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Every Portland rock star gets a bar these days, it seems.
Courtney Taylor-Taylor has the Old Portland. And now Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock will have the…. Glory Hole?
"Isaac would really like to call it Glory Hole," says Matt Brown of Title Bout, the company helping Brock put his bar together. "I don't know if we're going to go for that one."
Brown, a Bunk Bar owner and longtime friend of Brock's, says they've wanted to do a bar together for many years. This project came into being alongside new restaurant and bar company Title Bout, which Brown founded this year with partners Jessica Williams and Collin Connon. Title Bout has also signed on to expand chicken cart Chicken and Guns into multiple brick and mortar locations.
The bar remains untitled—other names thrown around include Missionary Position and Trash Panda, Brown says—but the location is known. It'll be in the old Red Flag spot on Northeast 28th Avenue, across the street from Stammtisch. Brock just signed the lease today, says Brown.
Though most of the details haven't been finalized, Brown says it'll be a "mid-concept bar"—not too fancy, not a dive bar. The decor will come from Brock's own skull.
"Isaac's good at creating worlds—whether that's on an album, the interior of a space or an exterior," Brown says. "He has a god-given talent for landscaping. So Isaac's role will be to create what this thing looks and feels like; I want it to be one of his worlds. I took the architect and the designer to his warehouse and it blew their minds—it's weird, ethereal, otherworldly, and a little jokey. The architect said, 'If we can just have a 20th of the items in the warehouse, we're set.'"
Right now, however, the space that once held Red Flag—a punky, low-down jukebox dive that closed after 10 years because of a rent hike—is just an "empty white box with a [kitchen] hood," says Brown. "One morning Isaac is going to wake up and text me something genius and that will be the name."