Laurelhurst
Laurelhurst is the default hoen lunch venue of the Newfound Glory Hole — the establishment most frequently invoked in chat consensus, generally without further descriptors.
Laurelhurst
Laurelhurst is the default lunchtime venue of the Newfound Glory Hole. While the chat rotates between several inner Northeast Portland establishments, the bare word "laurelhurst" — lowercase, no article, no further description — is by convention understood to refer to a specific bar in that neighborhood and to function as a verb ("to laurelhurst") when used in hoen lunch negotiations. The corpus contains 160 Laurelhurst citations spanning 2021-01-25 → 2026-05-13, making it by some distance the most-cited single venue in the chat's history.
Origins
The earliest mention is by Cullen Conway on January 25, 2021: "Sounds like some shit just went down in laurelhurst." By that spring Evan Bbbender is already proposing it as a weather-contingent destination ("Laurelhurst if weathers good?" — February 25, 2021), and the bar has appeared in the chat's hoen rotation in every subsequent year.
Status as default
On February 27, 2026, Matt asks the group: "What are you thinking? Classic laurelhurst?" — establishing in five words the convention that "laurelhurst" is the no-decision-required option. Evan Bbbender confirms with "Yeah I think laurelhurst or blutos," placing Laurelhurst in the pole position of the two-bar shortlist. The construction "a classic laurelhurst" recurs throughout the corpus, often deployed as a tiebreaker:
"Maybe a classic laurelhurst to keep it easy." — Evan Bbbender, April 16, 2026
"Something casual, a laurelhurst?" — Evan Bbbender, May 13, 2026
Notable Laurelhurst sessions
- March 16, 2026 — Evan Bbbender: "Laurelhurst is lit."
- March 20, 2026 — Evan Bbbender: "Left some goodies for the homies at laurelhurst."
- April 7, 2026 — Matt: "Not sure what that is but I noticed it was top billing @ Laurelhurst this weekend."
- April 18, 2026 — Evan Bbbender (repeating himself): "Laurelhurst is lit."
The phrase "Laurelhurst is lit" has, by virtue of repetition, achieved the status of a stock formula; it is the chat's lowest-stakes affirmation, comparable to "sounds good" in older codices.
Reservation observations
Kyle Derrick noted on February 19, 2026 that "645 at laurelhurst is like 90% available", a fact later cited as evidence that the chat could in fact book the place if it wanted to, and that any failure to do so was a moral, not a logistical, problem.