Honorable Mention sits in the basement of the Benson Hotel on Southwest Broadway, and it arrived in March 2026 as the most talked-about sports room downtown Portland has opened in years. The ownership group includes Trail Blazers guard Damian Lillard, and KGW called it the city's first true luxury sports lounge.
The address is 309 Southwest Broadway, inside the 1913 Benson Hotel, in the space that held the London Grill for decades. The lounge opened on March 6, 2026, and the local press turned out for it: the Portland Mercury, KOIN, KATU and Willamette Week all filed first looks within two weeks of the doors opening.
The design leans away from the standard sports-bar template. The owners describe the look as Victorian-inspired elegance set against an open-concept floor, which fits the bones of a century-old hotel grill room better than neon and vinyl booths would. Screens carry the night's games, and the room is built to watch a Blazers tip-off without giving up the feel of a proper downtown lounge.
What to order leans on the kitchen as much as the bar. Willamette Week's review ran under the line that the real most-valuable player is the food, a pointed note for a category that usually stops at wings. The drinks list runs to cocktails rather than only buckets of domestic beer, in keeping with the upscale framing the ownership group set out from day one.
The Lillard connection is the hook, and it is more than a name on the lease. KATU reported that the Blazers guard joined the Urban Restaurant Group to launch the lounge, tying a downtown room to the player most associated with the franchise. For Portland sports fans, that pairing of a marquee local athlete with a hotel-basement lounge is the reason the opening drew the coverage it did.
The room works best on a game night, when the screens earn their keep and the crowd skews toward fans who want a seat, a cocktail and a clear sightline rather than a packed standing rail. Weeknights without a marquee matchup settle into a quieter hotel-lounge rhythm, which suits anyone after a drink near Pioneer Courthouse Square without the roar.
The crowd is a downtown mix of Benson Hotel guests, after-work office workers and Blazers supporters, and it thickens on nights the team plays. Reservations are worth making for big games, since the lounge is a finite basement room rather than a sprawling multi-floor sports hall.
The appeal is the combination Portland did not have: a serious game-day room with a kitchen and bar program built to match, in a historic downtown hotel, backed by the city's best-known basketball name. For more of the city, see the guide to the best bars in Portland and the roundup of sports bars in Portland. For the wider category, browse the sports bars pillar.
