Pacific Standard

Pacific Standard is the ground-floor bar of the KEX hotel at 100 NE Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in the Central Eastside, opened by Jeffrey Morgenthaler and Benjamin Amberg, both previously of Clyde Common. The bar describes itself as a modern West Coast drinking and dining hall that celebrates the hotel bar by aiming to be a living room for the city — a destination for international travellers, but also a haunt for local regulars. Travel Oregon has described Morgenthaler as one of Portland's most renowned mixologists and among the earliest involved in the craft-cocktail movement in the early 2000s. The kitchen is bar food taken seriously: oysters on the half shell, deviled eggs with chives and paprika, a drive-thru burger with American cheese and dijonnaise, a fried chicken sandwich with Oaxaca cheese and tomatillo sauce, steelhead trout with shaved fennel and celeriac purée, and the bartender's cookies with chocolate chunks and sea salt.

What makes Pacific Standard genuinely useful to anyone managing their drinking is a menu-design decision rather than a single drink: the alcohol by volume of every cocktail is printed beside it, running from 0% up to a 39% house old fashioned. Willamette Week noted the practice when the bar relaunched its list in July 2022, describing myriad low- and no-alcohol options with the alcohol by volume for all of them printed on the menu. That means zero-proof drinks are not quarantined in a separate section but sit in the main cocktail grid, marked 0% ABV. Tiger Balm combines the bar's own house-made non-alcoholic spirit with Wilderton Lustre, pineapple and lime over pebble ice. Wandering Path is built on Pathfinder non-alcoholic spirit with grapefruit, lemon and egg whites, served up. Between those and full strength sits a genuine low-ABV ladder — a fun-sized mandarin orange gimlet at 9.5%, an all-day bloody mary at 9%, a pine-Aperol spritz at 10.6% — which makes the room equally legible whether you are moderating or not drinking at all. Kombucha, Leitz Eins Zwei Zero wine and BERO non-alcoholic beer round out the list. The bar is open daily from 3pm to midnight, with happy hour from 3 to 6pm and again from 10pm.