Sunnyside Neighborhood Association

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

A Q&A with Jerry Fechter at Horse Brass Pub.

In November this year, the Horse Brass Pub will turn 50, though the bar celebrated a bit early this year. For the past half-century, the storied taphouse has been home to local brewers, English expats, and neighborhood residents alike. It fills nightly with all ages of clientele looking to throw darts, knock back a few (real, imperial, 20-ounce) pints, and dig into some of the best fish and chips in Portland. And although he passed away in early 2011, you can still feel the presence of its famed publican Don Younger, the patron saint of Oregon’s craft brew scene, whose 86th birthday the Horse Brass celebrated in mid-July with a week of collaboration beers and live music. Its current owner, former Lompoc brewer and owner Jerry Fechter, carries the spirit forward today.

Alex Frane: How did you first meet Don?

Jerry Fechter: I met Don Younger when [the western] side of the Horse Brass opened in ‘94. A friend had said, “Hey, you need to come check out this bar. They have all these craft beers.” I came over five or six times over the next few years. I don’t really remember meeting Don, and I don’t really remember talking to him very often, but in 1999 I was trying to buy Lompoc Brewing, where I was the brewer. A guy who worked at Steinbart’s and Belmont Station said, “Don Younger might be into partnering up with you. He’s helped so many brewers.”

So he called up Don and we met and talked for about an hour or two. A couple of days later he came over to Lompoc at 8 in the morning. 10 hours later we had the framework of a deal. It took us about another month or so to get our money together and figure out what we were doing. Then we bought it in early 2000 and opened the doors around May.

AF: When did you join up with the Horse Brass?

JF: Over the next 11 years, the partnership was obviously good and Lompoc was doing well. Don must have seen something in me he liked and his longtime bookkeeper, Joellen Piluso, and I got along. When Don passed away 2011, he left an option for myself and Joellen to each buy half of the pub. I know he wanted to do something good for Joellen; she’s been here since day one.

AF: So did you start working here in 2011?

JF: No, it was business as usual, Joellen kept running it. Then slowly, over time, as I started selling off parts of Lompoc, I would come over to do maintenance projects, either build new stuff or fix stuff. When we closed Lompoc Brewing in 2019, that’s when we had the conversation: We’ll work together for a year or two and then we’ll phase Joellen out [for her retirement]. COVID bumped it back. I bought her out a couple of years ago and she retired three years ago. She still comes in about once or twice a month. I still have her reconcile the checkbook and she’s a good sounding board.

AF: What do you think makes the Horse Brass special compared to the many tap houses and brew pubs that have opened up in the last 50 years?

JF: It’s just a neat pub. There’s a lot of history here, a lot of craft beer history. Don was a total pioneer. Not only on the craft side, but he brought in all the imports. He brought in Newcastle, he brought in Watneys, he brought in Bass and Guinness. As an English pub, that was an easy avenue for him. When Widmer, Deschutes, Bridgeport, Pike, and Bert Grant’s, came on the scene, their first taps in Portland were at the Horse Brass. That blossomed over the years. After they opened this side over here [gesturing to the western half of the bar], a lot of the brewers all met here every Friday at 4 and they called it Poets. It was just a great place to come and meet brewers.

AF: How do you think the bar has evolved over the past 50 years?

JF: I think in a lot of ways we’ve evolved, but in a lot of ways we haven’t done anything. It’s always been a neighborhood bar and some of the regulars have been coming in here for 50 years. There are three things in life: your home life, your work life, and then you either have a hobby or you have a place to go where you socialize. Don was a big believer in the Third Place and that’s what he always tried to create. One of the original phrases that the Horse Brass was built on was “Where companionship is the order of the day.” It’s a very English phrase, but it holds true. You come to the bar to socialize and have a beer and talk to other folks who want to socialize and have a beer, and you get to know people. There’s good food and there’s good conversation to be had and that’s what people are looking for. So that’s all we’re trying to do. Don’s big quote was, “It’s not about the beer. It’s about the beer.” You know, how the beer gets there, who made the beer, what the beer does to people, how it makes them feel.

AF: Do you still see that kind of community here at the Brass?

JF: 100 percent. 100 percent. We see a lot of newer, younger folks coming in, hanging out. They bring other folk or meet other brewers here. We’re still doing something right.

Tech Tips: Summer boredom and screen time

Summer vacation is the season of sprinklers and popsicles and sleeping in. It’s also the season when parents often have the most difficulty managing screen time. Trying to get things done while also keeping the kids entertained all day can be really frustrating. It’s so easy for screens to become the default solution because they zap summer boredom better than any other invention. Entertained kids = parents getting things done.

