The Afterlife of Restuarants

June 13, 2020June 13, 2020 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

I hadn’t seen the windows of the bar papered up since before they opened. The vinyl logos and graphics had been up back then, but little else indicating that The Nerd Out would be a bar and not a comic book or collectibles shop. Standing outside now, the giant neon logo had since been joined by menus, flyers for events, comic-book inspired graphics for the typical restaurant notices (“Kids welcome everywhere but the bar,” “we welcome everyone,” etc.) and a host of stickers on the door. Delivery services, local clubs, reviewers that wrote about them… and one with a black top hat on it.

I gently knocked on the door. The owner, Mitch, greeted me and ushered me into the Nerd Out for the last time.

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86 the Normal

June 6, 2020 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Good evening, friends and neighbors.

The weather this weekend could have been better- cloudy, muggy, windy, rainy. No good for going out and doing much, which made it picture perfect for my days off.

See, lately, I’ve been on a big kick of not trying to do something every fucking minute. With the parade of nightmares, hatred, anger, righteous rage, and natural disasters happening outside my little corner- as often as I poke my head out to try and do some good, I want to spend some time remembering what still IS good. The “eternal verities” of a culinary life.

Everyone wants to “return to normal”- the pandemic to go away, hurricane season to pass, and the protesters to shut up and go home (after November 2016, I’ve learned that the people screaming and begging for “peace” tend to actually mean “peace and quiet.”)
Here’s the problem, though- that “normal” wasn’t working as well as you think it was. It won’t come back. It can’t, and if we’re being honest, it probably shouldn’t.

The end of the day at Saint Honore in Portland Oregon

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Enjoy the Odd Night Out- The Tricks to Being A Frugal Foodie

February 1, 2020 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Good evening, friends and neighbors!

I’m gonna get sappy for a second and tell you about my first date with my wife.
We knew we wanted to go out for dinner and a movie, and were tossing around ideas for local restaurants. We settled on a decent Italian place in the area, but the conversation first went like this:

Me: “Well, there’s a bunch of places near the theater. Fridays, Applebees…”
Emily: “Ugh, no. Let’s go to this place instead.”
Me: “Oh thank God.”

According to Emily, that was the moment she knew we would work out in one way or another- she loved food, she loved eating good food, and wanted someone she could nerd out about it with.

Three years into being married, and that’s still one of our favorite indulgences- going to restaurants and being nerds.

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Review #16- Little Beast Brewing Beergarden

June 15, 2019June 14, 2019 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

WHERE: 3412 SE Division St., Portland, OR 97202

When I first moved out to Portland from New Jersey nearly four years ago, one of the first things I was struck by is BIKES EVERYWHERE. In New Jersey, a bike was how kids got around, or what adults did for exercise while wearing goofy clothes.

In Portland, a bike is possibly the easiest way commute through the city and go about your life- and the city leans into that fact hard. Special low-traffic “greenways,” specially-marked bike lanes, bike accessibility on public transit… for a city rife with steep hills and busy streets, cycling is how you get around. In fact, I’d say that bike commuting is as much a part of Portland’s constantly metastasizing culture as “weird,” beer, small food businesses, and big green spaces.

So when I was tooling around Division Street on my bike yesterday, felt the need to dodge the near-record heat for a bit and came across a cute little house with a big front lawn, a sour beer menu, and some simple eats, you didn’t have to twist my arm.

That’s Little Beast in a nutshell.

Exterior shot of Little Beast Brewery Beergarden

Welcome to Little Beast

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Review #15- The Cavern

March 16, 2019March 15, 2019 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Where: 4601 SE Hawthorne Blvd., Portland OR, 97215

When you notice a small corner bar on a normally bustling strip of the city open for a few weeks, but then closed on Friday nights and Saturdays, one of the first things you start to wonder is “…who’s idea was that place?”

The small, narrow corner space- sharing its block with Zach’s Hot Dog Shack, the locally-famous Por Que No?, and a nondescript Tibetan tchotchke shop- had for a short time been the “Hawthorne Public House.” I’d looked in a few times in passing, and that’s precisely what I did. I passed. A whistle-clean bar on the inside, with big TV screens… that was closed at 4pm every Friday.

Passing by, regardless of day or hour, the joint was always empty or closed, and nothing ever compelled me to walk in.

One day, the windows were papered, the sign was down, and another Portland bar vanished like a fart in a Jacuzzi.

A couple months later, my friend Pete caught up with me at the beer cart next to the cafe. He’s a writer for Willamette Weekly, and besides just casually talking to folks about where they like to go for the best ___, he’s one of my go-to sources for new places to try.

“Hey Matt, you like pork, right?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“Ok, you need to go to this place. It’s like an old rocker, punk bar. You know where Por Que No is?”

“Oh, yeah that’s… oh wait, yeah! Someone finally did something with that space? I wondered what happened to it after the Public House went out.”

“… There was something there? Anyway, it’s called The Cavern. Go there sometime- one of the best places for meat in the city. Get the pork belly skewers, and spring for the mousse dip. It’s so raunchy and weird.”

If you want to be noticed, you’ve got to make a little noise- having a whiskey list and a knack for the carnivorous helps too.