Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Fire dancers have spun on this corner every Sunday night for a quarter of a century. Dante's at 350 West Burnside Street, at the corner of Third Avenue in Portland's Old Town, opened in February 2000 under owner Frank Faillace and quickly became the city's definitive anything-goes nightclub - a red-lit room where a metal show, a burlesque revue and a full variety spectacle can share the same week's calendar. The building carries a century of history, its storefronts documented back to the Jorgensen family's ownership in the 1890s and a 1921 permit listing the space as a soft drink and lunch counter. The signature is Sinferno Cabaret, the Sunday-night institution of burlesque, fire performance, circus acts, pole dance and DJs that has run since the club's early days - billed as the longest-running weekly cabaret show on the West Coast and named one of the top ten burlesque shows in America by Burlesque Magazine. Storm Large's band Storm and The Balls held a legendary Wednesday residency for years, and the SuicideGirls Burlesque Troupe made the room a regular stop. The live calendar leans rock, metal and punk, with the intimate stage and low ceiling pressing crowds against the acts - a geometry comedians have exploited too: Doug Stanhope recorded his Beer Hall Putsch album here in 2013, and Katt Williams played the room in 2018. Karaoke backed by a live band rounds out the weekly rhythm. A pizza window on the Third Avenue side has fed the late-night line for years - Lonesome's Pizza, once ranked among Portland's top slices by The Oregonian, gave way to Pizza Slut in 2017 - and the full bar runs strictly 21-plus, with the dark, theatrical, slightly gritty atmosphere of Old Town amplified rather than apologised for. Among the West Burnside neon - the Portland sign and Voodoo Doughnut are a block away - Dante's remains what it was built to be: the city's most reliable late-night spectacle, where the line between concert, cabaret and chaos stays deliberately blurred.