Author: Valerie Kahn

Q&A with Spencer Bone and Reed Lamb of Trails End Bar   

Spencer Bone (right), lives in the Woodstock neighborhood, and is co-founder of Bottle Rocket, a burger-focused food cart at Cartopia on Hawthorne. Reed Lamb (left), lives in the Parkrose neighborhood and is the founder of The Standard, a dive bar in the Kerns neighborhood. The two joined together to start Trails End Bar, on the eastern edge of Sunnyside.

Although Trails End is themed after the Oregon Trail, the menu doesn’t necessarily reflect that. What inspired the menu?

Spencer: Every food I make is pulled from the past. I grew up in California’s Salinas Valley. That’s major farmland and there are lots of immigrant farmworkers. I lived in a town where half of them were Mexican; one of the plates on the menu was linguica sausage. The linguica on our menu is like the one from California that I remember eating as a kid.

You were running a food cart before this that also served alcohol, so why open this place?

Spencer: With a brick and mortar restaurant, it’s more like a community, a group with the same goal. Maybe I’m more like a cult leader here. Having a crew that feels like they’re involved and invested in the menu themselves breeds a want to make it good.

Reed has been a friend of mine for over a decade. We’re camping buddies with lots of similar ideas. He’d been looking for something for a long time, and then this spot opened up with a kitchen. It was turnkey, technically; there was a bar in here and tables. You could come in with product and start selling. We didn’t have to apply for a new permit. The layout of the bar is the same. All the sinks are in the same place.

How did he get you on board?

Spencer: Reed doesn’t know much about kitchens. So he just kind of said, “Hey, come down and look at this kitchen for me. Tell me what you think.” And then that’s when I was like, “We should do this together.” When I was driving home I thought of the name, Trails End.

Why do you think that name came to you?

Spencer: I’ve always liked western-theme bars. Like, when you drive out to the middle of nowhere and nothing’s changed in a bar in 40 years. It’s just always been the kind of places I like.

Reed, what’s your motive for owning another bar?

Reed: It’s nice to get to express yourself in something that resembles an artistic manner. I get  precious little of it in my life. Even my wife is like, “You’re so much happier when you’re on a project.”

What kind of aura do you want this bar to have?

Spencer: A place that’s gonna be here forever, that was here forever. Almost like a Cheers vibe. You come after work, or you come after playing video games, whatever. As time goes on, we’d like to be able to go until 2:30 a.m. It’s the Trails End—it’s the end of the night, you come here.

Reed: I want it to seem a bit more grown up than the dive bars that I drink at normally, but not by a lot. I want it to still be fun. I want the bar to be smaller and more homey. A little bit more intimate, but still warm and familiar. It’s like a family bar that doesn’t allow kids. I want us to bring out the working people that are around here and still sling $2 Hamms and still have really good burger specials.

Where does this come from, the desire to cater to the service industry?

Spencer: That’s who we are!

Reed: I still work shifts at my bar [The Standard] when they pop up and I can’t get anyone else to work. You want to make a place that represents who you are.

Tell me about the aesthetic choices.

Spencer: As soon as I knew I was opening a bar, I reached out to one of my good friends, Matt Stinger. He’s a local artist, and I told him I wanted a mural of Oregon. I made a couple of funny requests. Like, we gotta have Bigfoot. And then there’s two lakes, or even three, called Lost Lake, and they’re all really hard to find. So he was like, “Where are they?” And I was like, “Just put them anywhere.”

Do you feel that a lot of the reason why this bar has come together the way it has, is because you developed a network of friends who were the perfect people to help you?

Spencer: Exactly. My friend Patrick—who is now in charge of the kitchen here— helped me open Bottle Rocket. He was one of my first employees there as well. So having him here is great, because he has great ideas. I would have just bought pickles. He’s like, “We can just make them. It’s cheaper, and it will taste better.”

I mean, you can go through life without friends, but it’s a lot easier to have them. You know that song, “Friends, you can depend onnnn.”

What do you have to say about Sunnyside as a neighborhood?

Spencer: There’s always been a working class vibe to most of southeast.

Reed: It seems like other places—like the Alberta neighborhood, nothing against them—kind of were an up and coming thing and a ton of out-of-towners moved in and made it cool. This neighborhood, though, it seems like Portlanders made it cool before the out-of-towners got here.

Earlier, you said that you believed that things were meant to be. How do you know when something’s meant to be?

Spencer: You have to take a leap, and then when you land on your feet, well, I guess that was meant to be. You’ll know, and you’ll definitely know if it’s not working.

Reed: I don’t know about “meant to be.” I do things logically some of the time, but a lot more often, I’m doing by feel. Something feels right and you just have that instinctual reaction. You’re like, “Yes, this is gonna work.” Other times, even if it seems like everything’s adding up, I’m like, “No, I’m pulling back from this.”

Is there anything I didn’t cover that you feel people should know?

Spencer: I just want to make sure that people know it came together through the work of everybody. It wasn’t just me and Reed. It was our friends and community. There’s no way it would have happened if it was just me and Reed by ourselves. We probably would just be drinking in a half torn out room. We would’ve been perfectly happy drinking in a half built bar by ourselves. At least it’s got whiskey in it.

Trails End Bar is located at 4601 SE Hawthorne Blvd, and open noon–midnight daily. For more info, check out their Instagram: @portlandtrailsend.