Postscript: Full Sail RiverPlace

Covid rearranged life in myriad ways, but in Portland it became a wrecking ball to a number of hallowed institutions. The latest case in point: “McCormick & Schmick’s Harborside, which sits in the RiverPlace complex, will close after dinner service on Sunday, ending a three-decade run at the location, according to two people familiar with the matter.”

The Willamette Week piece discusses Covid’s role in all this, but skates over the legacy of this once-great restaurant—and doesn’t even mention its partner, Full Sail’s Portland brewery and brewpub (known charmingly as the Pilsner Room). McCormick & Schmick was one of the first upscale restaurants to tap into the Pacific Northwest’s fresh bounty. In the 1990s, the RiverPlace location was one of the hottest tickets in town. The Pilsner Room was sort of the “lounge” part of the restaurant and lounge arrangement, and when they partnered with Full Sail, it became one of the prettiest places to have a pint. On a sunny day, the river walk became choked with people waiting to get in for a meal or a beer.

Full Sail was a big part of the location. The brewery leased a tiny corner of real estate to house its brewery, becoming a very early example of an R&D brewery there. Twenty years ago, you might show up to catch an afternoon NCAA tournament game, and grab a beer—all the while keeping an eye on the river. Now Full Sail’s involvement is so little-remembered that it doesn’t bear mentioning in the McCormick and Schmick’s news, but in the annals of Portland beer, it was a big deal.

Full Sail was one of the founding breweries in Oregon, opening in 1987. In 1992, they struck a deal with McCormick and Schmick’s to create the Pilsner Room as their house pub. They brought John Harris over from Deschutes, and that space became his little laboratory for the next couple decades. The company became something of a two-brewer operation, with John doing his small-batch thing in Portland, and Jamie Emmerson focusing on large package releases in Hood River.

I have no idea how much money the arrangement made Full Sail, but it gave the brewery a presence in its best market. Hiring John Harris also gave Full Sail a local advocate of the first order. Back in an age when the media still mattered, it was a lot easier to break off a reporter or news crew to head down to RiverPlace for a quote than trudging an hour east to Hood River. During the OBF week he held a famous cigar party each year, and he helped kick-start fresh hop brewing in the mid-aughts. John has been beer-famous for a long time, and having a downtown Portland brewery was good for his reputation and the brewery’s.

All that changed when John left Full Sail to start Ecliptic (itself another casualty of Covid). A couple years later, the employee-owners at Full Sail sold the company to a private equity firm, and the new management sent the brand in an unfortunate downward spiral. That was during the third wave of Portland brewery openings, and there was so much to see that people soon forgot about the Pilsner Room, and it’s surprising how little I hear it mentioned by old-timers. The closure of McCormick and Schmick’s is melancholy on its own terms—it was once a piece of Portland’s culinary character. Full Sail was no less a part of the city’s beer character. It was a great place, and John really helped elevate Portland beer.

RIP