BudgetTravel

The quirks of Portland's character are much more evident once you cross over to the east side. The first Thursday of every month, galleries in the Pearl stay open into the evening, and a few lay out platters of grapes and Camembert. On the street corners, accordionists play Edith Piaf songs. Meanwhile, galleries in Northeast Alberta, a neighborhood across the river, stay open late on the last Thursday of every month, and some encourage you to bring your own wine. A troubadour with iron-colored hair rasps Bob Dylan tunes on the stoop of a shuttered store, and folks from the neighborhood drag out card tables to sell homemade brownies and slices of blackberry pie. When I was there, an 8-year-old named Brian set up his own arcade game: For a penny a try, passersby could attempt to flick a plastic frog into a plastic bucket that was probably a few inches too high.

The art at Last Thursday didn't really seem like the main point (although there were some lovely paintings at Talisman Gallery). More than half the fun came from dancing to live bluegrass in the parking lot, perusing the shamanic jewelry and artistically arranged junk being hawked by sidewalk vendors, and wandering into the shops on the main drag, also open late. Besides the funky boutique Tumbleweed, where owner Kara Larson sells flowery, home-on-the-range dresses she makes herself, there's a real Mexican carnicería, Don Pancho's, offering not just sides of beef, but also plastic roses and elaborate polyester wedding dresses. When the galleries and shops finally lock their doors, everyone fans out to a handful of restaurants and bars. Tin Shed is, indeed, a corrugated tin building with marigold walls and light fixtures constructed of side-by-side dinner forks. It's quintessentially Portland--effortlessly charming and more sophisticated than it lets on, with wild mushroom ravioli and jalapeño mac and cheese.

Washington Park (John Clark)

Portland is blessed with a number of restaurants like this--unassuming, reasonably priced establishments that take food seriously without being uptight. Bread and Ink serves modern interpretations of comfort food in what was once a grocery store. It has the linoleum floors and green leather chairs of a 1950s coffee shop but the white tablecloths and brisk, professional service of a bistro. Another favorite, Pambiche, does gutsy Cuban food--pepper pot stew, garlic shrimp, and taro-root fritters--in a coral-colored building.

Even though Oregon makes some of the best wines around these days, beer is accorded equal reverence and described with the same nuance. The city has 34 microbreweries in the metropolitan area. The Lucky Labrador Brew Pub, in an old sheet-metal warehouse, brews a fantastic house ale. The back porch, where customers and their mostly big, mostly friendly dogs hang out at picnic tables, has the folksy feeling of a backyard BBQ.

The closest Portland gets to velvet-rope exclusivity is an event-cum-restaurant called Family Supper. It began as a dinner party at the home of Naomi and Michael Hebberoy, a couple that used to run a catering company called Ripe; it evolved into an invitation-only affair; and finally, Family Supper opened its doors to those lucky enough to get a reservation. Unmarked and unlisted, Family Supper is still more like a dinner party than a restaurant. The 40 guests are asked to arrive at 7:30 p.m. They spend the first half hour milling about the herb garden drinking wine or chatting with the chef in the open kitchen. At eight, everyone gathers in assigned seats at two butcher-block tables, and heaping platters of seasonally inspired Italian food are passed around. I had to fight my instinct to ask for a third helping of a rich sweet corn risotto with fresh truffles. For dessert we had blackberry cobbler topped with a cloud of barely sweet whipped cream.

Much less covert is the Pepto-Bismol-pink saltbox house where Lovely Hula Hands has staked its claim. The food veers from Southeast Asia to Cuba--Thai flatiron steak with sticky rice served in a take-out carton, Cuban pumpkin rice with tomato-coconut curry--while the décor is inspired by a grandma's parlor, with leafy vintage wallpaper, Japanese prints, and an old mantle serving as a bar.

