It’s the destination after your evening’s destination, the place you go to greet the midnight hour and chase it toward dawn.īut Montage is also open for lunch weekdays. Photo: Visitor7, July 27, 2013, via Wikimedia Commonsĭaylight seems odd in this shadowed lair that squats beside the eastern pilings of the Morrison Bridge. Montage is a creature of the night fabled for its wee-hours gatherings of the city’s wild things. Le Bistro Montage, from the outside, tucked beside the pilings of the Morrison Bridge. More surprising still, I was sitting at the ancient gnarled counter of Le Bistro Montage in the naked light of day, which is a little like basking in the sun with the Vampire Lestat. Surprisingly, it was pretty good: sliced thin and cooked crisp, a poor-man’s BLT cushioned by blankets of lettuce, red onion and tomato between pieces of toast. On the third visit I broke down and ordered the fried Spam sandwich. May a jazz band march you to your grave.ĭAY SHIFT DINER: Montage’s down-and-dandy lunch Here, then, is my Day Shift Diner ode to the vagrant pleasures of Montage, as it ran in The Oregonian on May 5, 2006. A joint it definitely was – one of the city’s best, and one whose loss many people, old and young, are going to mourn. Homely Montage was not, although its decorative brilliance was hardly of the Architectural Digest sort. It also, for a while, served weekday lunches, and those days happened to coincide with the time that I was doing a stretch at The Oregonian writing a column called Day Time Diner, in which I explored the highs and lows of morning and midday dining in Portland, sometimes at high-end places but with the column’s affections definitely teetering toward the wayward attractions of the homely joint. Late at night it howled, and when you went there it was often for two seemingly contradictory reasons: because it was familiar and comfortable and you knew what to expect and because chances were better than fair something totally unanticipated might explode. Montage, a sort-of Cajun joint tucked in a delicately fading old brick building below the east side of the Morrison Bridge, was one of those Portland places, a legend in the perpetual making, a place for hipsters and anti-hipsters and your country cousins in to see the town a time-bending passageway from Old Portland to New. Lizzie Acker has a few details on The Oregonian/Oregon Live. And I write “was” because, as several news sources have reported today, as of today it is no longer. It was called, officially, Le Bistro Montage, although for decades most Portlanders have called it just Montage.
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