The 29 Best Places to Drink in Portland OR

Scotch Lodge is a dark, wood-paneled whisky bar with towering walls of bottles, marble counters, and the kind of lighting that forgives everything. It won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar. Drinks come smoky and layered, the kitchen turns out silky pasta and fried brie sticks, and someone in the corner is usually having a quiet moment with a rare pour. Dress like you've read a book, then decline to mention it.

1. James Beard Awards 2026 · Winner · Outstanding Bar
2. James Beard Awards 2025 · Nominee · Outstanding Bar
3. The 50 #63 · North America's 50 Best Bars

Pink and purple neon sets the mood at this intimate cocktail bar, which leans hard into '80s New York nostalgia. Your drink arrives in whatever ceramic vessel the bartender feels like, a bunny, a donut with a handle, something stranger. The menu spans highballs, zero-proof options, and signatures like a blue cheese martini, but the real move is handing the bartender your preferences and letting them pull from a catalog of a thousand recipes.

1. Esquire The Best Bars in America
2. Portland Monthly The Best Bars in Portland
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Wildsam The 50 Most Essential Bars in America

1. Esquire The Best Bars in America

Paper lanterns and candles keep things moody at this night-market-style Chinese-Thai restaurant on SE Stark, inspired by Bangkok's Chinatown. The team behind Langbaan runs a freewheeling room where wide rice noodles and double-fried chive cakes share space with a kangaroo martini that landed on Esquire's list of the best martinis in America. The New York Times put it on their 2024 restaurant list, which is the kind of thing that happens when the food is this alive.

1. Esquire Kangaroo Martini · The Best Martinis in America
2. The New York Times 2024 · The Restaurant List
3. The New York Times The 25 Best Restaurants in Portland, Ore., Right Now

Jeffrey Morgenthaler, one of Portland's bartending legends, helped set up this cocktail bar in the lobby of the Kex Hotel as an unabashed love letter to the Pacific Northwest. The space feels like a well-appointed living room, and the menu lists alcohol percentages alongside each drink, which sounds nerdy until you're grateful for it. The range runs from zero-proof options to a 39% Old Fashioned over a single oversized ice cube.

1. Spirited Awards 2024 · Top 4 Finalist · Best U.S. Hotel Bar
2. Spirited Awards 2025 · Top 4 Finalist · Best U.S. Hotel Bar
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Huckberry The 50 Best Dive Bars in America

The rolling ladders are not decorative. They reach a full twelve feet to access shelves of over 1,500 bottles lining the bare brick walls of this former piano-store stockroom, and the bartenders use them. A thick bound menu catalogs everything by region and spirit type, library-style, because the name is sincere. It's a serious whiskey bar that takes the bit all the way, and the room is dramatic enough that even non-whiskey people tend to stay longer than planned.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Spirited Awards 2024 · Top 4 Finalist · World’s Best Spirits Selection

1. Esquire The Best Bars in America

The horseshoe bar juts into a low-ceilinged room lit by fairy lights, which tells you most of what you need to know before the first drink arrives. This is a cocktail bar with serious craft credentials and a named spot on Difford's Guide, but it wears that lightly. Off-duty bartenders from around Portland fill the stools, which is either the best endorsement or a sign you'll have to work harder to get the bartender's attention.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Portland Monthly The Best Bars in Portland
3. Spirited Awards 2023 · Regional Honoree · Best U.S. Cocktail Bar – U.S. West

1. Esquire The Best Bars in America
2. Bon Appétit America's Best New Restaurants

1. Esquire Imperial Jade · The Best Martinis in America

The zinc-topped bar inside the Ace Hotel is where Jeffrey Morgenthaler built his reputation, and Portland's cocktail crowd hasn't forgotten it. Clyde Common is technically a big, open dining hall, but the bar runs the show here, with vintage stools filling up fast under a double-height ceiling loud with conversation. The food is genuinely good, but nobody's coming just for dinner.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide

A long sloping entry leads you up into a warm, modern room where communal high tables split the space between a serious bar and proper wood-fired pizza. Ryan Magarian's cocktail program is the draw here, pairing classics and house originals with Italian street food from the kitchen. The design reads clean rather than cozy, which suits the crowd that comes as much for the drinks as anything coming out of that oven.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Eater Best New Bar
2. Eater The 38 Best Restaurants and Food Carts in Portland

Bar Diane is a wine bar in Northwest Portland where the hand-painted walls look like the rings left behind by a thousand glasses of rosé on a tablecloth. You can perch at the marble bar and get into the weeds on Oregon pinot, or grab a bistro table for a cocktail and a lobster roll. Pours run from affordable table wine to splurgy champagne, so nobody has to pretend to be a sommelier or a billionaire.

