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Bar of the Week: Kiknbaque Lounge

Easygoing spot shows off all of city’s colors

BY ERIC BARTELS

The Portland Tribune, Oct 12, 2007

JIM CLARK / TRIBUNE PHOTO

At Dale Villar’s Kiknbaque Lounge, the crowd is as varied as the drink choices.

Late last Friday night, at Billy Ray’s Neighborhood Dive in Northeast Portland, two Indiana natives were comparing notes. At one point, they began repeating that familiar rant about how ethnically homogenous Portland is.

It can be annoying. And it certainly seems dismissive of the nearly 150,000 nonwhite people who live in Portland.

Besides, these guys would only have had to go a few blocks up Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard for the multicultural experience they were missing.

When Dale Villar opened the Kiknbaque Lounge (Get it? Like “kickin’ back”?), his goal was to create a vibrant nightspot that welcomed folks from all points along Portland’s cultural spectrum.

Villar is a 32-year-old Portland native who graduated from Cleveland High School before venturing off to the Filipino homeland of his mother and father, where he enjoyed a surprising run as a TV star.

Now, combining his highly social nature with his family’s mastery of traditional Filipino cooking (try the meatballs), he is running a place that reflects the cultural mix of the Portland neighborhood where he grew up and the warmth of his own close-knit clan. It’s a sort of spicy, multihued Cheers.

“When we opened, we had a gay manager, a black doorman, a lesbian bartender,” he says. “You couldn’t say it was an ‘X’ bar.”

More than a year later, it’s all working out nicely.

At 11 p.m. last Friday, the place was in full swing. The club’s booming sound system was mostly relying on current, heavy-rotation dance hits. Two sets of 20-something white girls held down tables near the back, while a mix that included some young Latinas hung out by the pool table up front.

As the music began to diversify – some vintage Michael Jackson, a little Hendrix, a Kool and the Gang classic – the crowd grew more mixed as well.

There was a table of elegant young South Asian women. Two homeboys with gold teeth and oversize necklaces appeared. A 6-foot-plus transvestite made a quick cameo. Later came two white dudes in short-sleeve T-shirts, one in a trucker cap, and a punky girl with a severe haircut.

The Kiknbaque still has some kinks to work out. The bathrooms look like a typhoon just came through, and security hasn’t always been a picnic.

But as Villar works the house with his seemingly endless energy and boyish charm, he makes it look like maybe we can all just get along.

– Eric Bartels

3536 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 503-282-1833, www.kiknbaque.com, 4 p.m. to 2:15 a.m. daily

A Great American Bar: The Kiknbaque Lounge

I like karaoke a lot. I'm not a cultist like some, but I'm a pretty regular singer of Ozzy or Twisted Sister, enough to know that a lot of karaoke bars are the same. There are some booths. You stand on a little stage. But one place in Portland has a truly unique karaoke experience.

Singing at the Kiknbaque is kind of like busking on a crowded subway. You are not the center of attention. There is no stage. You walk amongst the patrons with a wireless microphone. And the patrons are actually diverse enough to roughly equate the contents of a subway car. In fact, Ben Moral, who is a Kiknbaque regular, will tell you it's "the most diverse crowd in Portland." It was that comment that inspired this story.

Full text from the Oregonian:

At the Kiknbaque the rainbow rules

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Jason Simms

Special to The Oregonian

The Kiknbaque Lounge is clean, but the blue lights are dim enough to hide anything broken. In the air, smoke swirls with the scent of expensive cologne. Patrons play pool and video poker, drink cognac and San Miguel.

And that's the point. The watering hole at 3536 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., run by a Filipino former film star, just might be the most diverse bar in town.

The music oscillates among country, hip-hop, rock and live jazz. There's comedy. Spoken word. Karaoke. And a gay-friendly dance binge. Patrons come in all colors.

Though the music mix drives away some customers, it pulls in the good ones, says Dale Acelar, the movie-star-turned-manager, who plans to buy the Kiknbaque in August. "If they're willing to wait to hear the music they want to hear," he says, "then they're going to accept other cultures."

Acelar, who became manager in August 2006 and promptly rebranded the space formerly known as Chances, says it would have been easy to make money catering to "young people wanting to hear hip-hop." But he had another goal: "I wanted to get close to the people who walked in the door."

His approach comes from his experience acting in films and on TV in the Philippines in the 1990s and early this decade. "It was so superficial," says Acelar, 33, who worked under the name Dale Villar. "No matter what I did, they only saw me as a face. It didn't really matter what I thought about anything."

So Acelar hung his own abstract canvases on the black walls and set out to make what owner Shawn Bargouti calls "a true cross-section of Northeast Portland."

Once, while hosting a punk band, Acelar found himself running after regulars who took one look and left. He offered to buy them drinks; he does the same to encourage ethnic diversity.

"If four white kids see 30 to 40 black people in a bar, they're gonna walk away," he says. "But the idea is: Why should they?"

While the strategy may sell fewer drinks, it pays off in other ways. Acelar met his fiancee at the Kiknbaque (they had a son in November) and has built a loyal staff from among customers.

Gerald Morrison, 43, is an umpire and baseball coach who used to come in after games. Now he works alongside Tawana "Love" Rasheed, an eight-year resident of the neighborhood who often joins customers in karaoke -- whether she knows the song or not.

"I've made a lot of friends here I never would have made anywhere else," she says.

Marlena Lincoln was training behind the bar last month just two weeks after celebrating her 21st birthday at the Kiknbaque. She'd kept coming back, trekking from her distant Argay neighborhood. "I don't mind coming by myself," she says. "I talk to everyone here."

Thai Gay, 30, a neighborhood resident who just discovered what she calls the Kickin-it-back, describes her first visit: "The crowd was upbeat. Everybody was talking, mingling."

The Kiknbaque hasn't been without challenges, though. Because many nearby clubs close at 1:30 a.m., the Kiknbaque would often see a surge of intoxicated patrons at the end of the night. Oregon Liquor Control Commission inspector Steve Bainbridge links violence in the area to those late-night customers. Though the bar hasn't had a major incident, he says, "there have been some close calls."

So last month, Acelar voluntarily started closing at 1:30 a.m. He also won't hesitate to turn on the lights to stop an argument or retrieve a lost phone. One night, he ejected a man who had been elbowing and kicking the chairs of a group of women new to the bar.

Now two of them, Louie Jones and Katie Pattison, host the bimonthly "Oh Snap!" gay-friendly night at the Kiknbaque.

"The regulars were a little bit scared," says Jones. "They didn't know if they could come in or not. But it was awesome. They started dancing and hung out with us."

Kickin' it Entertainment keeps patrons coming back. Free unless noted. Learn more at kiknbaque.com

Thursday, June 19, 2008

The Oregonian