Down the hill and across from the railroad yard, drunken sailors and Polish immigrants used to gather for heated poker games in the White Eagle. Today, it's a cozy parlor bar, with mosaic floors, an oak bar, and Oriental rugs, and it hosts country, blues, and rock shows. Upstairs are 11 small hotel rooms, perhaps the best deal in Portland at $30 to $50 a night, if you don't plan on sleeping until after the music stops (between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., depending on the night of the week). The White Eagle is run by a Portland-based company called McMenamins, whose business model is to buy historic buildings and transform them into bars and hotels while retaining as much of their character as possible. This being Portland, McMenamins is also known for brewing great beer.

McMenamins' other Portland hotel, the Kennedy School, is in a quiet, residential neighborhood to the east. It's an old grammar school transformed into a themed hotel. Former classrooms are furnished with formidable oak headboards, Oriental rugs, and tassled lampshades, and some choice details have been preserved, such as the chalkboards and the lockers. Movies are shown nightly in the former gymnasium ($3), and there's an on-site pub with live music a couple of nights a week.

Further south, in the Hawthorne neighborhood, is another vivid reminder that Portland isn't as young as it looks. Opened in 1927 to showcase silent films and vaudeville acts, Bagdad Theater still features the original Arabian Nights murals of snake charmers and sultans, from a time when the semiotics of ethnicity were a less volatile subject. The auditorium also retains its old red velvety seats, but some have been removed in order to make way for small wooden tables, which allow patrons to dine on pizza, microbrews, and local wine ($6.25 a glass, tops), while they watch second-run movies.

Hawthorne is Portland at its crunchiest. Incense seems to waft from every pastel-colored bungalow, and the old VWs in the driveways are plastered with free tibet stickers. In Other Words is a nonprofit bookstore that specializes in books by, for, and about women. Global Exchange is an import shop with an uncompromising fair-trade policy and beautiful wares: Tibetan prayer wheels, Mexican and Peruvian retablos, Indian bedspreads, and glazed Vietnamese tea sets. Powell's for Cooks and Gardeners is an offshoot of Powell's Books, the country's largest independent bookseller (and a Portland institution). The main store, Powell's City of Books, occupies a 74,000-square-foot building downtown, but the Hawthorne shop stocks the most obscure cookbooks you could ever dream up. Among the categories: ayurvedic, gluten-free, Amish, and Junior League. Then there's Rimsky-Korsakoffee House, which falls somewhere between a '60s coffeehouse and a Viennese café. Latter-day flower children in flowing skirts gather at night for coffee and cake in a Victorian house with a sloping front porch, and a swooning pianist plays Chopin and Beethoven on a scuffed baby grand.

Despite its earnestness--or perhaps because its residents need something to rebel against--Portland has its share of indie rockers, and most seem to be hanging out at Doug Fir. It's an ironic derivative of a Denny's-style coffee shop tricked out like a 1970s rec room as interpreted by an of-the-moment designer: faux-fur carpeting, curving vinyl banquettes, and late-night service. It's also an homage to the archetypal mountain lodge, with antler chandeliers and cocktail tables rendered from tree stumps. On the ground floor is a music club that books rock, hip-hop, and big-name DJs. The restaurant caters to the late-night cravings of the clubgoers, who in turn help fill the rooms of the adjacent Jupiter Hotel, a revamped '60s motor court offering rooms that have a playful Ikea aesthetic. On the patio, there's a big fire pit where guests can gather round and drink a few beers.

Most of the time, though, Portland is a resoundingly nice place where people are genuinely concerned about the welfare of other people, whether those people live next door or in Nepal. In an impossibly sweet residential area called Sellwood, where every house is graced with a rosebush and children scampered home from the community pool in groups, holding hands, I came upon an intersection where, on one corner, there was a table with a large Thermos of tea and a half-dozen mismatched cups hanging from pegs. help yourself said a hand-lettered sign. On another corner, inside a bamboo lean-to, there was a modest bookshelf and a chalkboard where someone had written, happy birthday, rebecca! A small plaque explained that this was Share-It Square, an effort to build relationships in the neighborhood.