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When Michael Banash and Rob Hemmerling dismantled Caswell's
towering bookshelves and erected Slow Bar a little over a
month ago, the longtime barkeeps wanted to create a club for
their own kind: bartenders.
But what they got was a bizarre Southeast Grand Avenue
homage to "seedy bliss" where business suits, Burnside skate
punks and Milwaukie suburbanites all collide. In Portland,
where every club boasts its own culture and devotees, Slow Bar
is a prime candidate for the swing voters of the nightlife
world.
Hemmerling had run Milwaukie standby Vic's Tavern for the
past decade, while Banash worked at strip emporium Exotica,
Voodoo Lounge and Vic's. When they opened Slow Bar, their
barflies buzzed in after them. The club's highbrow affections
come courtesy of ex-Higgins and Tabla cook Amy Jermain, whose
ambitious Slow menu includes ceviche and stinky cheese. Add to
that the fact that the crimson-lit space is named after Slow
Club, the infamous boîte in David Lynch's Blue
Velvet--and Slow Bar starts to make a bit more sense.
It's clever, really. Steeping your digs in Lynchian lore
gives a new business still searching for its personality some
immediate character--and free license on furnishings. The elk
antlers that hang above the mirrored bar? A direct reference
to the decor inside the Velvet crew's infamous haunt.
Why no macrobrews on tap, except for PBR? Probably because
Dennis Hopper's character Frank Booth says, "Heineken? Fuck
that shit. Pabst Blue Ribbon!" The awful, chintzy, 1980s-style
vases packed with curly willow and dried flowers? You got us
there.
Slow Bar's five booths are their own movie-worthy
characters: nearly 5 feet tall, padded and stained as red as
blood, they're the kind of cushy, shadowy caves built for
feeling up strangers and snorting illegal substances. God and
the devil themselves could be bargaining over your soul in the
very next booth--you'd never know.
Most every night, the bar is packed with one or two
factions of its fan base, from graying, lecherous men in
Hawaiian print shirts to blunt-banged hipster girls. The
owners plan to expand Slow Bar in the next six months, adding
pool tables and pinball machines, but Banash says their goal
of making the kind of bar that they wanted to hang out at has
already been met.
"One night around 12:30 am, when everybody was tipsy,
somebody played a Journey song on the jukebox," Banash says.
"There were 50 people here. They were all singing it out loud
together with their beers in the air. It was like a scene out
of a movie."
Yeah, a cinematic moment that's a hell of a lot easier to
understand than anything in Blue Velvet.
Originally published on
WEDNESDAY, 8/4/2004
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