8105 SE Stark St., 503-255-0049, roscoespdx.com. 11 am-2:30 pm daily. Happy hour 2-6 pm daily: food specials and a buck off wells.
Established: December 2006
Montavilla's now decade-old taphouse is lovable hodgepodge of many great things. It's a pool hall, a lottery bar, a pinball hangout, a Creole restaurant and an order-in sushi spot, and it has 20 stellar taps of beer that will always include something you don't expect. This mix of purposes—it's Portland's only beer bar that serves so well as an old-school dive bar—means that Roscoe's is home to an equally mixed crowd of pool-playing bikers, lotto players, and foosball wizards, plus a mass of seriously nerdy drinkers.
We highly recommend the themed monthly "Beer Summits," which are held on the last Friday of each month and carefully curated to showcase the best of styles and regions—whether sours or just "new" and "Oregon." Seemingly every year one of our favorite 10 beers in our annual beer guide was tasted here, in a keg that no one else got to try. But note that although the oysters are a mere $1.50 and may look inviting, you should leave them be—they're not for you.
Bar story: Though Roscoe's is officially 10 years old, the location did spend a previous 10 years as an entirely different bar that was also called Roscoe's. Bikers hung out there a lot, and it felt vaguely dangerous in a fun way—the sort of place where two women might be allowed to climb onto the bar top to have some fun, because they felt like it.
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