Quick Take:

Spring menus are popping up across Lane County, full of the green (and red, and purple, and orange) bounty of the season. Party Bar’s new burger special — grassfed patty, pickled green garlic, arugula, lemon allium aioli and a schmear of soft sheep’s milk on a housemade brioche bun — promises to be so springy that, “you’ll be sprung!”

Party Bar is always on the seasonal eats train. 

There was the downtown Eugene restaurant’s eggplant parm burger last fall. Then, it was the New Year’s Eve burger with truffles prepared three ways, the handheld version of a champagne toast. And the Doritos locos special (OK, that one was less seasonal and more a fun way to draw people in. It worked.)

Right now, Party Bar is serving Pacific Northwest spring in burger form ($20). It’s not the typical medium for showcasing a season as light as a pea sprout, but it works.

Let’s start with the soft sheep’s milk cheese, what my co-worker, arts and culture correspondent Annie Aguiar, called “goat cheese’s creamier cousin.” Because it’s higher in fat, it’s also less tangy and crumbly, with buttery notes that complement the (also buttery) grass-fed beef. The patty’s juices will drip down the sides of your pinky fingers, and you’ll get a luscious glob of arugula-packed cheese with every bite.

The pickled green garlic deserves its own paragraph. It cuts through the fatty burger and cheese like freshly mowed grass and is more mellow than mature garlic, yet sharp from the pickle. 

A cross-section of Party Bar’s spring burger special reveals a medium-rare patty and locally grown greens. Credit: Taylor Goebel / Lookout Eugene-Springfield

Developed by sous chef Sadie Garrett, the spring burger is an ode to what grows and grazes in the Willamette Valley. It is, in many ways, like biting into a farm, down to the brioche bun: Co-owner Mark Kosmicki bakes Party Bar’s breads using Oregon and Washington-grown grains from Camas Country Mill and Cairnspring Mills. 

The green garlic is from Groundwork Organics, a Junction City farm where Party Bar co-owner and chef Tiffany Norton worked years ago.

Upriver Organics grows the arugula just off the McKenzie River, and MycoLogical Natural Product’s wild onions are blended into the lemon allium aioli.

Even the eggs used for the buns and aioli are local, from Laughing Stock Farm. Each ⅓-pound beef patty comes from Eugene-based Fair Valley Farm.

Norton stops by Lane County Farmers Market at least once a week to grab ingredients. She’ll also email farmers frequently to check on the harvest. This week, she was waiting for the first asparagus and rhubarb to drop.

The burger special is indicative of how the restaurant’s menu lives through the seasons. And it’s a microcosm of the restaurant’s evolution: Norton and Kosmicki started Party Bar as a food cart in 2011. Two years later, they opened a brick-and-mortar downtown and then expanded the space on Broadway in 2018.

The space, speaking of which, acts as both your friendly neighborhood bar and a fun, cozy restaurant. Impress your date with a hip dinner, grab oysters and kiwi cocktails with your friends, or settle in for a solo post-work burger and beer at the bar.

Party Bar in downtown Eugene is a celebration of Pacific Northwest ingredients with a fun neighborhood bar vibe and a touch of whimsy. Credit: Taylor Goebel – Lookout Eugene/Springfield

Even when popular items are brought back, “everything evolves a tiny bit,” Norton said. One thing that hasn’t changed: Their dogmatic commitment to sourcing locally.

The food menu strikes a balance between creativity (see: crispy grit tots with apple ketchup, rainbow chard-ichoke feta dip) and an ode to quality ingredients you likely drive by every day. 

The fun part about Party Bar? You won’t always know what’s on the menu before visiting: It changes often enough that the online version isn’t up to date.

We did hear whispers of rhubarb doughnuts and a rhubarb white negroni during a recent visit, but you’ll just have to stop by and see for yourself.

And get the spring burger while you’re at it.

If you go

Party Bar opens at 4 p.m., Wednesday to Sunday, and is at 55 W. Broadway, Eugene. The spring burger dropped recently, so expect it on the menu for the next few weeks — or until the kitchen crew gets a new idea. A vegetarian version of the burger is also available. Party Bar can fill up quickly, so while drop-ins are welcome (our party of three showed up at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday with no issue), making a reservation never hurts.

Taylor Goebel covers Lane County's food and drink scene. She has nearly a decade of experience in multimedia journalism, having reported across the Mid-Atlantic on dining, food systems, education, healthcare, local elections, labor and business. She was most recently a food reporter in Washington state, where she documented a fourth-generation fishing family, covered a David vs. Goliath conflict between a national coffee chain and a small Turkish cafe, and had many culinary firsts, from ensaymadas and gilgeori (Korean street) toast to morels and black cod.