FOOD
BY AARON RAGANFORE
SPIRIT OF ALOHA
McMenamins North Bank opens
Kapu Hut
S
ome things come standard with a McMenamins
dining experience — craft brews, tater tots,
exposed wood beams — but Dan McMenamin, a
second generation co-owner of the business, says
individualism is key to the success of his family’s
empire.
“We try to let each location have its own story, its own
identity,” McMenamin says. The 50-plus restaurants
themselves, he says, “can lead you down the path to what
they want to be.”
Evidently, what McMenamins North Bank wants to be
is something exotic and a bit tongue-in-cheek: a tiki bar.
As of last month, McMenamins has retrofitted the
North Bank’s bar into the Kapu Hut, a cheerful, tropical-
themed watering hole harkening back to the 1950s and
’60s, which McMenamin says he hopes will provide
“serious relief from gloom” in western Oregon weather.
A bamboo canopy has been installed, carved tiki gods
glare from the corners and wooden masks hailing from
Africa, Japan and Papua New Guinea adorn the rattan-
lined walls.
McMenamin says he feels it’s a natural progression. He
cites the Indonesian wood panels lining the walls since his
company adopted the restaurant in 2000, coupled with
views of the Willamette River gracefully snaking past, as
clues that helped him discover North Bank’s spirit of
aloha.
That concept of discovery is central to the new grass-
skirted look. “Kapu” is a Hawaiian word meaning
“forbidden.”
“I like the idea of unexplored parts of the world, things
GARDENING
PHOTO BY KATHLEEN NYBERG
people hadn’t seen or heard of,” McMenamin notes.
“What’s the first thing you want to do when someone says,
‘Don’t go in there?’ The first thought on your mind is, ‘I
wonder what’s in there!’”
Such a romantic ideal for a restaurant’s ambience
represents a welcome variation on Eugene’s sea of sports
bars. No other local pub caters to the “Polynesian pop”
crowd, a subculture particularly popular in other West
Coast cities. McMenamin clearly knows the zeitgeist,
name-checking Portland tiki establishments The Alibi,
Hale Pele and Trader Vic’s.
The varied cocktail menu promisingly identifies the
pedigree of each drink, crafted from the bar’s more than 60
rums. Standouts include the refreshing, tart Jungle Bird,
and a Pisco Sour topped with creamy egg-white foam, a
blank canvas for an Angostura bitters stencil of the bar’s
charming tiki mask logo.
Winners on the fare menu include zesty arancini black
K APU HUT’S BAR
RUNNE TH OVER WITH
MORE TH AN 60 RUMS
rice balls and an inventive pork belly lollipop. Less even
are a well-intentioned but listless pulled pork slider and a
curiously watery version of that tiki cocktail staple, the
Mai Tai.
The Kapu Hut is well on its way toward genuine sultry
splendor, but hard-core tiki fanatics may not find an
immersive nostalgia experience — not yet, at least. Jerry
Garcia posters still peek back at those masks, and some
exotica on the sound system might help set the mood for a
tropical libation exploration.
For now, McMenamin seems comfortable allowing the
bar to grow organically.
“It has a latitudinal type of direction,” he explains.
“We’ll try to hone it more as it goes.”
Appropriate words for a voyage of discovery. Hopefully,
it’s a voyage thirsty Eugeneans will embark upon, as well. ■
Aaron Ragan-Fore writes about popular culture, history, folklore and the arts.
Find him at @aaronraganfore.
BY RACHEL FOSTER
LEARN TO LOVE ’EM!
A shout-out for mahonias
L
ondon’s many squares, parks and gardens are
planted with a good deal of ingenuity and flair,
always with an eye to ease of maintenance and
year-round visual value. I have spent quite a bit of
time there in recent years, mostly in the colder
months, so I have had a chance to observe how much use
is made of woody plants that are especially striking in
winter. They include winter flowering viburnums and trees
and shrubs with distinctive or colorful bark and, of course,
evergreens such as Garrya elliptica (an Oregon native)
with its long, silvery winter catkins.
