The Bathroom at Foxtrot Is Like a Grandmother’s Vanity Room, but More So

Portland can be a place of surprising domesticity. This extends to a distinct subgenre of its bars, which can feel as if you’ve stumbled into a family gathering where you’re inexplicably welcome. Cafe and cocktail bar Foxtrot, in the stately Queen Anne manor on Belmont, once home to the Pied Cow, is so aggressively domestic it almost comes out the other side and becomes uncanny. Its black-and-gold bathroom is also this way. “It started with just a collection of those kind of ’80s gold mirrors,” owner Britain Stephens says. It multiplied from there into a hall of etched glass. Deco flowers and birds. A double-stacked pedestal with a ceiling lamp in between. It’s like a grandmother’s vanity room, but amped to 11. “It’s just as if I was decorating my space, but maybe maximalizing,” Stephens says. He’s still not done. Ever since the place opened more than a year ago, he keeps adding and adding to its rooms. The bathroom, too, is unfinished: “It’ll kind of be an ongoing art project,” he says.

3244 SE Belmont St.

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