Rontoms

600 E Burnside St. Portland, OR 97214
Phone: (503) 236.4536

Located in: Southeast Portland & near Northeast Portland - Visit Website
horns upWiFipatioWheelchair Accessiblelate foodnon smokinghappy hourhipstersSmokingliquor
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BarFly's Review of Rontoms

The vintage rumpus room vibe is the draw here, with garage-sale chairs and sofas creating little islands of conversation that help to offset the impersonal warehouse ambience. Rontoms is best suited to boisterous groups, since the bar iPod is usually cranked on the weekends, effectively squelching conversational nuance. Plenty of homegrown hootch on the drink menu (Aviation Gin, Clear Creek Brandy and New Deal Vodka, among others) and the bar staff is friendly and competent. Dig into a grilled cheese sandwich and zesty tomato soup combo during Happy Hour, or just clog your arteries entirely with a pot of cheese fondue, then burn the calories off playing ping-pong on the expansive patio (partially covered with fire pit for smokers.) There is no sign out front, so keep your eyes peeled for the elusive front door.

Open from 4:00pm until close
Movie night every Sunday

Rontoms's Happy Hours
Monday$2+ beers, $3+ wells, $4 food 4:30-6:30pm
Tuesday$2+ beers, $3+ wells, $4 food 4:30-6:30pm
Wednesday$2+ beers, $3+ wells, $4 food 4:30-6:30pm
Thursday$2+ beers, $3+ wells, $4 food 4:30-6:30pm
Friday$2+ beers, $3+ wells, $4 food 4:30-6:30pm
SaturdayAlas, no happy hour today.
SundayAlas, no happy hour today.
Reader Reviews of Rontoms
$2 freakin' Lowenbraus!!

We hit Rontoms for a look-see. Huge room, kinda lost in a nineties chessy club thing but comfortable enough. Then I look at the beer menu and see two-dollar Lowenbrau bottles! Everyday! I almost cried tears of joy! Forget that PBR swill, grab a couch and lets toss a few back. I've become a fan.

Reviewed Anonymously by DOGBOY on September 30, 2009, 7:14 pm
Re: barlady

Perhaps you should take some spelling lessons so that Portland can accept your misspelling of you're. Who's the idiot here?

Reviewed By BarFly User Strack on September 15, 2009, 2:32 pm
RE: Noonchester

Your an idiot and you set the world back a few decades. Portland is about acceptance if you didn't get the obvious memo.

Reviewed Anonymously by barlady on September 14, 2009, 4:45 pm
bad experience

We went here to have a going-away happy hour for a european coworker. He had been served at a number of other bars in Portland using his international driver's license and a copy of his passport as ID, but was refused service here by our crappy waitress. Five minutes after refusing him service, she came back and asked him to leave the bar citing his lack of appropriate ID. Aside from this incident, we were given some serious attitude by the waitress due to someone mispronouncing a drink name because they spoke english as a second language. She was generally impatient and pushy with us, going so far as to fail to ask a new arrival at the table if they wanted a drink and arguing with us when we were unhappy with the food we were served. This bar's happy hour is not worth the attitude that the servers dish out.

Reviewed Anonymously by squilto on September 11, 2009, 8:09 pm
Go away Fratty Frats

I like this place most of the time but on Friday and Saturday nights after 10pm it gets invaded by Fratty Frats from the suburbs or douches from the Pearl. Eastsiders say go away and quit cramping our style.

Peace out.

Reviewed Anonymously by Noonchester on August 7, 2009, 6:25 pm
cool place-rude female bartenders

This place was cool. Loved the ping pong in the back. However, it's pretty rude to not give out a free drink to someone on their 21st birthday...It only happens once people! And if that is not possible, smiling might be a nice thing to learn. You might actually get a tip next time.

Reviewed Anonymously by mh2788 on July 31, 2009, 4:53 pm
GOOD FOR ME GOOD FOR YOU

Rontom's is a great bar. Straight up. Ron is a cool motherfucker first of all. And the staff have genuine character and are nice to talk to. If you get some sort of weird "hipster" vibe from the staff, then it's probably because you're a hipster or a drunk asshole. Which are usually one in the same. They are nice people. But don't try to make your bartenders your best fwend. Just be real. Have fun. Good drinks, good food. Service is pretty good, but if you want a platter of grapes, get it yourself. Nice fires. Huge patio. Watch out on the weekends, it can be just as packed as it is downtown,...with similar fuckheads.

Reviewed By BarFly User RonaldMegan on December 26, 2008, 3:47 pm
awesome!

I can't believe there is so much negative talk about this place!? I have had nothing but a great time everytime I've been there and the house is ALWAYS packed!! Apparently SOME people like it....

Reviewed Anonymously by chuck nasty on December 6, 2008, 11:00 am
a wash

Rontoms was really really neat. Initially. Although they've always played their music too loud. Music in a place is not entertainment for the employees. It should be loud enough that people can't overhear conversations more than 5-6 feet away (not 1 foot), so as to perpetuate some semblance of privacy in an otherwise crowded, open room. Whether it happens to be muzak or the best new song ever, that's what it should do.

