‘Round Midnight and Beyond
After hours eats...Jazz too

by Jaime Vázquez for pdxguide.com
December 2006

Belmont and Hawthorne, Portland's sibling streets of hippietown, bookend their neighborhood with some of the city's most eclectic restaurants. Both avenues are doing well, but gentrification's a funny thing: as money moves in and fixer-uppers become fixed-ups, the need increases for both to hang on to their street cred (no pun intended). To stay hip, the area still needs to feel gritty and authentic—and not suburban.

So of course the neighborhood's resident jazz club is doing just fine. Open since 2002, The Blue Monk shares a block with Whole Foods (I'll pause for snorts here), features a restaurant on the main floor, and a speakeasy bar and stage in the basement. From the street, it's a quaint bistro posing a nicer alternative to It's a Beautiful Pizza across the street, and the arrowed signs almost give the impression that the downstairs club is a separate, more secretive establishment.

The truth is that it might as well be, because as a restaurant, The Blue Monk more than holds its own. The menu is predominantly Italian, scattered with a dozen entrees that are spicy, homemade, or both. Their appetizers are all fancy spins on comfort food that are so well prepared that one could easily declare an impromptu Spanish tapas night of bruschetta, polenta, cheeses and bread. Having just come in from the cold, however, it was hard to think about anything besides the tomato soup.

While I waited for my food, I scouted out the jazz. Downstairs, the basement is a long rectangle of a room with a Capone-era bar in the rear and a smallish stage on the far side. Clearly, it was intended for intimate performances, although it was obvious that on a hopping night, a pair of earplugs would be a good idea.

A quintet was getting ready to play, and while the room wasn't packed, there were plenty of people there clearly on the basis of the club's reputation—whatever was on tap, it was going to be good. Spotting jazz nuts peppering a weeknight show is probably the best recommendation you could ask for; I had expected the staff to gush about upcoming acts, and they did of course, but this, this was a good sign. (I have a friend who will only eat sushi at restaurants where she sees Japanese patrons. I haven't decided if that's logical or racist yet, but nonetheless, I could see the same logic applying here.)

The show was everything it needed to be: personal, vibrant, incomprehensible and beautiful all at once, the way all good jazz is. But I had soup to get back to.

It was worth it. Tasty, hearty, gone in seconds flat. My wife ordered a martini, and the sip I stole made for a perfect chaser. Apparently, they're known for those too: the dining room was littered with cocktails, from fruity numbers to old man short glasses.

So where's the catch? If anything, it's that the upstairs feels more like a theme restaurant than the upscale late-night hipster place it is. Nearly every painting on the walls features their namesake, Thelonius, and the abundance of blue (the walls, the floor…it's everywhere) feels a little heavy-handed. Still though, there's a definite piety in the decoration, and the acts slated on the calendar demonstrate that this place is the real deal, so it's hard to say that anything feels forced here.

Take The Blue Monk as either the place that gives you the right to say “I know this great little jazz place with great late-night food…” or the vegan-friendly urban hippie bistro that was on Rachel Ray's Tasty Travels. Sure, it's a little weird to find good jazz amongst the condos, but it's cropped up in stranger places.

The opinions expressed within are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of pdxguide.com or The Columbian Publishing Co.