![]() Rinella Produce, a Gothic-lettered slogan painted in faded white across its old bricks: “The first fruits are the Lord’s.” Graziano Produce and its football-tough delivery trucks. Here in this urban maze is where your food starts, or at least where it lands, before it’s redistributed across the city. Around the corner sags the sad ghost of the grocery emporium Corno’s, stripped bare of the cartoon fruits and vegetables that once frolicked around its roof. ![]() ![]() A block away at City Liquidators, people are hanging out on the docks, ready to heft big things onto small pickup beds. The neighborhood’s pretty much asleep at night when Montage rocks, but in the light of lunchtime it hums. Bank in off MLK on Portland’s close-in Southeast side and you find yourself in a hidden cityscape of muscle and bone, a place of warehouses and rolled-up sleeves and rutted streets with railroad tracks. Just when you’d think it ought to be sleeping off the night before, it sets a surprisingly alluring table: quiet and noisy and relaxed and jumping all at once, like the early minutes of a rehearsal when the band’s still goofing around.ĭespite its late-night reputation, Montage sits squarely in quintessential Day Shift Diner territory. 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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