Portland Neighborhood Guide: Nob Hill

In an e-commerce world, Nob Hill can still sustain a full day of IRL shopping. Kitsch and thrift stores, shmancy retail outposts, and enough cafés and restaurants to fuel even the most ambitious quests line NW 23rd and 21st Avenues, the neighborhood’s dual main drags. And while Nob Hill is officially lumped into the sprawling Northwest District, this tree-lined rectangle between the Pearl and the West Hills, stretching from West Burnside to the start of the industrial zone, feels very much like a distinct pocket of the city, official geography be damned. Early Portlander Capt. John Couch—of Couch Street fame—took the first land claim in the neighborhood in the 1840s. Named after San Francisco’s luxury district, Nob Hill has its posh stretches today, but it also holds the tangle of grit and soul and glitz usually reserved for larger cities. There’s a taxidermy shop and a “peculiarium” (an oddities museum) called Freakybuttrue, but also an Aesop and a Pottery Barn. Boutiques fill converted houses that abut century-old apartment buildings; new commercial and residential buildings sprout like weeds between beautiful relics of Victorian and Colonial Revival architecture.

Culinary institutions and Old Portland holdouts make up its bones. RingSide Steakhouse anchors the southern border, serving the legendary onion rings James Beard himself once praised. Papa Haydn remains a standby for celebratory slices of cake, while the refreshingly unrefined Coffee Time (ask your born-and-raised friends) still hosts artsy teens devouring A People’s History of the United States. Stiffer drinks slide across the bar at a handful of dives, Joe’s Cellar being the crown jewel among them. But the neighborhood’s magic comes from its evolving mix of old and new. St. Jack, arguably the city’s only legitimate French bistro, has pumped out textbook marrow bones and steak frites for the past decade; newer still, Scottie’s Pizza serves one of the best slices in town. Retail is similarly varied and concentrated to NW 23rd’s south end. Urban Outfitters, Levi’s, Arc’teryx, and On Running weave into a mass of thrift stores and vintage shops—Crossroads, Visii, Northwest Union, Ratstar, and William Temple House—plus boutiques like Sloan, Marine Layer, and Title Nine.

Once you’ve had your fill, the perfect denouement to a day of consumerist self-care and well-earned gluttony is an early-evening flick at beloved art house theater Cinema 21.