As a GenXer raised by Boomer parents in the ‘80s, I can’t help but notice a huge cultural shift around kid’s boredom in the last 40 years. Boomer parents trusted that we had the skills to deal with our boredom and didn’t consider it their problem to solve. Those of us who were kids in the ‘80s had hours and hours to develop these skills—boring car rides, a sibling’s boring T-ball game, boring adult conversations, and hundreds of other boring things were part of every day living because Silicon Valley hadn’t yet invented the Instant Boredom Zapper.

Things had changed by the time I was raising my son in the 2010s. Boredom was now considered a parenting failure. A bored kid meant you were doing something wrong. I felt this particularly acutely as the parent of an only child.

Then, I was given the best parenting advice I’ve ever gotten. When my son was young, I was a violin teacher, surrounded by my students and their wise parents. Three of my students, all siblings, were remarkable because they were always engaged in creative and imaginative pastimes. I asked their mom what her secret was and her answer changed my son’s childhood. “Boredom!” she said. “Kids do the most incredible things when they get fully, truly bored. But you have to be willing to let them get REALLY bored. If they’re not doing something amazing, they’re not bored enough yet.”

I’d heard this idea before of course, but hadn’t really trusted it enough to try it with my own child. But when I stopped handing over a screen to solve boredom, when I let my son get REALLY bored, he started doing amazing things. He invented board games and wrote long stories in blank notebooks. He started rollerblading and launching dry ice rockets. During Covid, he built incredible physics contraptions with paper towel holders, marbles, string and dominos that took up his entire bedroom. The boredom I had dreaded so much turned out to be the secret sauce to a childhood full of creativity, imagination and motivation.

Seeing this happen really shifted my thinking. Perhaps our kids’ boredom isn’t a miserable state we should avoid at all costs, but an incredibly powerful motivator we’ve culturally forgotten about. It’s undeniable that technology has added amazing things to our lives. But, if boredom is actually the catalyst for motivation then what are we taking away from our kids when they have constant access to Instant Boredom Zappers?

These days I work with families to help them manage screen time and I see the same thing. Motivation, creativity, and imagination show up after the boredom. Real 1980s level boredom. What we had in the ‘80s was a ready list of things we loved to do when we were bored, and it was always front of mind because we had to use it all the time. This mental list rarely gets made by kids today, and the motivation to explore off-screen pastimes gets weaker when they’re always grabbing a Boredom Zapper.

Changing how we deal with boredom in our families can be challenging in the beginning, especially if kids have gotten very used to being entertained by a screen. One of the best ways to help kids learn to manage boredom is to plan ahead. Sit down with your kids and help them think of at least ten screen-free things they enjoy. Write them down on a Boredom List and hang it on the fridge. This way, whenever someone complains of boredom and asks for a screen, you have an easy answer. “Go check out your Boredom List—it has all kinds of great ideas for you!”

All of our kids can develop the boredom skills we had in the ‘80s, it just takes practice. It won’t happen in a single day, or a week, but it will happen in less than a month. We just have to trust it, like our parents and grandparents did.

Summer is a great time to experiment with changing how you think about boredom in your family. I’ve created two handouts to make it easier for your kids to create their boredom lists. Go to the Printouts page under “Resources” on my website mindful-media.net and look for Your Bag Of Tricks for Boredom, and 50 Things For Kids To Do. In the wise words of a Southeast Portland mom, “If they’re not doing something amazing, they’re not bored enough yet.” Let’s make this the summer we remember that boredom is a motivator, not a misery!

News from the President

Hi Sunnyside! Since it’s finally July, I’m really putting the emphasis on “Sunny”! It’s a great season to fill a basket full of food and drinks, grab a blanket and pack up the kids for events across Portland. That’s right, it’s time for our third annual summer events guide! As always, this is just a taste of all the free events going on around town and definitely puts the focus on events in Sunnyside and our surrounding neighborhoods. Visit portland.gov/parks/arts-culture/summer-free-all/cultural-events for a wider list of events in our city parks.

The Sounds of Summer

• Bring your dancing shoes (or just dance barefoot!) for Melao de Cuba at Mt.Tabor’s Caldera Amphitheater on July 9th at 6:30 p.m.

• The Rose Park Amphitheater will be the site for the Washington Park Summer Music Festival on August 8th and 9th at 6 p.m. This year celebrates the history and future of Black music in Portland with the Time Sound Big
Band and original soul music from Ural Thomas and the Pain.

