The Spare Room | |
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Address | 4830 Northeast 42nd Avenue |
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Location | Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
Coordinates | 45°33′29.1″N 122°37′12.7″W / 45.558083°N 122.620194°W |
Opened | 1977 |
Website | |
spareroomrestaurantandlounge |
Spare Room Restaurant and Lounge, or simply The Spare Room, is a dive bar, [1] restaurant, and entertainment venue in northeast Portland, Oregon, United States.
The Spare Room is a restaurant and entertainment venue with two bars in northeast Portland's Cully neighborhood, established in 1977 in a former bowling alley. The restaurant's daily menu features standard pub food and classic American cuisine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. [2] [3]
The space has a large dance floor and hosts a variety of events, such as bingo for seniors, country–western dances, karaoke, and hard and indie rock concerts. [2] [4] The Spare Room hosts a monthly event called "the Get Down", described by Willamette Week as a "soul, funk and R&B dance party that's almost too popular", as of 2018. [2] The venue also hosts "Sugar Town", described as one of the city's "most established inclusive dance nights" featuring a disc jockey who specializes in blues and soul music. [5]
The Spare Room was included in Portland Monthly's 2014 list of "Portland's Best Bars of the Moment". [6] In her 2016 overview of restaurants along Northeast 42nd Avenue in Cully, The Portland Mercury's Andrea Damewood described the venue as a place "where the magic happens" with "a hell of a karaoke setup". [4]
In 2018, Willamette Week described the venue as "an Old Portland icon that stands as the antithesis of New Portland's bougie homogeneity", with dim lights and inexpensive drinks. [2] The paper's Donovan Farley wrote, "The food is typical bar fare with a homey twist – think meatloaf and spaghetti dinners... Like a chilled-out and boozy Waffle House, the Spare Room also serves breakfast daily at 7 am, making it the rare establishment that's a great place to begin and end your day, provided you can do so while remaining employed." [2] Willamette Week also included the venue's "live-band karaoke experience", called "Karaoke from Hell", on their 2018 list of Portland's "best places to sing karaoke", [7] and the "Sugar Town" event in their list of the city's most "queer-centric" dance parties. [5]