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There is no toffee at Toffee Club (1006 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 971-254-9518, toffeeclubpdx.com). Where the dank and cramped Hawthorne Strip once stood, there is now a convivial English soccer pub that serves up fish and chips, and an ungodly array of Samuel Smith beer bottles alongside Firestone Walker and Breakside taps.
The new bar looks nothing like its strip-club predecessor—it's hard to even remember where the stage once sat. The airy, sun-drenched space looks instead like postwar England. That is to say, one half looks like a domestic sports pub with leaf-patterned deco wallpaper, a burnished-wood bar and a dartboard in a specially made wall recess. And the other half looks like a mortar-shelled concrete bunker, with screens that pull down over windows and a loading gate looking out on the liquor store.
The bar's name, as it turns out, comes from the Toffees—fans of Liverpudlian club Everton. One such Toffee is the bar's owner, Pete Hoppins, design director for all of Nike's soccerwear. But the Toffee who's actually in the Club is his brother Jack Hoppins, who puttered around during an epic Warriors-Blazers game trying to figure out the strange and foreign sport called "basketball" while his very American bartender laughed.
The bar played host to a massive game projection in a tiny white-walled backroom, which opens up for a Timbers and English Premier League schedule posted on the website. But it was more pleasant to watch from the bar while eating a well-battered fish sandwich ($10) with surprisingly good bread, plus a pint of malty-pale Fuller's. Much at the bar feels half-filled in—especially the bizarrely paltry liquor selection short on decent scotch and gin. But it'll be a nice little bar, especially coming off the bridge during happy hour.
Willamette Week
