Clyde Common has closed, ending go-go era for downtown Portland dining

Clyde Common in 2008, the year after it opened next to downtown Portland's new Ace Hotel.
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Looking back, Nate Tilden remembers the crowds.

They were waiting out front on Clyde Common’s first day, as Tilden put the finishing touches on his downtown Portland restaurant and bar. He hid his nail gun behind the bar, invited everyone inside and began pouring drinks. During its heyday, crowds would be three deep at the bar as the young cast of “Twilight” lit up the dining room or Fred and Carrie huddled with the “Portlandia” cast upstairs.

Clyde Common was Portland’s coolest restaurant for much of its early run. Now it’s gone for good. After splitting the restaurant in two during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, then running the kitchen himself near the end, Tilden is ready to move on.

“You have to keep the things alive that can be kept alive, and the things that die, give them the most graceful death they can have,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Clyde Common opened in May 2007 on Southwest Harvey Milk (then Stark) Street, next to Portland’s new Ace Hotel, describing itself as “a European style tavern serving delicious food and drinks in a casual and energizing space.” The room was designed as a mix of old and new: open kitchen, communal tables, zinc bar, canvas scrims, brick walls.

Behind the scenes, ambitions were bolder.

“We’re going to be the best hotel bar in the world, but we’re also going to be this really innovative restaurant,” Tilden recalls writing in a pitch to prospective investors. “People told us we had to pick one or the other.”

Star bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler joined the team in 2009, helping make good on the front side of that pitch. The bar became an innovation machine, pioneering both barrel-aged and carbonated cocktails. If you see a barrel-aged Negroni on the menu at a bar in New York, Chicago or Seattle, chances are the bartender did a stint at Clyde Common.

Also in 2009, former New York chef Chris Diminno (Blue Hill at Stone Barns) took over the kitchen, keeping original chef Jason Barwikowski’s blend of rustic presentations and esoteric ingredients while beefing up the pasta program. Carlo Lamagna, the man behind Portland’s 2021 Restaurant of the Year, Magna Kusina, was promoted to the head chef position in 2014, adding crispy lumpia, pork cheek adobo and other dishes inspired by his Filipino heritage. (Imagining Magna taking over the Clyde Common space five years ago is one of Portland’s great restaurant what-ifs.)

Clyde Common’s influence extends beyond its downtown walls, and even beyond the city itself. Along with neighbors Stumptown Coffee and Kenny & Zuke’s Delicatessen, Clyde Common ushered in a flood of new restaurants to the West End neighborhood, including Grüner, Lardo, Tasty N Alder and Bamboo Sushi. And though it was independently owned, its location — attached to the Ace by a hidden corridor — was an early argument that once-stodgy hotel restaurants could be dynamic, chef-driven and fun.

In 2008, a delegation from New York that included The Spotted Pig chef April Bloomfield and her right hand man, future Han Oak owner Peter Cho, visited Clyde Common to draw inspiration for The Breslin, an upcoming restaurant at the Ace Hotel New York. In 2010, Tilden, Barwikowski and salumi expert Elias Cairo would go on to launch Olympia Provisions, a restaurant and USDA-certified curing company with sausages that would grow to national distribution.

Communal tables were in vogue when Clyde Common opened in May, 2007.

For his part, Morgenthaler remembers nights sabering Champagne bottles into the crowd during staff parties shared with The Ace Hotel and Stumptown Coffee, and nights when drink orders were backed up so far he didn’t think he would finish making them all.

“When Nate told us we were not going to go on, we all had the same attitude, which was that we tried really hard,” Morgenthaler says. “It doesn’t feel like a failure because of all the great things we accomplished. My tenure there was 12 years. That’s a long, long time. Nobody lasts 12 years at a bar.”

Morgenthaler, who recently released a new line of canned cocktails with Ninkasi Brewing, plans to open a bar of his own this year.

Like all restaurants, especially those reliant on office workers to keep happy hours buzzing and tourists to keep dinner seats filled, Clyde Common was clobbered by the pandemic. In May, 2020, Tilden announced plans to split the restaurant in half, preserving the bar as Clyde Tavern and turning part of the dining room into the gourmet Common Market. Diminno returned to help make tavern burgers and his signature pastas, but by the end, Tilden was running the kitchen himself, slinging cast iron pizzas to 20 or so regulars each night.

Despite his pride in what the restaurant accomplished, Tilden feels betrayed by the city, which he says did little to help downtown businesses recover from the economic impacts caused by the pandemic. The restaurant chugged along thanks to a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan in 2020, but was denied for a Small Business Administration grant when the Restaurant Recovery Fund ran out of cash.

“My friends who have similar bars and restaurants in other cities, they might have closed, but they didn’t get destroyed and defecated upon and have city leaders just shrug,” Tilden says. “They say they’ll put some glue-on polka dots on the sidewalk, that will bring people back. They needed to give us money.”

Tilden also feels slighted by the new owner of Clyde Common’s building, Sortis Holdings, a Portland investment firm that bought into several prominent Portland brands during the pandemic, including Blue Star Donuts, Bamboo Sushi, and Submarine Hospitality, the restaurant group behind Ava Gene’s and Tusk. While acknowledging that “Clyde is emotional for me” — he held his wedding there in 2009 — Tilden feels like negotiations to buy the restaurant’s assets were not a high priority, and that Sortis chose to wait for him to run out of money so they could install a Submarine Hospitality restaurant in the space instead.

“I’m not happy with how negotiations went with Sortis, but it’s not a fight I’m going to win,” Tilden says. “My flagship restaurant was taken away from me by a pandemic. It wasn’t anybody doing anything evil to me ... When I go back in and have a $17 martini at Tusk downtown, I’ll say, ‘Hey, I love this room. I built this room.’”

Reached Sunday, Sortis Holdings owner Paul Brenneke said he was surprised to hear Tilden’s comments. He sees his company’s investments as partnerships with entrepreneur founders, and says Tilden was right to focus on his other businesses, including Olympia Provisions.

“We talked about some sort of venture together, but at the end of the day he had all this debt, and frankly Nate didn’t want to continue to be there,” Brenneke said. “And we didn’t feel it was very authentic to carry on with the name without what made Clyde special.”

There are no official plans for the Clyde Common space, Brenneke said.

After all the crowds, Clyde Common’s final nights were lonely ones. After working a pizza shift in May, Tilden was closing up when he spotted a man in the middle of Harvey Milk holding a golf club, “just smashing cars.”

“He looked up, started toward me and I hid inside my restaurant for half an hour,” Tilden says. “Then I ran to my car and thought, ‘I think we might be done.’”

“We did one more night, then we called our people, whoever wanted to come down,” he adds. “Twenty people, and we all put a cocktail in a coffee cup, and stood on the sidewalk on a beautiful spring evening, and sipped our barrel-aged Negronis, expressed our love for each other and the thing that we collectively built.”

These days, Tilden can be found cooking on the line at Bar Casa Vale, his Spanish restaurant and bar in Southeast Portland. He’s optimistic that restaurant will survive.

“I think we’re going to make it,” Tilden says. “We’ll hear the trumpets blare, see the sunlight come through the fog, raise our fists to the sky in Portland, Oregon and celebrate that we made it though.”

Michael Russell, mrussell@oregonian.com, @tdmrussell

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