Bitter End Pub: New Kicks

BITTER END PUB
By Matthew Korfhage

The original Bitter End Pub (1981 W Burnside St., 432-8326, bitterendpdx.com) was more a bitter beginning. It was a dim, dirty, piss-and-vinegar-fry dive that germinated a drunken army of Portland Timbers soccer fans largely by its proximity to Civic Stadium—I mean PGE Park, er, Jeld-Wen Field, oh, right, Providence Park. When the Timbers Army's home bar closed at the beginning of 2013, some fans keened deeply for bygone days of no-pity minor-league soccer and half-remembered overnight stays during overseas World Cup matches. Others remembered that it always kind of smelled like a septic tank. 


Well, the Bitter End is back, revived not by the original owners but by a squad of soccer fans alongside former Violetta owner Dwayne Beliakoff. The new bar is a theme-park version of a Portland soccer pub: The softwood bar’s underside is wrapped in corrugated aluminum, the walls are tiled with fake woodpiles and flat-screen TVs (where there’s not a creepily NSA surveillance photo of the soccer stadium visible across the street), and the space between the restrooms contains a faux wall of player lockers. A battery of clocks tells the time, with varying accuracy, at the sites of historical World Cups. 

Meanwhile, more than 20 beer taps crowd the space behind the bar, with an extremely strong preference for IPAs, lagers and pilsners, and a weird antipathy toward anything darker than a Brach’s caramel. Beliakoff has also installed a raw-oyster bar and fancy hamburgers on puffy buns. The men’s room contains a chalkboard on which fans scrawl game-day predictions and ask the important questions of the day: “Where is Richie Marquez?” Another chalk enthusiast scrawled the words “ABE MAKES GOOD CIDER,” referring to Cider Riot’s Abram Goldman-Armstrong. 

The bar’s resurgent popularity among superfans paradoxically makes it a relaxing place to watch soccer on home-match days. Ten minutes before the game, the entire overcrowding Timbers Army departs for the stadium, leaving behind an equally formidable army of service staff with nothing to do but ask you what you’d like. 

WWeek 2015

Matthew Korfhage

Matthew Korfhage

Matthew Korfhage has lived in St. Louis, Chicago, Munich and Bordeaux, but comes from Portland, where he makes guides to the city and writes about food, booze and books. He likes the Oxford comma but can't use it in the newspaper.

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office.

Help us dig deeper.

Support