Likewise Isn’t Really a Bar, It’s a Happening With Drinks

3564 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-206-4884, likewise.website. 5-11 pm Tuesday-Saturday.

Established: January 2015

Patronage is as old as the arts—presumably the cave-human who made all those cave paintings of hunters wasn't the one who did the actual hunting. So why should an art bar do any different? Hawthorne art project and drinkery Likewise has always made it clear that business wasn't really their business—they currently charge $300 to close down the bar, buy you a six-pack and let you into a neighborhood home to drink there for an hour, and that's only because the $700 immediate bar close and drive to the coast is "sold out." But to prop up their art-patronage model, Likewise sold $20-a-month memberships to support artist-in-residence bartenders and the installation projects they enact inside the bar, whether turning the bar's interior into that of an airplane, complete with fuselage, or a more recent train station. Membership signups have reached 136, and so Likewise will stay open—after, of course, constructing models of each member and hanging them on the wall. But even without being a member, feel free to drink in this gallery-white tunnel of a bar with a phone booth in the middle and bleachers facing the window—the drinks may even be designed by bartenders from Rum Club. But just know that the bar might ask you wear a blindfold, or to tweet childhood memories on a computer whose screen was projected onto the wall.

Bar story: The owners of Likewise weren't trying to start a bar back in 2014. They were trying to buy a car. But the Cup & Saucer owner—who is their landlord—invited them to start a bar instead.