Bar Review: Sizzle Pie's new Quality Bar

It's got fancy $10 cocktails, but Quality Bar still sorta looks like a pizza place.

LATE BLOOMER: Quality takes time. Or at least, Quality Bar (931 SW Oak St., sizzlepie.com) took a lot of it. Sizzle Pie first announced it would open a bar next to its westside pizza spot back in the heady days of February 2012. LMFAO was at the top of the Billboard charts, Jefferson Smith was set to be Portland's next mayor, and no one was quite sure what neighborhood the "West End" was.

Quality Bar (Emily Joan Greene/WW)

Well, they all know what the West End is now: It's a neighborhood where it's not even weird for a late-night pizza place to open a bar with $11 cocktails. Still, the bartender in the double-decker space recommended the admittedly tasty $8 Old Fashioned instead, which Quality Bar makes with peach bitters and peach-infused whiskey. When she tasted the drink with her straw, she actually said "Mmmmm!" before setting the drink down.

So there are no worries that Sizzle's gone all snooty-upscale on you, even as the tattooed and skull-capped guy sitting on one of the stools down the bar says, in an extraordinarily serious tone, that he's "really into anise right now."

Aside from the addition of a huge light-up wall of liquor, a mezzanine seating area over the restrooms and a vast array of potted plants stored 12 feet above the bar, Quality Bar still sort of looks like a pizza place. It's got the same rectangular blond-wood tables and gray walls of the actual pizza spot next door. The bonus is that, at Quality Bar, you can sit in leisurely fashion and order your vegan, veggie or meat-laden Sizzle Pie slice from a menu. And you will wait for it while sipping a $6 Hopworks IPA on nitro or a $10 whiskey cocktail—"Rock Over London, Rock On Chicago"—named after sainted, disturbed Chicago icon Wesley Willis.

But note that one of those $7 cocktails is actually just a shot and a Narragansett tallboy, which the person next to you will order as if 'Gansett is a rare delicacy and not just the shit they drank in Jaws.

Quality Bar (Emily Joan Greene/WW)

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