• With the kids out of school, parents may be feeling a bit of summer stress! Can I interest you in a glass of wine? Bring your kids to Firefly Wine Room (4538 SE Hawthorne) for Family Music Night with Mr. Ben on the 1st, 3rd and 5th Mondays all summer long.

Sunset Cinema

• The Buckman Community Association will have a viewing of Men in Black on August 1st at 7:30 p.m at Colonel Summers Park. After last year’s showing of Galaxy Quest, Buckman keeps killing it with the funny sci-fi!

• Nothing says cool like Jamaican bobsledders at the Winter Olympics!
The SNA, in partnership with the Richmond and the Hosford-Abernathy
NAs, will host Cool Runnings on August 22nd at 7:30 p.m. in Sewallcrest Park.

A Night at the Theater (in the park)

• Set in the shadow of Shakespeare’s 12th Night, A Simple Truth by Ken
Yoshikawa is an epic five-act verse tragicomedy. It tells a story of
sovereignty, grief, and ecological preservation. Presented by Oregon
Adventure Theater at TaborSpace on July 10th and 11th at 6:30 p.m.

• Longtime readers know that I am a sucker for the Original Shakespeare
Company’s hilarious takes on the Bard. This year’s slate at Laurelhurst includes something for everyone with Henry IV – Part I on July 10th, King Lear on July 11th and a double-header of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and
Twelfth Night on July 25th. The full summer schedule is at opsfest.org.

Dancing (and eating and playing) in the Street

• Sunnyside’s street murals will be highlighted during a Pedalpalooza ride
on Saturday, July 18th. The ride starts at the Heart of Hawthorne
Plaza (at 37th Ave.) at 10 a.m. and proceeds on a 3.8 mile route
that will highlight the salmon murals on Salmon St. and the Sunnyside Piazza. More info at shift2bikes.org/calendar.

• How about a little educational fun? Explore Northwest Geology on a walk
through Mt. Tabor on July 26th at 2 p.m. Meet at the Visitor’s Center.

• Street fair season returns on August 23rd for the Hawthorne Street Fair and the summer wraps up with the Belmont Street Fair on September 19th. The SNA will be at both, so stop by and say hello!

That’s the summer fun list for 2026 but fear not, the SNA is not taking the summer off! We are working on multiple issues that affect the neighborhood, including dangerous traffic on our corridors, proposed developments on the empty lot at 4511 SE Hawthorne, and engaging with neighbors and other stakeholders around the long-vacant Laurelhurst Village property on Stark at 30th. More news on all of these fronts to come, but for now get outside and enjoy all that our city has to show off in the summer!

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

A Q&A with Kat Thirakomen and David Fiske owners of Bangkok Belly.

When Kat Thirakomen and David Fiske opened Bangkok Belly on Belmont in November their idea was to offer dishes from Thailand that they missed and craved the most. Judging by the restaurant’s popularity, Portlanders will soon be craving these foods, too. The menu centers on skewers and salads, with seasonal specials like goong ping—grilled wild Mexican shrimp skewer with green garlic nam jim seafood sauce—and Yum Tua Waan, a sugar snap pea salad with housemade chili jam, cilantro, mint, shrimp paste, coconut, peanut, and fried shallot. The couple met in Bangkok and then moved to Portland to go to grad school—David in urban planning and Kat in business—before returning to Thailand, until recently. Now they live south of Sunnyside, in Richmond. We talked about the swing dance scene in Bangkok, what they love about this part of Belmont, and what “yum” means in Thai.

So your family has a restaurant business in Thailand. Tell me about it.

Kat: I’ve always been around restaurants, but the food here [at Bangkok Belly] is not the same as what we serve at my parents’ restaurant. [More on that later.] We have: a tight concept of the dishes that we love and miss from when we both lived there together for almost ten years. So: skewers and Thai salads. We toss herbs with different things like proteins—steelhead trout, pork collar to give two examples—and a variety of bright, sweet, tangy dressings. And we have a cocktail program that’s ingredient-forward. David spearheads that.

David: Thai spins on the classics is my approach to the bar program. So we have a really good Martini on the menu with a Thai basil shrub. And there’s an Old Fashioned with a little bit of banana liqueur and rum inspired by a famous Bangkok banana fritter.

Kat: This makes us different from other Thai restaurants in town. It’s a really small space with a small kitchen, so we keep everything tight. We also make everything from scratch using quality ingredients. We make curry paste from scratch, we make our own chili jam. Everything is fresh, using local ingredients you can’t find in Thailand when we can, and people have been tasting and noticing that.