Anyway, I used to go there all the time when they opened because they were extraordinary. Great food, good drinks, decent service, cool venue.

Gradually, though, people realized how cool the place was, and the service took a serious hit. Sometimes I wonder there is a special staffing agency that supplies apathetic waitstaff to the restaurants in the city of Portland.

The end result is that while the place is cool on the inside and the food and drinks are good, it's overrun and the service is usually pretty bad. The last time I went there, I waited 45 minutes for a fucking sandwich. When I *got up* and asked about it, it turned out it had been completely forgotten about, and not only that, they were out of some ingredient to make it. And it wasn't even busy.

SO. Sorry, Rontoms. I know you're making money, but this grumpy old man isn't onboard any more.

Reviewed By BarFly User Wizzlepig on October 14, 2008, 4:36 pm
Service Fucking Sucks

Cool bar, decent drinks/food...but the service. UGH!

Seriously, this bar is typical Portland...shitty service from a half-baked hipster who thinks they are better than you...too bad really cuz this bar is pretty cool...spacious warehouse right off E Burnside. Perhaps the owner should stop hiring his slacker friends and inject a bit of professionalism? But then again, this would only invite the bridge/tunnel rats and turn the place from tolerable to shit...SIGH, THE DILEMMA! THE DRAMA!

:)

Reviewed By BarFly User Lococito on September 30, 2008, 10:34 am
god place, service sucks

Very nice place inside and outside. but it definetly gets crowded on the weekends with lots of hipsters that think they are better then you. The bartenders are kinda cocks and you gotta wait forever to even get there attention but all in all i like going to the place.

Reviewed Anonymously by ariel on September 27, 2008, 6:09 pm
Rontoms is my late night American Apparel

The point is, regardless of the fact that the staff think they're better than me because I'm buying the drink rather than serving it, its not gonna change the fact that I look fucking cool in it. (At least thats what I like to think when I'm drunk at 2am with a mouth full of swedish meatballs) Cin-cin!

Reviewed By BarFly User frankandstein on September 23, 2008, 6:29 pm
Service?! Where?

Usually we suffer through mediocre service at Ron Tom's (it being close to work and having good ambiance). Last night really took the cake. While we dragged through three long parched hours, our waitress appeared ooooh, maybe three times. My beers tasted strongly of the coagulated smog in their dirty taps, the waitress brought out the wrong food order and insisted she'd brought the right one, offered a discount which she did not give on it, tried to charge me for an extra beer (as if the dirty two weren't enough), and generally ignored us even though the place was empty and we were polite to her.

Reviewed Anonymously by LJ on September 23, 2008, 9:19 am
Big

This might be the largest bar in town. The patio has scrubland around it.

Not a bad place, really. It's hard sometimes to separate the clientele from the bar itself, and yeah there's some douchey content here. But the service hasn't been so bad in my few visits and the drinks are good.

Reviewed By BarFly User Totalnerd on August 3, 2008, 10:05 am
it's okaaaay...

Love the decor, the patio and the location... the drinks and food are decent and I love that they serve local liquor, but the service is CRAPPY... which almost makes it not worth going to. A group of 6 of us stopped for happy hour one evening and there were maybe 10 people in the whole place - including the wait staff. We waited for 15 minutes for someone to come take our drink order. Then Dude only came by once to check on us during the hour-and-a-half we were there. Not to mention, they cranked the music so loud that we could barely hear each other across the table. This could be a rockin' place... my advice: lose the 'tude or hire servers who actually ENJOY people to run your bar!!!

Reviewed Anonymously by super v on July 18, 2008, 3:07 pm
not so great

i got the happy hour caesar salad and boy did it suck... $4 for a tiny, limp pile of salad. i won't make that mistake again.

Reviewed Anonymously by andrew on July 2, 2008, 6:22 pm
Not so bad

I met some folks there for happy hour (there idea, not mine). After reading reviews here, I was pretty sure I was going to hate the place. While there was some sort of hipster-friendly-emo-style-douche music playing, the place seemed okay otherwise. The server was nice, and drinks were strong and fairly priced.

I haven't been there during peak hours, but for happy hour, it's actually alright.

Reviewed By BarFly User foil on May 27, 2008, 10:54 am
Long Island

I ordered two long islands tonight. The first tasted okay. The second tasted disgusting. When I asked the bartender what that extra flavor was, he said it was a "standard long island." He then said that he put whiskey in his standard long islands. When I told him that there is no whiskey in a long island, he condescendingly insisted that I was wrong, even though I know this beverage like a best friend. I also found out that the first long island made by another bartender, though it didn't have whiskey, was missing the shot of tequila that is in the recipe for a long island. So it was a shot short of the drink I paid for. If they're going to charge $8.50 for the drink, they should learn how to make it. And never put whiskey in a long island unless you're trying to make someone puke. I couldn't even finish the drink (and that says something)!

