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Reelin’ in fried chicken

March 05, 2010

by Evan Tenenbaum

As we pulled up to the dingy looking bar, my friend stared out the window at the two dirty, piss-drunk old guys chain-smoking cigarettes outside the front door.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if we were going in there?” he asked, chuckling.

“We are,” I said.

Walking into the Reel ’m Inn Bar and Tavern on SE Division St. is like walking through a time warp, back to a time when Southeast Portland was a little less hip, Portland was a little more grimy, and Lewis & Clark was probably a lot more fun.

The bar almost seems to have multiple personality disorder, with old fishing gear hanging from the rafters next to framed football jerseys and flat screen TVs flashing basketball scores. The beer selection is the pits, the carpet is sticky, the old bar-flies insist on listening to some pretty scarring jukebox music, and the bathroom has more offending graffiti than the upper bathroom in Watzek. Sounds like just the type of spot you would want to order a bunch of food in, right? Right.

Two words, my friends: chicken and jo-jos (well, three words, or four with no hyphen). This place has some of the best fried chicken and jo-jos (deep fried potato wedges) in the city, and DEFINITELY the biggest. The pictures don’t really do the meal justice. For $7.25 you can get a breast the size of a football, a thigh the size of a hockey puck and a chicken wing the size of Colin Hamilton’s Chief Justice “gavel.” All of this, in addition to at least a couple of pounds worth of jo-jos. One meal is easily split between two people, unless you both can’t compromise on which of the six sauces to drench the jo-jos in.

The food is definitely not quick. The bartender is the cook, and the kitchen is literally a deep fryer behind the bar. The plus side of the wait is that if you get there on a night when Mama Gina is working the bar, she will entertain the hell out of you until your chicken is fried to perfection. With just as much flavor as the food and as much heat as the fryer, she is the cherry on top of the chicken and jo-jos experience.

Others may claim that restaurants such as The Screen Door or Cat’s Corner have better quality chicken, and they may be right. But when you combine the size, price, and overall ridiculous ambiance of the meal, the Reel ’m Inn is the clear P-town leader in terms of giving drunkards their cholesterol fix. Now, I write all this with some hesitation. There’s limited seating in this joint, and huge groups of stoned underage college students might not be so appreciated. So a few words of advice: Go in small groups, be nice to Mama Gina, don’t lose too much money at video poker and make sure not to burn your mouth on the jo-jos. They’re really hot.