There’s a Playboy from 2003 sitting at the end of the bar, across from a cluttered gallery wall of gilded religious iconography lit by a row of guttering candles. Golden light flickers across the millennial centerfold’s golden skin as she poses demurely on pale satin sheets. At the door, a couple of drag queens are making a dramatic entrance while a squadron of club girls slam neon blue shots of something or other. “Why is it blue?” one of them mutters to herself. “Blue is fun” is the general consensus.
We are all at the grand opening of Good Girl on April 23, the new occupant of the classic brick storefront on lower Morrison that used to be Home, A Bar. Home was always a bit tricky to pin down: a neighborhood joint on a clubby street with a name that was hard to Google. But the burgers were solid, and Home trucked along for almost a decade before finally closing up shop last summer. For Good Girl owner Paige Cooper, a veteran Bay Area bartender and former Home staff, that felt like an opportunity to start something new. And now, just about a year later, we’re standing in it while Eminem blasts from the speakers and the bartender lines up another row of blue shots.
Unlike Home, Good Girl is pretty easy to classify: “Slutty goth dive bar” is how Cooper puts it. The aesthetic is stronger, too. A neon sign in the window greets passersby with the words “Live Rude Girls” in bright red all-caps. A gothic cathedral of wrought iron and blood red neon looms behind the back bar like the altar in a sexy Batman villain’s maximalist lair. The walls are tricked out in gilded crucifixes and vintage bar signs, and the bathrooms feel like you could develop photos of cosmic horrors in them.
The iconography is in line with Cooper’s Catholic upbringing, and the sexy stuff is in line with this stretch of edgy inner SE bars and clubs, which more or less starts at strip club Sassy’s on SE 9th and ends at the Coffin Club on Grand. But Cooper says that’s mostly just window dressing. “Where I’m from, a bar is just a bar,” Cooper explains. “You walk in, there’s people from all walks of life, you sit down, and you’re instantly comfortable.”
Cooper’s been working in dive bars since she was old enough to drink in one. “I worked one in Palmdale that really made me who I was,” she says. “Sawdust floors, door guys that were like ten feet tall, fights all the time. It was a true dive. I was 21, 22… that’s how I learned I can do this.” After a decade or so working California dive bars, she moved up to Portland during the pandemic and got a gig at Home until she parted ways with the bar under contested circumstances.
After that there was some time in the wilderness: “I was just doing gig after gig, scraping just to find something,” Cooper recalls. Eventually she landed at Sugar Hill, a bar owned by Quinn Matthewstearn and David Hall, who also operate Jackie’s, Panther Club, and Nevermind, along with several other clubby retro bars around town. “After four months, I was like, ‘Can I work at the other ones?’” Cooper says. “Each of their locations is so different; I wanted to learn how everything worked.” And then when the opportunity arose to lease the space Home once occupied, the dramatic irony was too good to pass on.
Cooper is chatty in disposition, monochromatic in attire, and dripping in cool tattoos. And like all good dive owners, she’s zero bullshit when it comes to laying down the law. Behind the bar are three signs: an efficient draft and cocktail list, a legally required food menu (“no subs, no mods, eat it or don’t”), and a code of conduct that includes prohibitions on creeps and lines at the well. It concludes with the line “Fuck around and find out.”
The food menu is similarly to the point: it’s all stuff a solo bartender can fix in a pinch without taking their eyes off the door for too long. Think corn dogs and PB&J freezer waffles. Fine dining it isn’t, but there’s some fun struggle food on there. That said, this is likely going to be one of those places where the move is pregaming hot chow elsewhere and sticking to the specialty of the house, which is booze. There’s a couple of microbrews on tap from Breakside and Ecliptic, plus some cheaper cans ($3 Hamm’s!). The cocktail list is similarly unfussy, with a handful of dive bar classics (think Dirty Shirleys and 7 and 7s) and the requisite neon blue Jolly Rancher shots.
The swag is also on theme: “I feel like the merch at every bar is the same: hat, T-shirt. I don’t want that,” Cooper says. But branded apparel is a must these days, so she went the boudoir route and commissioned some underwear with the bar’s logo on them. “I’m gonna do rotating types,” Cooper notes. “Next ones are going to be boyshorts. Maybe boxers after that.”
Good Girl, 719 SE Morrison, Tue-Thur 4 pm-1 am, Fri-Sat 4 pm-2 am, Sun 4 pm-1 am, @goodgirlpdx