BITTER END PUB - IMAGE: Amaren Colosi
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.
