Here’s our alt-weekly pal Martin Cizmar, an Akron native and the current Arts and Culture editor at the Willamette Week, rhapsodizing about the new Fat Head’s in Portland’s Pearl District (a brewpub Mecca, of sorts): 

Fat Head’s…really channels the spirit of suburban Cleveland. That’s not a knock. There’s a lot to love about this big, doughy brewery and restaurant.

First, the beer, which is solid to excellent, including a squeaky-clean Czech Pilsner and the state’s best new weizenbock; that weiz is the deceptively smooth 8.7 percent ABV Alpenglow, a glorious pigpile of clove and banana that took gold at the Great American Beer Festival last month.

Then, there are bun-busting sandwiches and burgers, which come from a billboard-sized menu… The space is Cheesecake Factory-scale, decorated with company branding and, so far, slammed, meaning we waited over an hour for our food. (The waitress halved our bill.) The taps haven’t yet poured the flagship Head Hunter IPA—a revelation in North Olmsted, Ohio, though hard-pressed to rank among Oregon’s top 10 IPAs—but it’s already becoming one of the Pearl’s more pleasant bars. Hey, if it’s good enough for Cleveland’s westside ’burbs, it’s good enough for Portland’s admen and tourists.

Scene’s Doug Trattner wrote about the Fat Head’s arrival in North Olmsted back in 2009, and they’re still flipping dynamite burgers and brewing exotic, state-of-the-art beers out west. 

This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2014.

Sam Allard is a former senior writer at Scene.

5 replies on “Portland Loves Fat Head’s, “The Spirit of Suburban Cleveland””

  2. Oh great, the “grass is always greener guy” chiming in on how everything outside of Ohio is always better. You know, no one in Ohio has left the state to figure that out apparently, so I’m glad you updated us to how perfect everything is on the west coast [cue weather report comparing the two states]. I’m sure Fathead’s will be an excellent addition there, but that could be my Ohio-centric, mental-midget mind fabricating how good a “good” beer really is.

  3. Actually I find the head hunter to be equal if not better than many Oregon IPA’s. It’s a great IPA, certainly better than des chutes and rogue. Equal with lucky lab and Bridgeport.

  4. Beer lovers come to Cleveland from CHICAGO to drink our brews, and Chicago is a hard-core food town…so I think Fat Heads will do great in PDX.

  5. I’ll pick Bridgeport or Deschutes any day over Fat Heads, but I do hope they do well out there because I think Fat Heads can brew some great stuff. I keep reading the excerpt from the WW and it’s a bit condescending. Having lived in PDX and still visit from my current home in CLE, that shit is beyond annoying to me. CLE can hang with PDX.

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