Miss Dish
Lush Life

by CARYN B. BROOKS
cbrooks@wweek.com

GENTLE READERS,

Miss Dish asks Andrew Sugar if that's his real name, and he reaches for his wallet and whips out his driver's license. There, embossed with the Oregon state seal, is a moniker more likely to be associated with porndom than a restaurant-nightclub entrepreneur. Miss Dish is impressed that a name so sweet is legit.

She is standing in the former grocery store at Northwest 6th and Couch where Gus Van Sant's first film, Mala Noche, was shot with Mr. Sugar, a 33-year-old who might look more at home on snowboard slopes than in the empire-building business. This site is where Sugar is in the process of piecing together Lush, a combination upscale restaurant and bar that was supposed to open in May but now looks like it will roll out the red carpet at the end of June. This building alone, with its upstairs dining room that features private velvet-boothed dining areas and the downstairs lounge designed to hold a boomerang bar and private party alcoves, clocks in at 6,400 square feet. Wait--that's not all! A planned patio on the south side adds another 1,500 square feet of inner-city outdoor enjoyment. But there's more! On the other side of the patio is the old Star Theatre, a onetime burlesque house recently owned by Van Sant. This Sugar intends to transform into 3,500 square feet of block-rockin' dance club.

Miss Dish squints at the driver's license and notices a discrepancy. The man standing before her is tall and lean. With his wool cap, jeans and wrap-around sunglasses he looks the part of the fellow who says he turned bicycle marketing on its pedal with a series of flashy two-wheel shops in South Beach, Fla., before moving to Portland four years ago. In this driver's license picture, however, a lumpy guy stares back, more John Goodman than Johnny Knoxville. "Did you lose a lot of weight?" Miss Dish demurely inquires. Sugar affirms, saying he used to weigh over 300 pounds. Always looking for a dieting tip, Miss Dish asks him how he did it. Sugar shrugs. "I started eating breakfast. I never used to eat breakfast before." Silence. "I guess a lot of it was brain power," he continues. Ah, the winning combination of breakfast and brainpower: two things this first-time restaurant-club owner will need as he embarks on a project so big that even one of the building's co-owners, Mike Quinn--the man who ran La Luna so successfully for so many years--says, "I think it's going to be tough."

Sugar says he knows it's not going to be a torte-walk. He says he knows that when most people begin work in a new field they usually start small and work their way up. But, he says, that's not how he does things. "I gotta take a chance," Sugar explains. "I feel that Portland, as a whole, needs so much."

So what is it that Portland needs, according to Sugar? A place where cocktail attire is required, for one. Even though he himself wears the soggy-wear that's so very City of Roses ("My friends tell me I clean up well," he contends), he believes that people want a special place to go where more is asked of them. He believes that Portlanders want a fancy restaurant that serves fresh, high-quality food with ultra-high presentation values. "I hate quote-unquote Northwest cuisine," he says. Sugar's hired a chef named David Strouts, who he says comes from the Hilton. Sugar himself will help with the menu, since he's completed about five months of culinary school and knows a thing or two about fine dining. A huge menu is in the works, and Sugar plans to have the place open for lunch, dinner and late-night service. The plan is to keep price points under $25 ("I'd like to say not more than $20," he says). Expect such things as seared ahi tuna, pesto rack of lamb and rotisserie chicken.

What Sugar may be lacking in experience, he makes up for with backing from the neighborhood. Unlike other potential upstarts in the Old Town area, Sugar was cleared for a liquor license pretty painlessly (the same could not be said for Quinn's project, East, which got shut out). According to Sugar, his success is the product of starting early--he says he met with all the appropriate departments seven months before he put his application in and sent out letters outlining the project. Of course, there's another reason the city might have smiled on Lush. "I'm cleaning up a whole city block," Sugar says. And what a city block it is. If he pulls off his big plans, this street corner right on the bus mall that is known more for drug dealing than wheeling and dealing will be completely transformed. Another corner for lushes is becoming lush.