What made you decide to choose Sunnyside as a place to open your business?

David: The space became available—the previous restaurant [Daily Fuel] was leaving. And we really fell in love with the space. It’s a 100-year-old building with tall vaulted ceilings and the original windows let in a lot of natural light. We also liked the size of it, and the layout seemed perfect for our concept. We like the open kitchen—we want it to be intimate and community-driven. What’s even cooler is that we uncovered the original floor tiles from when it used to be a Pantorium.

A what?

Kat: A Pantorium.

David: Essentially, it’s a fancy word for a dry cleaner. It was like a drapery dry cleaning service. One of our first Instagram posts had original photos of it. This building has had many lives. I knew it when it was a pizza restaurant, and then it got chopped up into two spaces. I’m from Portland, and I’ve always loved this stretch of Belmont. This is my favorite commercial stretch in Southeast. It still has an old Portland vibe, even though the businesses have changed.

Kat: What’s cool about this block is that the business owners are always around. We know the owners at Los Puñales, at AnnamVL—there are three generations there. Sugar Hill, Olivia at the tattoo shop across the street, the new owners at Aalto Lounge…

David: There’s also H Mart, and with that and AnnamVL, there’s a connection of Southeast Asian people and people who like Asian food. We felt that was another great reason for us to be here.

Do you guys ever get ingredients from H Mart?

Kat: We source from purveyors most of the time. But if we need more limes…

David: It’s definitely nice if we run out of something. It’s like our emergency pantry.

Do you ever get anything from the farmers market?

Kat: We have some seasonal dishes on the menu. Currently we have a sugar snap pea salad, which is our take on a winged bean salad. It has the same kind of crunch. We are sourcing it from a local farm, Pablo Muñoz Farms. And one of our purveyors is Organically Grown Co. We get a delivery from them every week. We try to use organic whenever we can. One of our skewers is oyster mushroom, and that’s from OGC.

How did you guys meet in Thailand?

David: Kat is from Thailand and I moved there in 2011 to teach English. I thought I would stay a year, and then I met Kat. I ended up staying for almost four years. We moved back here, both went to grad school, and then moved back to Thailand in 2018 for about five years. But we initially met through swing dancing.

Really? Is there a swing dancing scene in Bangkok?

Kat: It’s bigger than the one here, now.

David: It was just starting when we were there, and we both started learning at the same time.

Kat: One of my really good friends from middle school, went to the US for school and he brought it back.

He brought it back single-handedly?

Kat: Yeah, and then he found another American teacher who also loves swing dancing and they joined forces to build a scene together. And we were part of the scene-building.

David: Kat was learning from her friend, a Thai guy, and I was learning with an American guy who I met through some friends. When they joined forces, we met, and the rest is history!

Kat: We ended up teaching swing and lindy hop together in Thailand on Saturdays.

David: We were dancing like three, four times a week and when we first moved back to Portland we were dancing a lot. We don’t dance as much these days! But, you’ll notice that the music that we play in the restaurant has a lot of swing-style jazz and other music from that era.

Kat, tell me how your family’s restaurant differs from Bangkok Belly.

Kat: My parents do hot pot. Hot pot is when you put fresh vegetables, fresh meats, meatballs into boiling broth. It’s communal—you cook it together, family-style. Then you dip it in sauce. We don’t do that here, but I’ve tried to put a lot of how they run their business into our restaurant, like taking care of our team and customers as a first priority.

I’ve had hot pot before, but thought it was Chinese.

Kat: I think it originates in China, and other versions exist throughout Asia. Like in Japan with Shabu Shabu. Thais have their own take on that.

What do the two of you love about Sunnyside?

Kat: I like that the business owners are always around. It’s really nice to connect with the other business owners on the block. I also like the diversity of businesses and people on this block, too.

David: We’ve had a lot of neighbors that come in and who have become regulars. It seems like a lot of people that live in Sunnyside are proud to live here. There’s definitely a strong neighborhood and community vibe.

Kat: Everyone is so nice and friendly! People are so graceful and gracious.

David: It’s been really nice just to be welcomed and feel like we’re a part of the neighborhood. That’s really what we want this place to be–a neighborhood spot.

What do you think needs improvement in Sunnyside?

David: The only thing I can think of is that I would love for this street to have more streetside seating—like there is on 28th and Burnside. It would make it more of a great food block if the whole block had seating like that.

Bangkok Belly is located at 3342 Belmont and is open from 5–9 p.m. Wed.–Saturday. (4–8 p.m. Sunday). Follow the restaurant on Instagram at @Bangkokbellypdx.