and chat with me between numbers. In the back section furthest away will be a similar group of regulars who prefer to keep the music more ambient, but always say hi as they leave a tip in my jar on their way out the door. In between will be other regulars sitting in booths and tables, many of whom I know by name and can play their favorite tune without it being requested.

Peppered in and around the regular folks will be new-comers to Wine-down Wednesday, and if I catch them leaving between tunes when I can engage with them, I’ll ask them how their evening went, which of Chef Eric’s great dishes they enjoyed that night, and remind them that “we do this every Wednesday evening, so come on back and see us”.

My previous record for an extended engagement was 3.5 years at the Sheraton Hotel in Bakersfield, CA back in the ’90s. Now I’m moving into my 7th year at the Hobnob. Warren and I haven’t discussed extensions for many years now… Wine-down Wednesday is just something we do, building on Warren’s 40 years experience managing the most successful restaurant in Brown County.

Hobnob feels like home to me now, an extended family of good, hard-working Americans doing their best to deliver a quality dining experience to folks in the middle of their workweek. And for two hours every Wednesday, I get to play music I love for folks who appreciate good guitar music (plus turn a few bucks, make some friends, and sit down with wifey to a fine meal ourselves at the end of the night). I consider that a true privilege.