god you people who gave bad reviews are dumb. they bartenders and staff are always pleasant and nice to look at. come on. plus, whoever thinks that just because you've entered the legal age of drinking means you get a free drink is stupid. your friends should be buying you drinks, not the bartender. jesus. rontoms is awesome and the food is good. nuff said. there are some pretentious folks that frequent there, but this IS portland which is predominantly made up of upper/middle class raised hipsters, so why are you complaining? get used to it.

plus there's ping pong! although, could you guys keep it down in the summer for the apartment dwellers upstairs? kthx :]

more beers on tap would be nice for sure!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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!

:)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!!!

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.

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.

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)!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.