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Chad Walsh

Welcome back to the Weekly Wrap. Here’s all the news you may have missed over the Thanksgiving break.

Today, the Mercury reported that Hey Love, East Burnside’s balmy new fern bar is now serving lunch and Sunday brunch. Expect to dig into Seinfeld-in-name-only lunch offerings (e.g., a spam Reuben dubbed “The Yada Yada”) and Sunday brunch items like cinnamon rolls served with CBD-infused warm caramel. (The Hey Love team is also rolling out daily happy hour discounts from 2 to 5 pm.) We also dropped our holiday food guide right before Turkey Day, and thanks to our new publish-every-other-week format, you can still pick up a copy at your favorite bar/cafe/street corner to prepare for those still looming holidays.

This week, the O reported that barman-about-town, Tommy Klus, is opening the Scotch Lodge, a whiskey-lovers oasis in the old Biwa space. Once it opens in January, Klus will share with the public his extensive whiskey collection, while his friend, chef Aaron Barnett (St. Jack, La Moule), will share dishes inspired by frequent trips to France over the last couple of years. Speaking of inspired: The paper just gifted carnivores an early holiday present by ranking the city’s best new burgers. (Spoiler alert: American cheese [which never really went away] is back because it is, indeed, the premiere cheeseburger cheese.)

And speaking of cheese—the cream kind—PoMo wrote that the friends behind St. Johns’ still fairly new cult classic Bernstein Bagels will open a straight up brick-and-mortar in the old Mint space at the corner of Interstate and Russell. Their handmade bagels are already phenomena, and their possible breakfast cocktails and pizza bagels could be as well, once Bernstein’s nails down those first few opening weeks.

Willamette Week was busy this week reviewing the “rambunctious” sauces at Bhuna (which “warrants a visit”), and KalĂ©, the Japanese curry comfort dish spot that the weekly is “here for,” as well as profiling the NW’s newest bars, Botanist and Bantam Tavern, which gives the neighborhood two new excellent bars devoted to craft cocktails and idiosyncratic bar food. And remember that Thrillist story published two weeks ago in which the author blames himself for killing Stanch’s by claiming its cheeseburger as the best in the US? Well, WW did some digging and the owner’s personal troubles alluded to in the original piece include an acrimonious divorce and pleading no contest to choking his then-wife, among other things, complicating a narrative that lots of us glommed onto.

Finally, Eater reported that the folks behind Bar Casa Vale are opening an adjacent seafood supper club called Erizo. It nailed down (ish) an opening date for the Pearl’s upcoming ‘80s-themed craft cocktail bar, Pink Rabbit (early December); it let us know that Ladd’s Addition’s Upper Left coffee shop is opening a second shop across the river on the 500 block of SW Morrison; it scored a scoop by pointing out that downtown PDX is getting a new dairy-free ice creamery (Kozy Bar will make ice cream bars sweetened with fermented rice); and it dropped menu details on Kimberly and Vitaly Paley’s now open Rosa Rosa. Say, “Hello!” to lamb meatballs, chickpea crĂȘpes, bruschetta, and anchovy-heavy puttanesca. Che bello.