This SF internet celeb will buy you a drink — but only if you can find him

Jim Mollé will buy you a drink, if you can find him. Jim Mollé will buy you a drink, if you can find him. Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate; Getty Images Buy photo Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate; Getty Images Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close This SF internet celeb will buy you a drink — but only if you can find him 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

“Wow! That’s the beginning of a joke,” says Jim Mollé, looking towards the door at House of Shields. “A guy walks into a bar with a tuba…”

A young man has just waddled into this New Montgomery Street cocktail bar, and he is indeed lugging a white-painted tuba, with several probable bandmates in tow. Bartender Shanti DeLuca stops stirring a drink and furrows his brows. Mollé, sidled up at the bar, is utterly tickled.

“What are these guys doing?” he asks.

They could be here to meet Mollé — he’d have no idea. The Castro Valley local has built something of an online community for himself based on exactly these types of mystery meet-ups.

Once or twice a month for almost a year, Mollé has posted a photo of himself on the social media site Reddit under his username u/jimmyjah. In them, he invites anyone who sees his picture in the San Francisco forum, called a “subreddit,” to join him at this unidentified bar. When they figure out where he is based on his picture or a riddle (or, one time, coordinates), he’ll buy their first drink.

A surge of upvotes and comments typically follows online, elevating Mollé’s post to the top of r/sanfrancisco. Offline, a handful of those Redditors locate Mollé and join him to hang out, network and trade contact information. In the process, over the last few months, he’s become a veritable local Reddit celebrity.

The social media attention, however, was never the intention. Mollé just wanted to meet new people, IRL.

RELATED: Why one of San Francisco's oldest bars is legally frozen in time

Mollé’s worked in this neighborhood by New Montgomery for more than 20 years. He lived in San Francisco for most of that time, then moved to the East Bay after his daughters were born to be closer to them and his co-parent. When he’s not with his kids, he likes to drop by the House of Shields and talk about the classic bar’s sordid backstory with the other patrons.

One day, he took that conversation to Reddit, posting a simple question to r/sanfrancisco: “This is my favorite bar,” he wrote, accompanying it with a photo of the House of Shields. “What’s your favorite bar and why?”

The post blew up with anecdotes and stories of local lore, leading Mollé to wonder if there might be another way to connect with his neighbors.

That night, Mollé sat at this bar with his best friend and former co-worker, Hamilton Cline (another Reddit celeb in his own right). In the comments of Mollé’s favorite bar post, he and Cline added an invitation, asking anyone who might see their message to join them.

They didn’t, and “nobody came,” Mollé recalls, but it nevertheless got the two of them thinking. Cline had always been curious about how Reddit’s algorithms worked, and Mollé, quite the extrovert, was just happy to meet new people. So they decided to try a dedicated post, where right in the headline, they invite anyone to join them if they can find them — first drink free.

RELATED: Meet Reddit-famous BART portraitist Hamilton Cline

“One rainy cold night in February, we posted, and nobody showed for a while,” Mollé says. It got late so Cline left. Mollé noticed the weather was becoming a bit rough outside, but he stuck it out a little longer.

“Someone comes in and tapped me on the shoulder,” Mollé says. “I turn around and here's this like small, dark-haired Japanese girl in a black leather jacket. She says, ‘Are you Jimmy from Reddit?’ And I go, ‘Yes I am.’ She’s like, ‘You're not going to murder me, are you?’”

Mollé lets out a guffaw. “I’m like, ‘Well, not here, [this bar] is original wood.’”

Though it was a humble turnout, Mollé felt encouraged. Peg — who has since become one of his “greatest, dearest friends” — gave him faith that he might be onto one of those rare internet movements that brings people together rather than dividing them.

“‘Dude, that was amazing. I'm going to do it again,’” he recalls telling Cline. “And so maybe once a month, twice a month if ... [we have] extra disposable income, then I'll do it. And it's been wonderful.”

There have been some especially memorable, albeit expensive moments. One time, Mollé and Cline handed out Reddit Silver — which Cline likens to a digital “high five that costs money” — to everyone who came to the meet-up. Another time, for Mollé’s 50th birthday, they gave Reddit Gold to everyone who commented on the meet-up post that day. Because Gold gives a Redditor an actual perk, premium access to the social media site for a week, it cost Mollé a bit of money.

“Yeah,” he exhales. “That was pretty fun and expensive.”

But the night that best sticks in Mollé’s brain involved a surprise visitor: Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit.

“I'd seen Jimmy's posts a number of times already on r/sanfrancisco,” Huffman tells SFGATE. “I saw the post organically and decided to stop by.”

Huffman’s arrival brought Mollé’s count for that particular night up to about six or seven people, and that meant Mollé was hustling, trying to keep up with multiple conversations. As a rule, he’s always sure to ask for a guest’s first name and about where they work. He bought Huffman a beer and made his usual introduction but then, trying to be a good host, he got swept in another conversation.

A short time later, he remembered the stunted conversation and asked Huffman what his title was at Reddit.

“'I'm one of the cofounders I guess,'” Mollé recalled him saying. “It was funny, this is like two hours into it. He stayed there the whole time. The CEO of Reddit was there at my little thing and I didn't know.”

“Everyone else knew,” Cline jumps in.

“This is how your best friend knows you well, right?” Mollé says, nodding to Cline. “He knows I'm a f—ing fan boy. As soon as I find that that's the CEO of Reddit, I'm going to be all silly and stupid.”

For his part, Huffman, like other Redditors who have attended Mollé’s meet-ups in the past, was just curious.

“Many of us [who work at Reddit] are readers of r/sanfrancisco, and speaking for myself, I joined less because of any novelty of working at Reddit and more because it sounded like a fun group to hang with,” the CEO says.

Mollé chats with Huffman via text occasionally, and they’ve met up a few times since then at the bar. The same goes for other Redditors who’ve attended Mollé’s meet-ups. Sometimes they return, not for the free drink, but just to hang.

“Jim personifies an idea that I'm thankful to have learned from Reddit: that people are fundamentally good, and we should expect positive experiences, even when meeting up with strangers at a bar,” Huffman said of Mollé. “A second life lesson I've learned from Jimmy and Reddit is that buying people drinks is an efficient way to make friends.”

And friends have certainly been made here. Connections too, that have sprawled out past casual meet-ups. Besides new drinking buddies made, there have been job referrals, even relationships, because of these nights.

So much of the experience thus far has been positive that Mollé is a bit perplexed by the lack of trolling. He thinks the r/sanfrancisco forum moderators may be shielding him from negative comments, but tried not to mind that too much.

The people who actually come to the bar are unfailingly sincere. They might show up come for the free drink, but they always stay and chat. That was all Mollé ever wanted, really. For now, he’s going to keep posting on Reddit and holding these events as long as his wallet (and sometimes, Cline’s wallet) can support it.

It’s been 10 months, and lots of people have asked Mollé why he keeps this all going.

“Why keep doing it?” he recounts being asked. “Because people come and they're wonderful. I meet nice people and I’ve made some great friends. And it's a skill. It's just ... putting a nice little thing out into the universe.”

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGate digital editor. Email: alyssa.pereira@sfgate.com | Twitter: @alyspereira

