I visited Henry's Tavern as I was waiting for First Thursday in the Pearl. The service was friendly and fast even during a very busy happy hour, and they did have a large beer selection, though if you've attended a year's worth of beer festivals and had a monthly visits to Bailey's Taproom for tasting sampler trays, it turns out you have already had a lot of them. Seeing a huge tabloid page of beer listings and being able to say you've had almost everything is… well, quite a realization, and makes you wonder what to call this accomplishment.
For happy hour eats, I sampled the hot spinach parmesan artichoke dip with warm tortilla chips, mac and cheese with cheddar and parmesan, and the signature gorgonzola waffle cut fries. The spinach dip was laughable. Something from Safeway's deli would be better… no kitchen could have possibly made this, they must have reheated it from a jar. The mac and cheese is better at Noodles and Company then here because the creamyness is the texture of nacho sauce. And I mean the kind you pump out as a convenience store- don't try to fool me with that little sprinkling of grated cheese from a bag that there was a lot of real cheese in this. The signature gorgonzola waffle cut fries were well cooked, but incredibly oversalted and the gorgonzola sauce not plentiful enough to counter it. More gorgonzola sauce please.
There are a lot of options in the Pearl district, and the food here clearly didn't measure up with the many other choices for food nearby. The selection of beer might be interesting to a non-Portland-beer scene person, and one thing they do offer is the many large screen TVs. So, for a sports bar, it's a good trendy sports bar that has a lot of beer options. But, also, it's a sports bar. Decide for yourself if this is what you want.
Meanwhile, my eyes widened when I saw the Ploughman's Platter at Horse Brass Pub. This old style English pub is large and no longer smoky, and balances its larger size with still feeling like a neighborhood hole in the wall dive somehow. The beer menu here offers a lot of variety. Meanwhile, the English Ploughman's plate is not the size of a mere snack. "Cheese, apple, carrots, pickle and tomato, served with potato chips, bread and butter." says the description innocently. What they don't specify is that the cheeses are 3 hunks not pieces (two of them clearly go into the wedge category), there's like half a dozen pickles, a quarter of a loaf of bread, the equivalent of a bag of potato chips from the vending machine (but fresh!) and two whole apples sliced handily into wedges on a platter. The cheddar was a bit sharp (but it is a classic cheddar), and I really liked the stilton. Seriously, it was very authentic Ploughman's lunch! Great for soaking up the higher alcohol beer (and continued to work even through our next stop at Belmont Station… well we still ended up "drunk shopping" at Fred Meyer. Seriously the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne is awesome, even sober. I digress). Next time, I'll try the fish and chips, because I'd visit Horse Brass and Belmont Station again.
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