Restaurant’s identity is a big whatever

• Powell strip mall eatery’s lights are on; where is everybody?

By Jacob Quinn Sanders

The Portland Tribune, Jul 27, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

You can’t really say something is hidden when it has a big illuminated sign on one of Southeast Portland’s busiest streets.

Right?

Hence the conundrum with Husky or Maltese Whatever, a restaurant at Southeast Powell Boulevard and 36th Avenue in the Powell Center strip mall. It has a current license Ñ and has for a year and a half Ñ although it never seems open. Phone calls to the number listed on the sign go unanswered. Inside, the tables are set and clean, the sandwich board looks ready to use, and the electricity is clearly on.

But most important: What the heck is with that name?

“I suggest that solving the mystery could very well leave us spiritually impoverished, that in fact Husky or Maltese Whatever could very well be some kind of celebration of cultural ambiguity, the harbinger of a trend I’m ready to call Post-Millennial Murk,” wrote Ronnie Cordova of Southeast Portland in an e-mail. “Embrace it!”

Cordova writes an online journal called Sublethal and thus is responsible for at least a small bit of neighborhood curiosity on this matter.

His original post July 10 might as well have been streaming video of him tearing his hair out.

“If you know what it could possibly mean or signify I implore you to tell me É” he wrote at Sublethal.net.

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit