Portland’s Pacific Standard and Palomar up for national Spirited Awards

Two Portland bars are among the top four finalists for this year’s Spirited Awards, one of the most prestigious honors in the cocktail world.

Pacific Standard, located inside the KEX Hotel, is nominated for Best U.S. Hotel Bar. Palomar — a Cuban-inspired bar that recently moved from Hosford-Abernethy to Northwest Portland — is a finalist for Best U.S. Restaurant Bar.

The awards, which will be announced in New Orleans on July 24, recognize excellence in bars and mixology around the globe.

Pacific Standard’s Jeffrey Morgenthaler is also up for Best U.S. Bar Mentor. Morgenthaler joins us along with Palomar’s Ricky Gomez to talk about what the nominations mean, how their approach to running a bar has evolved, and how they’re navigating a cocktail industry shaped by shifting consumer habits and the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Jenn Chávez: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Jenn Chávez. In New Orleans next month, convenes the 19th annual Spirited Awards. You might think of it like the Oscars of cocktails, bestowing honors on people and establishments across the global bar industry. And once again, Portland will be represented. Pacific Standard in Northeast Portland is a finalist for Best U.S. Hotel Bar. Palomar in Northwest Portland is in the running for Best U.S. Restaurant Bar.

Joining me now are Palomar’s Ricky Gomez and Pacific Standard’s Jeffrey Morgenthaler, who’s also a finalist for Best U.S. Bar Mentor. Ricky and Jeffrey, thank you so much for being here and congratulations.

Jeffrey Morgenthaler: Thank you.

Ricky Gomez: Thanks for having us.

Chávez: Absolutely. OK, so my first question is for both of you; maybe Jeffrey, you first. So I walk into your bar on a busy evening, I don’t know, like Friday evening at 8. Can you describe the scene to me? What am I seeing, hearing? What’s the vibe?

Morgenthaler: Oh my gosh, you’re on one of the busiest corners in Portland; you’re on the corner of MLK and Couch. Floor to ceiling windows, huge circular bar right in the center of the room, big leather couches, book library in the back, lots of wood, warm, super just like exciting, exhilarating vibe. There’s just a buzz in the room. It’s really nice. Yeah, hotel lobby.

Chávez: I can imagine it now. OK, Ricky, same question for you. What is the vibe at Palomar?

Gomez: Yeah, so, we are located on NW 23rd between Pettygrove and Quimby. Right when you walk in the room, or even before you walk in the room, huge glass windows that all open up to have – with our perfect weather right now – open air vibes for the room. Then, we’re a restaurant and bar, so the room is really split right down the middle. Along the right side, beautiful 30-ft bar with 15 seats at it, with our back bar all clad in white.

Our design is really kind of Miami Art Deco; my mom and dad are both from Cuba but spent their childhood in Miami. So that’s a lot of the inspiration behind Palomar. So we have lots of pinks, teals, yellows in our furniture, white quartz table tops, white oak. I really love just clean lines with touches of texture and plants, palm wallpaper in the back corner that has a bunch of my family photos of my parents, grandparents and uncles in Cuba in the ‘50s – so bringing some of the history of my family to the space and just a lot of energy. Our pass for the kitchen is in there, where our chef Ricky Bella is always expediting and keeping the vibe of our kitchen and our food going out.

I love our new location, we’ve been there for three months now. And it’s been wonderful.

Morgenthaler: It’s a beautiful bar. It really is.

Chávez: Both of them sound like beautiful bars. I’m ready for the weekend, even just listening to this.

Morgenthaler: So close.

Chávez: Yes, we are. Ricky, I just wanna stick with you really quick. You mentioned your Cuban heritage comes through in the design and the vibe of the space. How does that come through in the food and beverage that you offer?

Gomez: Yeah, so with the drink program, a lot of assumptions are Cuban, it’s a full rum bar and things like that. But a lot of the inspiration is from Cuba in the 1920s after a prohibition hit in the United States and people are still drinking a lot of gin cocktails. When you look at our spirit selection, we have just as many agave spirits as we do rum spirits. So the cocktail program – yes, we like a lot of rum cocktails, but it is really balanced. There’s still a lot of stirred cocktails for the people that like stirred cocktails, refreshing.

And then on the food program, it’s evolved over the years, starting with very classic Cuban diner food and then with changing of different chefs. Ricky Bella has been with us for a while now, and having him put his stamp on the menu with his Mexican heritage, my Cuban heritage, and then being born and raised in New Orleans – that’s really the story that we tell throughout the menu.

There’s a lot of things that are recognizable, but putting in our signature spin on it. Of course, we have a signature burger, shrimp cocktails, ceviche, but we still have braised pork shoulder, because you can’t go to a Cuban restaurant without braised pork. So, we really just tell a story through those different food items and with a cocktail menu as well, showing just modern takes on a lot of those classic drinks.

Chávez: I love Cuban-Mexican unity. We love to see it. I might be a little bit biased. [Laughs]

Jeffrey, I want to turn to you now. Pacific Standard is nominated for the best U.S. Hotel Bar. And I’m curious, how is running a hotel bar in particular unique from other types of bar settings in terms of your clientele? Like, do you meet folks from out of town? Do you still have local regulars, a little bit of both?

Morgenthaler: You know, I always say that a really successful hotel bar is half visitors from national/international and half locals. I ran the beverage programs at the Ace Hotel for 12 years, so Clyde Common and Pépé le Moko. And at any given time, you’d look around and you’d see a table of people visiting from Germany sitting right next to a bunch of people that just drove in from Tualatin.

So that’s the exciting thing about a hotel bar is that sort of energy. You’ve got a ton of locals, and you’ve got a ton of visitors from out of town. It’s really fun and exciting. I love it. I mean, I’ve been in hotels now for 15-16 years of my life. So, I’ve gotten pretty, I guess OK at it. [Laughter]

Chávez: Well, I know that y’all are nominated for Best U.S. Hotel Bar; of course, Palomar nominated for Best U.S. Restaurant Bar. Jeffrey, I see that you are also nominated for Best Bar Mentor. And I know, just even in my own industry of journalism, mentorship is so important across so many different lines of work. What does being a bar mentor look like for you?

Morgenthaler: For me, I started my career in Eugene in ‘96, and this is kind of the early days of the internet. And as I was getting interested in cocktails and learning all I could, I started sharing my findings, my knowledge online on my website. This was 20-plus years ago and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s become kind of like a side passion project. Sharing knowledge with bartenders and home enthusiasts around the world has been really rewarding for me and just a great way to connect with people in my industry. I think Ricky and I met online probably before we ever met in person.

Gomez: I wasn’t one of those guys. [Laughter] It was in person.

Chávez: Well, Ricky, I want to turn back to you for a minute. Palomar, like you said, moved to Northwest not too long ago. Previously, it was in Northeast. What has that move and that transition been like for you?

Gomez: The move and transition has been great.

Chávez: Great.

Gomez: Moving from Southeast to Northwest wasn’t a decision we took lightly, in the sense of, you’re already in in an established place, the restaurant’s built out, so to take a risk to move neighborhoods and to reinvest more financially into an area that you haven’t operated before – it was a risk, but we felt it was a risk worth taking.

In Southeast, the last three years have just been a bit of a struggle since the pandemic. We definitely would not have survived if it wasn’t for assistance that we got financially from the federal government during the pandemic. And it’s just been a struggle down there. Looking at the Portland market, I mean, it’s a neighborhood town and our previous location wasn’t really in the middle of a residential neighborhood; it was industrial Southeast. And we survived by guests coming to see us – “survive” is the most appropriate word I would use for that.

So we wanna thrive, we wanna share what we do with more people. The Northwest neighborhood – I was starting to spend time in that area after opening Side Eye, another bar with some partners here locally. And I saw just all the residents, not only the expansion of the Slabtown neighborhood, but the people who have been in that neighborhood for decades. NW 23rd is definitely one of those higher traffic areas. A space became available, and we talked to the owner of that property, and we really worked out a deal that we thought was beneficial for both of us, and really worked out a deal with them that was flexible.

The next thing was getting it done in a short amount of time. We did the build-out in seven weeks. We did a little video series about it. Our final day of service was February 28 and we opened on March 14 at our new location. So we needed to be keeping everybody employed and keeping everybody having some income during that time. It was a lot; but, now that we’ve been open for a few months, I think it’s safe to say it’s been a great success.

Chávez: Well, yeah, congratulations. And I’m sorry, I misspoke – Southeast was your previous location, not Northeast. I’m so glad things are going well for you, especially after the pandemic, which was so hard on your industry.

I wanted to ask you about that, Jeffrey. What was the pandemic like for you as a member of the bar industry and what do you see now in terms of your industry’s kind of recovery from that period?

Morgenthaler: I mean, I think the uncertainty was maybe the worst part. I’d been at the same job for 12 years; I thought I was going to pretty much be there forever. And losing both those bars and everything that came along with that was really, really, really hard. I kind of floated around for a couple of years and didn’t really know what I was going to do, until the opportunity to open a bar in the KEX Hotel came up. And that was a lifesaver in a lot of ways. If anything, it got me off the couch and gave me something to do. Ricky and I are both workers; we go a little crazy if we’re not working all the time. We just are like those dogs that need too much exercise; we need to be working. So, for me, it’s been so nice to get back to work.

Things have changed. I think things have changed on both sides of the bar. Things have changed behind the bar and things have changed on the front end of the bar – different sets of expectations from guests and different … We lost a lot of people during the pandemic, a lot of people transitioned out of the bar industry. So we lost a lot of that great talent. And I know a lot of my team from the old days are no longer doing this anymore.

In some ways, it feels like starting over from scratch. So, it’s pretty intense. But we love what we do, we’re passionate about what we do.

Gomez: I think that’s a good silver lining, so to speak. That’s the way I treated it, was a reset. Because when the pandemic hit, there wasn’t anything you could really do; you’re just trying to survive. But once we got that reset, we were able to see and change our businesses – at least I was, at Palomar – to where you’re able to survive it during the slow times. Every city has some sense of seasonality to it and to be able to last the lull seasons, the slow seasons, and not lose money and then be able to obviously try to make money during that busy season.

The pandemic gave us at Palomar a time to reset. When I first opened it – my background’s bartending – I wanted it to be a bar. But you always have to have food for liquor licensing in the state of Oregon, so we wanted to make sure we gave people another reason to come and have really good food.

But, when the pandemic hit is really when Palomar turned into a restaurant. Our sales really went to like 50/50 right down the middle between food and cocktails, where previously might have been about 35% food. So Palomar really became something different during that pandemic time, because restaurants were a place where we were able to open up, use social distancing and all the other things at the time, and have focus on our food program to give people a reason to come in. Again, [we tried] to keep as many people employed as we could, because bars can open with 6 feet of social distancing and things like that. So we were able to reinvent and turn into what we are now.

Chávez: OK, I’m so sorry, because we have literally one minute left. But you are here because you’re nominated for these prestigious awards. You guys are obviously friends, too. How does it feel to be going to these awards together, to be part of the same bar industry? How does it feel to be nominated?

Morgenthaler: It’s always just such an honor to be nominated and this is one of those awards where you’re being recognized by your peers. So, that’s what really makes this super special for us is the recognition from the people that we respect the most.

Gomez: Yeah, absolutely. It’s our third year now, and saying that this year is more special because we are in our new location, we are in our new home, and to see that we’re still in this category and still being recognized. When you move locations, there’s all these different things that change and maybe people move on. And it’s nice to still be, again, in the top four and be recognized by your peers.

Chávez: Well, Ricky, Jeffrey, congratulations.

Morgenthaler: Thank you.

Gomez: Thank you.

Chávez: I’ve been speaking with Palomar’s Ricky Gomez and Pacific Standard’s Jeffrey Morgenthaler.

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