Skip to main content
There was no way The Houston Blacklight would arrive with anything less than a bang. Through 2023, anticipation was high for the cocktail bar, conceived as a maximalist next step for Thomas and Mariah Pisha-Duffly, the well-known duo behind two of Portland’s best restaurants, Gado Gado and Oma’s Hideaway. It also opened in July, about a month after the James Beard Award ceremony where Thomas was nominated for Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific.
The Houston Blacklight has already been named one of the 10 best bars in the city by Portland Monthly as well as Best New Bar by Eater PDX. So now you’ve come to your favorite alt weekly to learn the truth: Is such praise warranted? The answer: Yes! Sure. Mostly!
Inspired by velvet blacklight posters of the 1970s, the aesthetic of THB (as it’s abbreviated on the dispensary-esque neon sign out front) lands somewhere between “absurdist man cave” and “baby’s first head shop.” Beaded curtains and a spotlit magenta fringe wall greet you at the entrance, one of many prime spots for an Instagram selfie. Dinosaur coloring book menus in a front basket request that you order at the bar, but once cozily seated in an enormous horseshoe-shape booth and being greeted with water, I kind of didn’t want to get up. If in a group, definitely choose someone to be the Resident Orderer.
The bar area is the most conceptually successful part of the space, where paper umbrella lamps illuminate shelves of period knickknacks, flanking an enormous mural of a nude horseperson watching an undersea fight between anthropomorphic creatures. Black wallpaper decorated with similar neon figures lines various other rooms. Perhaps one element that would help solidify the visual concept would be featuring more of the things that inspired the place; there aren’t any actual blacklight posters—not a patch of velvet to be seen. And a huge painted mural of a lava lamp in the bathroom just kinda makes me wish there were lava lamps all around! The result is a slightly ungrounded nostalgia, an ache for the real thing as opposed to immersion, which sometimes makes THB feel more like a themed pop-up and less like a genuine artifact. Still, it’s all in the spirit of colorful trippy fun.
On the far end of the bar, a slushy machine swirls and purrs, producing both the turquoise Thot Experiment and creamsicle-orange Baby, I’m a Star! During my visit, they were available twisted together ($15), resulting in a dangerously sippable 12-flavor fever dream. A slightly confusing element was the inclusion of boba, which froze and burst in the chilly concoction. The drink also required the use of a metal straw that became so teeth-achingly cold as I sipped that I was scared I would end up stuck to it like Flick in A Christmas Story.
Many Things Cannot Fly ($15) arrived in a speckled-blue dinosaur egg with a toy dino riding the straw, and though boasting blackberry gin, coconut rum, black sesame orgeat, and Jäger, it tasted like a liquefied pineapple gummy bear. (I was not mad about it!) The N/A Inspiration Information ($10) was great—a spicy-salty li’l strawberry jam number with the tang of yuzu and lactic acid and the playful crunch of coarse-ground peppercorns.
As anyone who has eaten at Gado Gado or Oma’s might expect, the food at THB is uniformly wonderful. The pull-apart sausage and milk bread with seedy herbed mustard and everything seasoning ($16) was one of those quintessential Portland dishes: nostalgic party food—in this case pigs in a blanket—taken to new heights with care and finesse. That buttery little ring of perfection was the centerpiece of THB; everything else orbited around it. I can’t imagine anyone trying it and not including it in the top 10 best things they’ve eaten this year.
The warm chicories ($14) were the platonic ideal autumn salad, with apples, tender roasted delicata squash, whipped goat cheese swooshed across the plate, and “Marash chili bird seed crumble.” As Noah in The Notebook would say, “If this crumble is for birds, I’m a bird.” [Note: I hate pitting greens against each other, but that salad totally smoked the Belgian endive offering ($13) at the time. Sorry, endive.]
Elsewhere, the shrimp cocktail ($13) was as welcome as ever in a chilled glass of sambal cocktail sauce, and mapo tofu gravy fries ($12) had a numbing spice, with firm tofu successfully supplanting cheese curds in this alternate poutine dimension.
Both burgers ($15 each) were good, with the vegan option approaching great. The first bite had me totally fooled until a dining companion noted that it had “a nutty creamy thing going on.” Loaded with caramelized onions and “vegan AF sauce” (which…sure), the only thing that prevented it from reaching its full potential was the unexplained lack of the promised heirloom tomato. The beef burger had a very thick and almost gamey patty, a surprisingly mature sandwich for a city that’s just starting to crawl out of The Smash Burger Haze. Said dining partner described it as “gnarly” (in the complimentary rock-’n’-roll sense) at least three times.
Minor quibbles aside, I had a great evening out with friends and would probably have had an even better one if I weren’t taking diligent notes at 6:30 pm and instead absolutely schnockered at 10:30 pm. The Houston Blacklight works because it does something a lot of people forget to do when they open a bar in this city: It feels like a place made for Portland, not shuttled in from somewhere else. It’s not a faux dive bar, and it’s not swanky or elevated; it’s just a goofy fun thing with wildly juicy cocktails and some solid bar bites. Its instant-classic designation by other publications is less a product of the hype machine and more an earnest desire to place something on the map that deserves a long and happy life. “Keeping Portland Weird” is an exhausting task, but, hey, someone’s gotta do it.
DRINK: The Houston Blacklight, 2100 SE Clinton St., 503-477-4738, thehoustonblacklight.com. 4-11 pm Monday-Thursday, 4 pm-midnight Friday, 10 am-midnight Saturday, 10 am-11 pm Sunday.