Mixster Northeast

Another classic mixster establishment is the Sandy Hut, an unrepetant old school dive bar on NE Sandy (hence the name) just north of where it forks off from Burnside. The goofy hut-shaped sign
is prominent from Sandy as one drives by. It's classic Portland, but it's also the kind of place one would go into on a dare, which is exactly how I found myself there last Thursday afternoon.

I was up in NE, in the Hollywood district, on some personal business. Red had texted me that she was going out to dinner with her coworkers at the end of shift, since it was the end of the quarter. On my own, I decided to grab a late lunch. Seeing the Sandy Hut sign as I came down towards the river reminded me of how I had joked with Red about going in there.

Four-thirty in the afternoon is perfect time of day to explore these types of places. It seemed now or never.  So I parked the Bimmer on a side street and picked my way across traffic on Sandy to the wedge shaped little building that looks like it grew right out of the fabric of Portland itself, the city that works.

Inside were a dozen locals scattered along the long arching bar back in the dimly lit dining room.  Behind them on the wall behind the bar were not only usual collection of stickers and artistic designs, but dusty found-object artifacts like a King Tut head and some antlers, giving the bar itself that organic feel of a fallen giant log rotting in a forest---exactly what you'd want in a dive bar.

All five televisions throughout the place, including the big screen in the empty part of the dining room, were showing the Blazers game.  A couple of the local crusties at the bar were watching the game and discussing the team, in the manner of slow-speed color commentators.

A gregarious and ample-figured Portland blonde woman, her exposed chest covered with tattoos, busily served them drink from behind the bar. She seemed to recognize everyone there by name (except yours truly).

The signature cocktail menu was on a whiteboard, written with blue, green and red Dry-Erase markers. It three drinks, all of them named after Blazer team members, I inferred. I ordered the Robinson Root Beer, that was made with vodka and a maraschino cherry, served in a beer mug.


The menu on the outside wall was full of Mexican items. But once I inside I realized that it was probably better to forget about those dishes and order from the specials listed on the white board---a bacon burger. That's what I had been wanting anyway---a dive bar burger. To my satisfaction it was tasty and came in a basket with fries.

As I sat at the bar, I noticed the booths in the dining room, all of them unoccupied at this hour, were slanted in decor more to the hipster side, with lounge-style lighting. After ten minutes, as if right on cue, a couple thin-framed young men wearing dark clothes came in and took a seat in the dining room at one of the tables. They asked the bartender if they could switch the big screen from the Blazers game to watch the Stanford game in the NCAA tournament. She said she was happy to comply, and took the remote over the big screen to find the game on the channel guide.

"Yeah, the college basketball tournament," chimed in one of the crusties, as if waking up from a slumber to castigate the bartender over her ignorance of the sport.

"I only had all the televisions on the Blazers game, because that's what I thought people wanted," she said, offering a plaintive apology to the faux complaint.

It turned out that the Stanford game had not yet started, so the two young men played a table video game while a different NCAA tournament game played out on the big screen.

It was just before five o'clock. The hour of the hipster had arrived.