1. Portland Monthly The Best Bars in Portland

1. Spirited Awards 2024 · Regional Honoree · Best New U.S. Cocktail Bar – U.S. West

Dots Cafe is a neighborhood dive on Clinton Street where the vinyl booths, flocked wallpaper, and velvet portraits seem to have been told it's still around 2010, and nobody's corrected them. You order at the bar, which leaves time to study a menu of cheesy fries and vegan burgers. Cocktails are on offer, but a shot and a local beer fits the room. The patio has slushies and cheap rosé, and Portland Monthly lists it among the city's best bars.

1. Portland Monthly The Best Bars in Portland

A small bridge over a little moat takes you from a residential stretch of Northeast Broadway into what is, with commitment, a full tiki immersion. Woven palm walls, bamboo rafters, illuminated pufferfish, and three hand-carved tiki gods loom over the sunken bar while intermittent thunder rumbles and wisps of volcano smoke drift through. The rum-based cocktails are the actual point of the exercise, and nobody here seems to mind.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Portland Monthly The Best Bars in Portland

This is an English-style pub on Belmont, low-ceilinged and wood-beamed, with decades of cigarette smoke apparently still living in the walls. The beer comes in proper 20-ounce pints, there are real metal-tipped darts, and the Scotch eggs and fish and chips have outlasted every menu update. Regulars fill it by evening, and the vintage posters, flags, and brass plaques suggest nobody has felt the need to redecorate since the Reagan administration.

1. Portland Monthly The Best Bars in Portland

Family portraits of the bartender's Cuban relatives line the upstairs walls, which tells you something about what kind of cocktail bar this is. Ricky Gomez, who came up through New Orleans institutions like Cure and Teardrop Lounge, channels his Miami-meets-NOLA-meets-Havana upbringing into a tropical menu where blenders run loud and the hospitality runs warmer than the drinks.

1. Spirited Awards 2024 · Top 4 Finalist · Best U.S. Restaurant Bar
2. Spirited Awards 2025 · Top 4 Finalist · Best U.S. Restaurant Bar
3. Portland Monthly The Best Bars in Portland

Sandy Hut is a neighborhood dive on a traffic island on NE Sandy, now dwarfed by the apartment buildings that sprouted around it. It has been cleaned up a bit, so the food is better and the drinks cost more, like everywhere. Parents stop in after soccer practice for a pint and a shot, punks work the pool table and video poker, and the late-night crowd returns for hangover brunch. Portland's Best Bars list includes it.

1. Portland Monthly The Best Bars in Portland

The name lies a little: Teardrop is a square room with painted concrete walls, and the curve comes from the island bar itself, which bends the whole space into something warmer than the bones suggest. It's a serious cocktail lounge, the kind where the menu moves between classics, originals, and borrowed recipes from people who've thought hard about this stuff. Classic films flicker overhead, the lighting is kind, and a quiet Monday still feels like somewhere worth being.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Portland Monthly The Best Bars in Portland
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Redwood paneling climbs to a vaulted ceiling lit by stained glass skylights, and a sign on the wall politely warns guests to watch their language. Huber's is a bar that has been around forever, and it shows in the best possible way, with tableside Flaming Spanish Coffees set ablaze by bartenders who have clearly done this before. Old Portland money and curious newcomers share the room, and nobody seems to check their phone.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The 65-foot marble bar is the first thing you clock, backed by a wall of taps that looks like it was built for a congregation. Jackknife is a high-volume neighborhood bar attached to the Sentinel Hotel, heavy rock on the speakers and a toasted-oak floor that leans more saloon than cocktail lounge. The short cocktail list skews toward house drinks. Come for draft beer and a loud night out, not a quiet first-date conversation.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

From the street it reads like a shop, and inside it's barely bigger than one, with around thirty seats tucked under warm light and a hefty oak bar. Kask is a cocktail bar with a leather-bound list organized by spirit, leaning hard on amaro, sherry, and vermouth. The drinks skew classical without being stiff about it. Small rooms either feel intimate or claustrophobic, and this one lands on the right side.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The bar inside Jupiter NEXT Hotel is draped in plants and local art, designed to feel like somewhere sunnier than Portland on a Tuesday. It's a cocktail bar that shapeshifts across the day, quiet enough to nurse a drink in the afternoon and loud enough to justify a second one by night. The drinks lean tropical, bright and built for humidity the Pacific Northwest rarely delivers.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery
2. Spirited Awards 2023 · Regional Honoree · Best U.S. Hotel Bar – U.S. West

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide