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The Lutz is an exercise in mutually agreeable contradictions. The recently upgraded 70-year-old Woodstock dive has a tallboy crowd, a sincerely decent craft-beer selection (Pfriem, Breakside, Baerlic), and $3 wells at happy hour but also a couple of housemade shrubs it throws into daily cocktails. It has old-school diner fare like pork tenderloin and patty melts that both cost $2 less than the bar's swankier burger, and a crowd that wears every kind of collar imaginable from white to blue to none. The customers seem to roll in shifts—retirees early, white-collars at happy hour. By the late evening, it's working-class cigarette smokers and kids from Reed, just like it was back in the '90s. The juke's gone digital, sure, and when one person plays the Washed Out song cadged by Portlandia as its theme, the bearded guy next to me confesses he'd felt uneasy when the song came on but didn't know why. He pays his tab, and after talking up secret local train tunnels and old indie-rock all-ages venues, he wanders back home to shoot guns in his backyard. What a perfect bar.
HAPPY HOUR: 4-6 pm and 11 pm-2 am daily. Food specials.
ENTERTAINMENT: Jukebox, pool, patio.
4639 SE Woodstock Blvd., 503-774-0353. 11 am-2:30 pm daily
Willamette Week