Oregon is home to a lot of restaurants, bars, wineries, and breweries, but there are tons of hidden gems that some Portlanders aren't unearthing. To help guide us to these potential discoveries, we've enlisted some of our city's many food players to share their recommendations for a weekly feature dubbed Dining Confidential.
Image of Corner Saloon courtesy Facebook
After Emily Crowley co-founded a series of farm dinners (one of the first in the Northwest), she spent the next seven years creating magical nights on farms and cultivating relationships with our regions' finest chefs, winemakers, artisans, and purveyors. Nowadays, she's quite busy as the Associate Director of Feast Portland — instead of making her way way through vineyards and farms, she's pacing around Director Park with a tape measure in hand, working out all the details for the upcoming festival. But when not working with winemakers and chefs, she throws back beer at an unexpected (though cherished) Lake Oswego dive.
I grew up in Lake Oswego, which isn't exactly known for its eating and drinking establishments — and good dive bars are in even shorter supply. But just on the border of Lake O (in Tualatin), at what used to be a dusty four way stop (it's now a fancy European round-about much more suited to L.O. standards), sits the Corner Saloon, formerly known as Wanker's. It's a dark room decorated in typical dive bar fashion; autographed celebrity photographs, trophies from the locally sponsored little league team, peanut shells on the floor, and a small area where ageing garage bands belt out Steely Dan covers on the weekends. On summer nights, when it's not Harley Wednesday, my family's been known to take up more than half the back patio often retelling stories from epic past visits. The halter-top clad waitresses don't care if you're coming off a bike ride (Lycra or leather) or fresh from the barkdust outlet across the street. The beer is cold and the Buffalo wings have been given the stamp of approval by my Upstate New York husband. Just be sure to order them extra crispy.
· Corner Saloon [Official site]
· All Previous Dining Confidentials [Eater PDX]
