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First there was Ping, and it was good.
But after the Pok Pok spinoff closed to "expand" at the end of 2012, it instead went dark for good, finally reviving in April 2014 as Easy Company, a cocktail bar far too swanky for Old Town that lasted about six months. Big Trouble—charming hole in the wall themed for Little China, with Chinese small bites—lasted the same.
And so now, there is Fortune Bar (329 NW Couch St., 229-7468, facebook.com/fortunepdx), co-owned by ChefStable and the people who bought nearby Tube a year back.
All the knickknacks and themes and pretense are gone; the food menu is a handwritten scrawl on half-torn paper, with cold-case food from the next-door ChefStable commissary.
Fortune is now one thing and one thing only: a white-walled Old Town canvas for DJs, a listening lounge with tight floor space that leads to close quarters if you're dancing.
Night to night, the canvas sometimes remains blank aside from Tube overflow, a victim perhaps of the demilitarized zone of Southwest 4th Avenue, where foot traffic has ebbed to near-nothing after all the other bars closed, from Couture to the Crown Room to Magic Garden.
But the busy night is Wednesday, according to the bartender, when Danny Merkury spins "future hip-hop" and R&B. Other nights, it's beats from house on Fridays to throwback rap on Tuesdays, and tap cocktails (margarita, old fashioned, Moscow Mule) keep the drinks flowing if the bar stacks up late in the night, which barely even gets rolling till after 11 pm.
Take note: The craft beers are $6 a pint and the tap margarita is $10. This is Chinatown, which means tourist prices. You can take those Asian carp on the wall art as a metaphor: It's mostly invasive species here.
Willamette Week