Portland Bar the Last Rodeo Saddles Up With Barbecue Tacos and Cowboy Boot Cocktails

“The theme we were joking around about is ‘depressed Palm Springs cowboy,’” says Ezra Caraeff, one of the co-owners of the Last Rodeo, a new bar in Sellwood. “We didn’t want the macho kind, you know? F-250 cowboy. We wanted the cowboy contemplating the decisions he’s made.” The Palm Springs comparison matches the airy, casually elegant space awash in teals and blonde wood. The “depressed cowboy” part can be found in the impeccably curated playlist of mournful honky-tonk, while the paintings on the walls, most by Fort Worth artist Kevin Chupik, evoke the disappearing West from films like Lonely Are the Brave and No Country for Old Men.

Caraeff, along with Chip Addabbo and John Naekel, form the core of Three on a Match, a bar collective that includes Paydirt, the Old Gold, and Hi-Top Tavern. Each of those bars have different menus, aesthetics, and areas of focus, but they’re unified in that they’re all consummate neighborhood bars: classy enough for date night, casual enough for a $3.50 tallboy after work.

Their new Sellwood bar occupies the first level of the somewhat legendary (and some say cursed) 1920s Spanish revival building that was once the Woods music venue, a fixture of the shoegaze scene in the mid-aughts. Before that, it was a funeral home. “I’ve been here late at night by myself, and it does not feel remotely haunted,” Caraeff assures, although he does note that the basement still has some remnants of its former trade: “I was like, ‘Why does this office have a floor drain?’” Thankfully, the rest of the building just feels like, well, a regular building. Neighboring tenants include an esthetician and a nail salon, so it can’t be that haunted.

The newly remodeled interior feels deliberately light and open, filled with early evening sun and the happy clink of fast-draining pint glasses. There’s now an expansive patio that wraps around two sides of the building, which already seems like the best place to see and be seen in the summer. It’s slightly elevated, which prevents the bar crowd from spilling out onto the sidewalk, while also placing patrons at about eye level with passersby. And best of all it’s almost completely in the shadow of the building itself, which means no need for precarious umbrellas or strategic shadow hopping.

While the vibes inside skew Southwestern, the food menu is all Central Texas courtesy of a collab with Matt’s BBQ Tacos, the beloved truck offshoot of Matt’s BBQ proper. Barbecue and breakfast tacos aren’t exactly ubiquitous on the West Coast, but they’re basically a dietary staple in Austin, and the examples on offer here can go boot to boot with any there. The concept of a $6 taco does sting a bit, but that’s before a tray arrives piled high with silky guac and hefty strips of glistening sauce-glazed pork belly. The vegetarian offerings are just as substantial, with a smoky mushroom fajita taco that can also be made vegan. There’s a good mix of sides and appetizers too, in particular the waffle fries, which can be ordered either fried in beef fat or vegetable oil.

And speaking of beef fat, there’s the brisket-washed Maker’s Mark Old Fashioned that feels destined to become a cocktail-hour conversation piece. Does brisket tallow pair well with Kentucky bourbon and maple syrup? That’s perhaps best left to the individual palate, but it does lend a smoky campfire quality to a cocktail that already hearkens back to the flavor profiles of a 19th-century saloon.

The rest of the cocktail menu features a good mix of classics and new creations, including a draft espresso martini and mezcal margarita, or the Cowboy Cooler which features Astral blanco tequila and ancho chile liqueur served up in a (glass) cowboy boot. For the perpetually indecisive, there’s a fun section in the back featuring illustrated portraits of the bar staff and their signature shifty. Bartender J-Bird likes a High Life and navy-strength gin on the rocks, for example, or if you want to get fancy, barback Lee says they “dream of a Corpse Reviver #2.”

Caraeff says they’ve been looking to work with Matt’s for a while, but the last bar they opened didn’t quite have the right floor plan for it. “They use these giant 50-foot smokers,” he says, which can be hard to integrate into existing architecture. Caraeff says that Three on a Match has been trying to expand smart rather than fast: “We’ve had a lot of false alarms over the years. We’ve looked at spaces in the suburbs, downtown, all over, nothing’s really made sense.”

So how did they wind up in Sellwood? Facebook Marketplace, actually. “We buy stuff for the bars there, on occasion, and I have this real sweet spot of an algorithm. Haunted puppets, marionettes with one leg, stuff like that.” He says his nightly ritual of cruising the virtual flea market produced an unexpected result: a listing for a section of the 5,500-square-foot property. For Caraeff, who was the music editor for the Portland Mercury when the Woods was in full swing, it was an easy sell. “That was 119 days ago,” he recalls, “so just as quick a turnaround as possible.” That is remarkably fast to put together a bar that feels as polished as this one, but as they say this isn’t exactly their first rodeo: “We’re not totally ready,” Caraeff notes, “but we’re always like, ‘Let’s jump out of the plane, figure out the parachute on the way down.’”

Plan or no plan, it seems to have worked out. Despite an attempt at a soft opening on Friday, July 11, there’s been a line to the door ever since. The bar has enough seating and arrangements for the flow of traffic such that the line moves quickly, but a recent visit at 4 p.m. on Sunday, July 13, might as well have been a Saturday night rush. One of the harried bartenders, in between slinging glass boots full of tequila and taking orders for waffle fries, repeatedly cautions patrons that the slushie machine is operating at about 10 times the recommended capacity and isn’t quite getting the boozy slush quite as set as they’d like. “I literally don’t care,” says a gleeful lady in a floral sun dress, and she orders a pair of mostly-there Panda Coladas with extra ice. “I’m not gonna put ’em on Yelp,” she assures the bartender.

Currently the Last Rodeo is open 4 p.m. to 11 p.m., and Caraeff says the plan is to open earlier as they staff up. There’s no plan to go later though, which probably makes sense with the giant patio and sleepy residential neighborhood nearby. “We’ve got so many great bars on the street,” Caraeff says, “we’re very happy to send people to Kay’s or Limelight or Cosmo,” and notes that the neighborhood as a whole has been “super sweet.”

Sellwood has always had the makings of a great bar crawl street, but it’s still very Old Portland and can be a bit insular as a result. A sad cowboy bar in an old funeral parlor might seem like a risky proposition, but in practice it fits the neighborhood like a well-worn Stetson. Like all neighborhood bars, the final call will come down to the neighbors themselves, but if this past weekend was any indication, Sellwood has decided to sidle up to the rail.

The Last Rodeo is located at 6637 SE Milwaukie Avenue, Portland; open from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m., Thursday to Monday. Minors allowed, if they’re cool and like tacos,’til 9 p.m.