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Jon Taffer only ever parachuted into Portland twice for Bar Rescue, his televised showcase of supposedly struggling businesses. On his second Rose City stint, Taffer rebranded Tonic Lounge as The Panic Room, transforming the Sandy Boulevard music venue into what a Hungry-Man dinner might look like as a full bar. After several other false starts, “The Penis Room,” as staff began to call it, was bulldozed in 2019 in favor of a retirement-age apartment complex.
Taffer’s first Portland trip—far more successful on paper and onscreen—is less often discussed.
In 2015, the TV show “rescued” the Six Point Inn, a St. Johns dive housed in a former grocery store, rechristening it Over Easy Bar & Breakfast.
Taffer can’t get over the Six Point Inn’s name (there are no rooms to rent at this inn). And as in pretty much every other episode, he watches with bar owner Oleg Pilipenko as the seemingly ill-equipped bar and kitchen staff are overwhelmed by a packed house. Inside, the bar is shabby with age; outside, it’s a tired pistachio-mint green.
Indeed, Six Point Inn is named not because it was once upon a time a boarding house but for the complex sextuple intersection where it was built before cars were as fast or prevalent as they are today. One early photo shows it with a wood plank porch and a dirt road outside. Men in suits have parked their horse-drawn carriage next to the building.
A man named Carl Carlson purchased the grocery store and beer parlor that became Six Point Inn during World War II for $10, according to a vintage newspaper clipping in Over Easy’s possession. His widow, Doris Wittren, managed the bar for over 40 years. She lived upstairs and served homestyle meals.
“It was a very home feel, like holiday parties, birthday parties, potlucks for any kind of holiday,” says Tawnie Morrow, Over Easy’s current bar manager. Morrow, one of two remaining Over Easy employees who appeared on Bar Rescue, started at Six Point Inn in 2002. At the time, Thomas and Jenny Wood, Wittren’s nephew and niece-in-law, owned the place.
“It wasn’t just like, bar-and-customer,” Morrow remembered. “It was like a big family, like going to a family get-together.”
Things took a turn under new ownership in the late aughts. Over Easy is one of three Oregon bars Pilipenko owns, alongside fellow blue-collar St. Johns bar The Ranger Tavern and the Buckman neighborhood dive Katie O’Brien’s (he also owns a restaurant in Hawaii).
After an extended maternity leave, Morrow remembers returning to a new clientele and a bar reenvisioned as a live poker lounge and nightclub, a vision credited to Pilipenko’s former business partner.
“There were a lot of strange decisions being made for the type of bar that this is,” Morrow says. “It was just attracting trouble.”
Eventually, the business partner split and Six Point Inn reverted to its previous life as a neighborhood watering hole. It took some time to shed Six Point Inn’s suddenly rougher reputation, but Morrow believes that was accomplished before Bar Rescue called.
“I felt like it would be a good advertisement for us,” Morrow remembers. “I don’t feel like this bar has ever been in trouble of going under, but obviously that’s part of the show.”
Onscreen, Morrow and her co-workers were shown improperly muddling cocktails in home-grade cocktail mixers, while the unsupported head chef floundered. There’s a shot of him microwaving gravy for breakfast dishes. The dishwasher was broken.
Morrow says Taffer’s scouts chose Six Point Inn as a bar that could use a free remodel, which she and Pilipenko agreed might be a nice price. The catch was that it would have to play the role of a struggling bar to make it happen.
Morrow says most of the drama viewers saw on Bar Rescue was staged. The rush crowd featured in the episode’s “before” segment, for example, was designed to push staff to its absolute limits. As Morrow remembers it, Six Point Inn was simply never that impatiently busy. The parking lot can fill up quickly—and navigating that six-way intersection is somewhat terrifying—but it never hits capacity, as it was shown on TV.
Today, Over Easy’s kitchen is run by Wittren’s great-nephew, Landis Ward, who appeared as a server on Bar Rescue. The menu is expansive, with all-day breakfast and a fresh weekly special. Anyone who’s eaten at Katie O’Brien’s will know what Over Easy’s food tastes like, though its menu does lean further on Ward’s small-batch pickled vegetable company.
The episode’s other most dramatic moment, tension between Pilipenko and his stepdaughter, Sunny Karkoshkina, was also staged. Karkoshkina indeed was the manager before Bar Rescue called, and despite being portrayed as a stressed-out micromanager, Morrow says Karkoshkina helped restore Six Point Inn back to its pre-poker days. But she had moved to Hawaii by the time Taffer’s crew showed up, and she returned to Portland to film the hectic bar scenes that Taffer and Pilipenko watched “undercover.” (Morrow says she believes Karkoshkina’s relationship with Pilipenko is now better than it appeared on TV; Pilipenko did not respond to multiple interview requests.)
Most of the changes Taffer made at Over Easy did not last. The new brown exterior paint job wasn’t primed, so it chipped quickly, and the second bar well Taffer added almost never gets used. Morrow lamented the removal of beveled antique oak features on the bar and interior decorative shelves, swapped for straight wood boards of untreated lumber. Black latex paint applied to Prohibition-era cooler doors also peeled quickly. For what it’s worth, Morrow is fond of the blue wallpaper they pasted over original wood panels.
Bar Rescue fans and TikTok gawkers occasionally stop by, but Morrow says the show never generated a significant boom in business.
“We’ve always run on the neighborhood, not a TV show. That’s just one of the chapters in the book of the bar,” Morrow says. “Me being here so long, I’ve seen customers pass away and their grandkids come in, and it’s like a whole generation of people. It’s pretty cool. It’s like family.”
DRINK: Over Easy Bar & Breakfast, 6801 N Columbia Way, 503-286-2484, overeasy.bar. 8 am–midnight daily. 21+.
