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Televisions cast a soft glow across Honorable Mention as Portland beat the tanking Utah Jazz at Moda Center on Friday night. The sound was off. The sleek and revamped subterranean lounge beneath the historic Benson Hotel is polished and game-ready. And yet, the cocktails—the element the bar seems most eager to put in play—still look to be in the preseason.
The marble staircases and polished brass railings throughout still carry the weight of The Benson’s early 20th century grandeur. Below, in the basement, the mood shifts. Honorable Mention occupies a windowless room that teeters between a speakeasy and a private clubhouse: dim lighting, plush seating, and a discreet atmosphere that encourages lingering over drinks and deep conversation.
In a bar co-owned by Damian Lillard, the silence felt perhaps appropriate. Lillard has always preferred to let the scoreboard speak for him.
On paper, the drink list aims for approachable craft and recognizability: a cocoa-nib Negroni, a Vieux Carré-adjacent rye cocktail called Liquid Inspiration, and tropical rum drinks with names like Sucker Punch and Runner’s High. The menu reads well. The execution, at least on an early busy-night visit, left something to be desired.
Several cocktails were built directly in their serving glasses over large cubes rather than mixed in separate vessels, an approach that renders proper chilling and dilution difficult. Equal-parts drinks were free-poured with a confidence that bordered on amateurish optimism. Liquid Inspiration—built from rye, sweet vermouth, brandy, Benedictine and bitters—should shoot for the rich, spirit-forward neighborhood of a Vieux Carré. Instead, it arrived soft and overly sweet, missing the crisp integration that makes that family of cocktails work.
The evening’s best drink was the cocoa-nib Negroni, a simple cocktail typically difficult to ruin. Still, it landed somewhat under-diluted, as though all the right players had been signed but the team hadn’t yet practiced together.
The tikilike drinks fared worse. One rum cocktail tasted almost entirely of pineapple juice, with the rum so subtle it was hard to tell whether it had even been drafted. Another promised coconut cream, orgeat, and demerara but delivered little body and even less character. The listed ingredients suggested spice and depth; the drink itself suggested only juice.
Staff mentioned that custom mixing beakers were still on back order, which may explain some of the improvisation. Nonetheless, beakers are not the only way to stir or chill a cocktail properly, and for a place billing itself as an elevated drinking destination, the bar program needs to be sharper than this.
For now, beer may be the safer play. In a city built on craft beer, the lack of brewer diversity at Honorable Mention is curious. A hazy IPA from Eugene’s McKenzie River Brewing—acquired last summer by Urban Restaurant Group, the bar’s parent company—arrived well carbonated in a clean shaker pint with solid lacing. Basic? Sure. But it executed correctly, all the same.
What makes Honorable Mention more interesting than a simple “good room, bad drinks” story is that the kitchen is operating in an entirely different league.
Chef Bobby Brown (who handles the food menu at all Urban Restaurant Group’s properties) describes the concept as “Michelin star meets sports bar,” an ambitious but appropriate ethos for a high-end sports bar. Instead, the food is where the restaurant starts to make real sense.
Brown says he wanted dishes to be “super approachable” and “really recognizable, but totally upside down.” The menu reflects that philosophy. It bounces and crosses over from steak tartare to blistered shishitos to pepperoni pizza without ever feeling lazily formulaic.
The tartare was solid, though slightly underseasoned, and the accompanying toast leaned a touch chewier than ideal. The lollipop buffalo wings were a revelation: juicy and brightly acidic, deeply unctuous, and served with a proper blue cheese dressing. The tidy lollipop format delivers a kind of functional elegance, replete with all the fatty indulgence of buffalo wings sans the sauce-smeared fingers; a thoughtful consideration in a room where plenty of diners arrive dressed to the nines. Blistered shishitos arrived perfectly crisp with a furikake ranch threaded with flecks of earthy, briny nori, toasted and seasoned in the kitchen. Even the furikake is made in-house, with nori toasted and seasoned before being folded into the sauce.
The sleeper hit, though, may be the pizza. Brown says he’s been making pizza for two decades and uses imported Caputo flour for the dough. The result is essentially an upscale version of classic American pan pizza—deeply golden, crisp-edged, lavish with cheese, maybe even a little too gooey, but exactly right for the concept of low- to highbrow.
That split personality defines Honorable Mention right now. The lounge is sexy, the crowd is there, and the kitchen is already delivering dishes that feel thoughtful and fully realized. The cocktail program—supposedly central to the luxury sports lounge idea—still looks like a work in progress.
If the wrinkles in the bar program are eventually ironed out, Honorable Mention could become that imagined upscale take on the Portland sports bar—a place to watch a game while eating and drinking exceptionally well. For now, the kitchen is clearly game-ready. The cocktails could use a few more reps in training camp.
EAT: Honorable Mention at The Benson, 309 SW Broadway, 971-254-8691, honorablementionpdx.com. 4–11 pm Sunday–Thursday, 4 pm–midnight Friday and Saturday.
