by Sam Soule for pdxguide.com
March 2006

In 1993, Portland had few successful businesses catering to the city's alternative rock community. When Dot's Cafe opened up in the site of a former Mexican restaurant/drug front on the sleepy intersection of NE 26th and SE Clinton, it was a unique sensation. And right from the start, it was a success.

Such a success, in fact, that intersection of NE 26th and SE Clinton — indeed, much of the neighborhood running along Division Street — can hardly be considered "sleepy" anymore. But that's another story.

In my fevered mind, the opening of Dot's was like a cultural watershed moment for the city of Portland — FINALLY, the kids who raised a band like Nirvana regionally, and the likes of Crackerbash, Hazel and Dead Moon locally, had a place to go that wasn't just a rock show or a house party. Dot's had good food and good beer, a smart-kitch aesthetic favoring sock monkeys and velvet paintings, and the good post-punk taste to play bands like The Fall on the house stereo. Indie-kids and college students were in love.

And, if you lived in the Clinton Street neighborhood (like I did) and worked a crappy job (like I did), you likely made Dot's the extended living room of your pathetic, under-furnished apartment (fill in the rest).

These days I live on the north side and I, sadly, confess my return to Dot's has been years in the making — though the place has never been totally out of my mind. I find in every quad of PDX 2006 the creative savvy and business wisdom of minds weaned on seven inch punk singles rocking street level shops AND the upper tiers of corporate management. Dot's was ahead of the curve. (But it didn't curve with it).

Though Dot's is no longer the unique sensation it once was, a Sunday evening still finds the place filled with sweatered kids in heavy eye glasses along with a diverse assortment of older and more diverse folk from the surrounding neighborhood. Dot's popularity has waned little since The Year Punk Broke.

A lot of the success of Dot's seems to lie in the fact that little of the business has been modified or updated since it originally opened. The room is still essentially the same restaurant/bar-with-pool-table split it always has been. The arrangement of estate sale furniture and accessories is a bit fancier, a bit smarter, with gleaming formica tables, diner chairs and long bench seats offering a variety of seating options. The velvet paintings and pop culture prints covering the mostly aqua-marine walls has grown more impressive. Strings of glowing fist-size globes punch globs of primary color through the bar's inky darkness, a nice touch that I don't remember from before. Where are the sock monkeys?

But Steve is still there, just like he was over a decade ago — sitting at the bar nursing a drink, grumpily withdrawn and carelessly put together. No doubt still ruing the day his band up and left him. His little beard thing is gone and he's drinking cocktails now (the Rainier pounders Dot's used to carry having been long since discontinued by the manufacturer) but that's Steve, alright. As I sidle onto a stool one over I can feel his slow recognition. I decide to wait to see if he'll say something first. By the end of my stay he does.

"So you used to come in here years back, right?" he asks, eyeing my notebook and camera. "You work for the government now?"

Other changes: Dot's bar has expanded to full liquor service; and the kitchen, which still offers an impressive selection of burgers, chicken sandwiches and Mexican dishes, now features a few Middle Eastern inspired items. The sandwich side of cut veggies with herb cream cheese remains the same; however, mints have replaced Jolly Rogers when the dinner check is delivered.

Not changed: Dot's still plays great obscure and alternative music on the house stereo; Dot's is still cool. And that's just not being glib.

While the rest of world expanded on "alternative music's" commercial potential, Dot's has never attempted to be anything more than it ever was: a hang-out deeply rooted in Portland underground music community — at one time, all Dot's employees played in local bands. Dot's never cashed in. Debit and credit cards are not accepted at the bar but checks are; Dot's remains the kind of place that still honors, in its way, a time when bands singed to small labels with a handshake, not a contract.

In this sense, Dot's is neighborhood, it is people and it is cool.

I walked in this past Sunday wondering what the bartender working might say if faced with the following situation: A twenty-three-year-old kid who the bar knows as a largely silent regular, shows up with a date, runs a tab, only to explain later that he'd forgot to brings his money, he was tripping on acid so hard — could he come back and pay his tab tomorrow?

Does the bartender trust the kid to come back the next day and pay? Does the bartender even let the kid come back?

By the end of my visit I was convinced that the Dot's of today would have done the same thing today as they did with me all those years ago.

Let me come down and let me come back.

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