You know how there are just some days when things are just absolutely crazy: you’re swamped with work at the office, you’ve overcommitted to social activities, you’re constantly on the phone with your realtor, you’re wrecked from yesterday’s 6-mile trail race that you most definitely did not even train for but somehow fumbled through, and gosh darn it, all you need is a drink already!?! Nope? Just me?

Well, in any case, thank god for the Little Green Pickle and the Bent Brick:
Every so often, I’m lucky enough to get invited to an event hosted by the Little Green Pickle. The Little Green Pickle is a PR and media relations firm that specializes in food. They represent some of the best restaurants in town and often invite local food bloggers around the area to come gather, eat, and drink at their client’s restaurants.

Somehow Frances at the Little Green Pickle must’ve had some weird intuition that this was going to be one of my more hellish weeks when she invited me to this happy hour nearly a month ago. A little pick-me-up cocktail after work was exactly what I needed. I was especially excited about the Bent Brick since it’s literally only six blocks away from my office — my coworkers and I have been looking for a good place around the area for happy hour sometime now and I wanted to scope the Bent Brick out for the team. And oh boy, it did not disappoint:

My first drink was called “Seeing Things Clearly” and filled with all sorts of delicious stuff like vodka, honey, rhubarb liqueur, and chamomile bitters — basically, all my favorite flavors. It was really refreshing and a great springtime drink. Thanks to Carrie from Little Green Pickle for the awesome hand modeling in the top picture (though I’m not actually quite sure if she knew I was taking pictures of her hand like a creeper).

My second drink, “Peet and Pete” was a little bit more heavy and true to the whiskey drinking gal that I am:

Filled with whiskey, bourbon, orange bitters and some other fancy thing I don’t quite know, it had a great woody and smoky taste. Definitely a drink for the grown-ups. Loved the frosted glass, especially in this crazy warm weather Portland’s been having.

And this being a Little Green Pickle event, Carrie ordered everything off the happy hour menu so we could eat snacks with our libations. I was super excited to try their food menu since I’d recently attended a wine-tasting at their sister restaurant Park Kitchen and was duly impressed by the wine AND the food. While Park Kitchen was a little bit out of my price range and a tad too formal for me to just stop by spontaneously, the Bent Brick was more up my alley: German-style favorites with an American twist.

But what does that mean, exactly?

Hot dogs. Yep, one of my favorite foods… is that lame of me to say that? I feel like food bloggers are supposed to be into foie gras or something. No matter, give me a hot dog and I’m happy. Especially an awesome tasting hotdog like that one you see in the picture. Apparently the Bent Brick makes all their sausages in house, so I know that no awful things like hooves and entrails are in the meat. Double thumbs up for that, because the only thing that keeps me from eating a hot dog a day is the sketchy meat quality. No, really. Now you all know how gross I am.

Other favorites of mine from the menu included smoked salmon chips:

They’re like shrimp chips from your favorite Asian restaurant, but made with smoked salmon instead. Never had anything like them anywhere else. Amazeballs. Seriously.

I also really enjoyed these things, despite not having any idea what they are (sorry, I may or may not have been tipsy at this point):

They might be steelhead roe tea sandwiches, but Carrie or Frances can keep me honest on that one. I’ll update once I know.

So, the big question here is: would I recommend this place to my coworkers for cocktails and happy hour after a hard day’s work? Oh heck yeah! I’d even recommend it to them without the hard day’s worth of work behind us. So Bent Brick, be warned — expect a ton of Puppet Labs engineers at your patios soon.

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