It’s tough to open a bar with the goal of being a “neighborhood bar.” Yet not two weeks after 5 & Dime opened in Foster-Powell, a neighborhood about as far away from mine as you can get, it already felt like the bar I’d pop into when I was in the area. The drinks are great (and cheap), but more importantly, there’s something about the dark green and gray and slightly weathered gold accents everywhere that gives the bar a lived-in feeling even just weeks after opening.
It helps that the Blazers are on TV and a huge portrait of Rasheed Wallace hangs on one wall, while near the kitchen, Anthony Bourdain’s twinkle-eyed scowl reigns, and at the other end of the bar, Nina Simone glares seriously over the record player.
Even the menu pays homage to a badass of yet another creative field, with a list of house cocktails named for characters from Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel American Gods, which pleases the middle-school version of me to no end. These range from a heavyweight “bartender’s daiquiri” called Mr. Nancy, to the novel’s New Gods (TV, internet, etc.), represented in cocktail form by tequila with kombucha and CBD, to a Mr. Jaquel and Mr. Ibis, a rye whiskey and egg white cocktail made with dates, local Townshend’s chai-influenced Kashmiri amaro, and grains of paradise. Crucially, none of these cocktails costs more than $11, and the vast majority of two additional pages of “classic cocktails (that people actually drink)” come in under $10. Even among those classics, the menu encourages some experimentation, like swapping Cynar in for Fernet in a Toronto cocktail, for instance (a godsend during the tragic Fernet-Branca shortage Portland is currently living through).
