The Best Italian Restaurants in Portland. Portland, the dirtbag timber town that it once was, boasts some of the most storied dives on the West Coast, from graffiti-plastered hole-in-the-walls to dilapidated old beer halls still bathed in the warm glow of light-up Schlitz ads. The strength of a dive bar is the regulars that fill its sticky halls year after year, the neighborhood pilgrims who gather at the rail to exchange barroom truisms, neighborhood gossip, and observations about the wider world that may or may not have any basis in reality.
Fixtures get broken and might get fixed, but hardly anything gets replaced. A good dive is an oasis of simple pleasures — beer, pool, conversation — in the encroaching landscape of gentrification and app-based loyalty programs. Indeed, most of the surfaces in this spacious St. Johns watering hole are some kind of fabric, from the scalloped plush booths to the eclectic assemblage of lounge chairs to a small carpeted stage in the back.
Johns mariespdx. Kenton Club might as well be the namesake of the surrounding Kenton neighborhood, a sprightly small town intersection located about as far north as Portland proper gets. The bar itself is a perfectly preserved rundown lounge circa or so, the kind of place Jim Rockford would grab an afternoon beer in an episode of The Rockford Files.
The lighting is dim, the wood is thickly varnished, the tiny corner stage is bedecked in gold tinsel, and the jukebox is probably broken, just as it should be. Lombard hosts a murderers row of seedy watering holes, but few match the battered charm of the Mousetrap Tavern, which marries the worn-out linoleum of a roadside diner with the woodgrain fixtures of a well-loved rumpus room.
An oasis of well-worn elegance on an otherwise residential stretch of Fremont, this venerable neighborhood spot boasts the kind of hammered tin ceilings most often seen in sepia-toned photos of 19th-century San Francisco. Modernity intrudes in the form of a wall of video poker and a plywood DJ booth, but on an average Wednesday afternoon the space fills up nicely with the sounds of clinking pool balls and animated chatter.