Reviewed Anonymously by Ez on April 14, 2008, 12:58 am
Hipster Dillweeds.

I showed up at this place at about 10pm on a sat night for a friends b-day get together. First impression; I loved the decor and ambiance. You can't smoke but they have a pretty nice patio to accomidate us smokers. Several of my friends had ordered some food and said it took a while to get it but it was pretty tasty. However, there was nowhere to sit and the whole place was packed to the gills with obnoxious-ass pretentious hipster a-holes, and their vapid little sqwacking hos. I could only stand it for like a half an hour. Maybe it's not always like this. Maybe there was a convention in town, I don't know. But it was enough to keep me from wanting to going back.

Reviewed By BarFly User ky on March 19, 2008, 4:51 pm
Yes, sit at the bar

I've been here twice in the last month or so and enjoyed it quite a bit. Nice atmosphere, good drinks... Of course we sat at the bar both times so our service may have been better?

I like the set-up, place seems clean and well-maintained...I imagine the huge deck out back would be pretty nice spring/summer.

Reviewed By BarFly User beav on November 19, 2007, 11:39 am
Service Sucks

My wife and I stumbled in to Rontoms tonight and had a poor excuse for beef stroganoff for dinner and a couple of drinks. Our waiter brought us one drink and never came back, we got a second round after dinner with our desert. Our waiter had the personality of Paris Hilton, but at least he thought he was cool. We recommend the chocolate chip bread pudding, it's very tasty, and we really liked the atmosphere, a very contemporary take on an old wherehouse with a sweet log burninng fireplace. I would never take anyone there for the food, but drinks at the bar maybe ok if you don't mind waiting to get served.

Reviewed Anonymously by DeadlyNightshade on November 17, 2007, 8:46 pm
to cool for a name

The service was bad. Took our order, gave our order. That is the extent of our attention from the server. Never came back to see if we needed another drink before we had to chase her down for our ticket. Even as we approached her at the bar, she made obvious attempts to not make eye contact with us.

Reviewed Anonymously by jessi on November 1, 2007, 4:15 am
Sevice bites

I went to Rontoms on a Saturday night, and with hardly a person in the place no servers came to the table to take an order. So, nearly 10 minutes later I went to the bar and stood waiting for several minutes while 3 bartenders stood around doing nothing until 2 other people who couldn't get service at a table came up and were acknowledged by a bartender after waiting for a few minutes. A couple of minutes later another of the bartenders asked "who's next?" All this for average drinks, and a pretentious vibe- who the hell has black drink menus in a dimly lit club?

Reviewed Anonymously by Al on September 2, 2007, 12:07 pm
Beautiful Soup!

I had the tomato soup and sandwiches, which apparently is their claim to fame, since this is the third time I've heard how damn good that item is--well, fourth, if you count me telling myself, "This soup is fucking awesome!" (Can I say "fucking" when I'm writing a review? I hope so, because I just said it.)

I thought the staff was friendly enough...and I think the drinks were priced well. Will definately be going back there when I'm in that part of town.

Reviewed By BarFly User PrincessHikaru on April 19, 2007, 11:39 pm
damn good place

Rontoms is an absolutely amazing space- great furniture, nice lighting, open patio and of course, the easy on the eyes waitstaff. Not only are they gorgeous and witty, but they provide perfectly attentive service without being annoying. They have an array of liquor and good wine to satisfy your libation desire.

Reviewed Anonymously by Kaila on April 19, 2007, 12:37 pm
BAD Service

There were - Maybe - five people in the place and we sat at the bar and waited 10 whole minutes to be served! The three, albeit hot, dumbheads behind the bar were just f'ing around and took their sweet time to even acknowledge us. We were sitting less then five feet away from them! So we took our drinks to a table and watched as everyone in the place sat waiting to get a drink refill, when we decided to go next store to the Bside. At the Bside friends knew all too well how bad the service was at Rontom, I was preaching to the choir.

Reviewed Anonymously by JJ drinkie pooh on April 14, 2007, 6:02 pm
It's good

I like Ron. I like patios. Rontom's has a big one. The bartender is cocky. I hear he's a model. They get like that. The food is good. I like the caeser dressing. I like the grilled cheese and tomato soup. All 3 make for a tasty little meal. I wish they had more beers on tap.

Reviewed By BarFly User AmyJean on April 12, 2007, 12:12 pm
A-OK!

I was with the reviewer the night he visited, and had to suffer through the horrid death metal that was deafening the entirely disinterested crowd. I've been back many times, and have since heard only cool tunes coming from the BTs' iPods. So give 'em a break there.

The servers are friendly (rare!) and cute (a bonus), the deliberately retro food (braunschweiger paté, devilled eggs, etc.) are tasty enough, the fürni is cool (and definitely not garage sale quality or aesthetic), the mixed crowd generally friendly and non-obnoxious, and I don't find the place "wearhousey" at all--a large, wide-open space is fine when the furniture is properly arranged, as it is.

Reviewed Anonymously by Aitch on February 8, 2007, 3:44 pm
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