Most of the evergreens in small-scale
London plantings are broad-leafed
types, not conifers. Perhaps that’s
because conifers, if not slow-growing
dwarfs, would eventually get too big,
and most conifers will not regenerate
when cut back hard, unlike overgrown
broad-leafed shrubs. It’s a loss to skip
the density and fine textures of conifers,
but there are plenty of textures (and
shades of green) available without them.
And there’s plenty of drama to be found
in combining different broad-leafed
plants. In London gardens, contrast in structure, texture
and color often takes priority over winter flowers.
One group of evergreen plants that’s widely used in
London provides both winter flowers and year-round
drama. Mahonias are closely allied with barberries, as the
small yellow flowers attest, but mahonias have compound
leaves. (Some taxonomists want to lump them with the
genus Berberis, but this name change has not stuck yet.)
We have our own native mahonias that we call Oregon
grape, but the largest and most sculptural species come
from Asia.
British gardeners love mahonias much more than
American gardeners do. Personally, I think American gar-
deners should shape up and learn to like them better,
because they can contribute so much to the winter land-
scape. From early fall until mid-spring there’s always a
mahonia in bloom, and some are sweetly fragrant. Because
of their lack of popularity in the U.S. most of the Asian
species can be quite difficult to find, but named cultivars
of Mahonia x media (crosses between
M. japonica and M. lomarifolia) are
readily available and reliably hardy. The
cultivar most frequently encountered is
named “Charity.”
Roger Gossler, who lists Charity and
several other kinds of mahonia in the
Gossler Farms Nursery catalog, has
called Mahonia x media “one of the
greatest groups of plants selected for the
woodland garden in the 20th century.”
Certainly the leaves are at their most
superb in shade, where they may grow
as long as 18 inches. But they will also grow in sun, where
the multi-stemmed plants remain determinedly upright for
many years and bloom heavily. The long spikes of yellow
flowers can be upright, drooping or somewhere in between,
and the buds are conspicuous and decorative long before
they open. Charity blooms in late fall.
Our native mahonias, while less sculptural, are also
well worth growing. The most familiar is tall Oregon grape
Most of the
evergreens in
small-scale London
plantings are
broad-leafed types,
not conifers.
30
NOVEMBER 13, 2014 • EUGENEWEEKLY.COM
(Mahonia aquifolium; Berberis aquifolium), a work horse
of a plant that grows in sun or shade and blooms in time to
provide nectar for early-rising bees and birds when little
else is flowering. The flowers are bright yellow, on stubby
racemes less elegant than those of the Asian mahonias. The
leaves are frequently glossy, and they can take on bur-
gundy hues when exposed to winter sun. Tall Oregon
grape plants are generally multi-stemmed and can get very
tall and gangly. In gardens, they benefit greatly from occa-
sional pruning: stems can be shortened or selectively
removed.
There are a few cultivars of tall Oregon grape. The only
one I know of in this country is named compact Oregon
grape (Mahonia aquifolium “Compacta”), a very useful
plant for filling narrow, dry borders. It runs moderately
and grows to about 3 feet. On roughly the same scale is
Cascade Oregon grape (Mahonia nervosa), also known as
longleaf Oregon grape. It is sometimes tricky to establish,
but it has the loveliest leaves among the native species,
especially in shade. It is usually under 2 feet tall, but can
grow taller in many years. It blooms significantly later
than M. aquifolium, with flowers of a lighter yellow that
are more gracefully displayed.
Lastly, there is creeping Oregon grape (Mahonia
repens), which makes a great ground cover and is quite
satisfactory in full sun where it will take on deep red tones
in winter. Some clones have shiny leaves, some matte. I
had always thought of this as a very low-growing plant,
until a friend showed me some well-fed specimens that
were at least 2 feet tall. ■
Rachel Foster of Eugene is a writer and garden consultant. She can be reached at
rfoster@efn.org.