Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Burnside Skatepark, though built without permission, eventually won
tentative acceptance by city government as a public skate park.
Retrace your steps up E. Burnside St. and take a right on SE 3rd Ave.,
then a left on SE Ankeny St., then a right onto SE Martin Luther King
Jr. Blvd. At the corner of MLK and SE Oak St. you'll find the Sheridan
Fruit Company, a small grocery store that has been owned and oper-
ated by the same family since 1946. The produce and the deli here are
excellent.
Follow SE Oak St. two blocks down to SE 2nd Ave., where you'll come
to the neighborhood's longstanding namesake pub, Produce Row Café.
This former workingman's beer bar and sandwich shop underwent a
radical transformation not long ago. It was always comfy, but now it's
also stylish, and the back patio has been covered to accommodate the
long rainy season. Food options at the “old” ProRow consisted of a few
types of legendarily enormous sandwiches; these days you can get
moules frites and radicchio salad, too. One thing that hasn't changed,
thank goodness, is the massive beer selection (now with whiskey!).
From SE Oak St., turn left onto SE 2nd Ave. to reach the imposing,
mustard-yellow Olympic Mills Commerce Center, one of the more at-
tractive structures in the area. Renovated and retrofitted in 2008, this
large, open-format industrial space was originally the Olympic Cereal
Mill, built in 1920. During the 1920s it was home to a General Mills sub-
sidiary that churned out boxes of Wheaties. Today its tenants include,
among other things, the highbrow charcuterie joint Olympic Provisions,
which is about as far from a box of cereal as it's possible to get.
Continue along SE 2nd Ave. and turn left at SE Morrison St. At the
corner of Morrison and SE 3rd Ave. is Le Bistro Montage, whose mere
name elicits gazes of dreamy nostalgia in Portland scenesters of a cer-
tain age. It was the ultimate late-night postclub dining spot during the
1990s (it opened in 1992 and was named Restaurant of the Year that
year by local alt-weekly Willamette Week ). It was, and still is, open for
dinner until 4 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays, catering largely to the
wasted and famished. Things that made it brilliant include white-
clothed communal tables, “pounder” bottles of Rainier, frog legs, ex-
tremely cheap mac-and-cheese with odd enhancements such as Spam,
oyster shooters (if you asked for one, the waiters would bellow your or-
der to the kitchen at the tops of their lungs), The Last Supper and other
Search WWH ::




Custom Search