Dog Friendly Beer Garden in Cully: What to Expect at The Back Patio

If you've got a dog that's good on a leash and you're tired of leaving them home while you grab a beer, Cully has an answer. The Back Patio sits at the five-way intersection of Cully and Prescott, just off NE Sandy Blvd, and the whole operation is built around one long garden patio where dogs, food carts, pinball, and a rotating beer list all share the same space. It's not a side feature here. It's the point.

A Patio Built for Leashed Dogs and Their People

The garden patio runs year-round, not just in July when everyone wants to be outside. Fire tables and heaters keep it usable through the wetter months, and string lights make it feel less like a parking lot and more like somewhere you'd actually want to sit for a couple hours. Leashed, well-behaved dogs are welcome out there any day of the week, which means you don't have to time your visit around some narrow window or a special "yappy hour." You just bring the dog, find a table, and settle in.

The policy is simple: dogs stay on leash, and they need to be the kind of dog that can hang out around strangers, other dogs, and the occasional dropped pretzel stick without causing a scene. If your dog fits that description, there's a spot for them on the patio basically any time The Back Patio is open.

What's On Tap and What's Cooking

The beer list leans Pacific Northwest and changes often enough that it's worth checking the drink menu before you go if you have a favorite style in mind. Recent pours have included Rosenstadt Dunkel, Boneyard RPM IPA, Great Notion North IPA, and Pfriem German Pilsner, alongside wine and sake by the glass, cider, a non-alcoholic beer option, and kombucha for anyone not drinking that day. It's a taphouse in the real sense of the word: rotating, regional, and not trying to be everything at once.

Food comes from two directions. The in-house kitchen handles things like meat and cheese boards, salmon lox, and pretzel sticks, the kind of food that's built for sharing at a table outside. Then there's the food cart pod on the patio itself, with Saucy Beast burgers, Wanda's Thai, and Joshua's taco truck rotating through. Check the food page for who's parked there before you head over, since the carts aren't always the same lineup week to week. Between the kitchen and the carts, you can put together a full meal without ever leaving the garden, which matters when you've got a dog at your feet and no interest in moving tables twice.

More Than a Beer Garden: Arcade, Pinball, and Weekly Events

What makes this place different from a standard beer garden is everything happening around the patio. Inside, there are nine pinball machines, including Iron Man, Demolition Man, FunHouse, and Fish Tales, running anywhere from fifty cents to a dollar a play. The vintage arcade cabinets, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Super Pac-Man, and Defender among them, are a quarter a play, which is closer to what they cost when those games were new. Outside, there's foosball, cornhole, and a board game library for anyone who'd rather sit at a table with cards than stand at a cabinet. You can poke around the games page for the full rundown before you come.

The weekly schedule gives people a reason to come back on a specific night. Vinyl Night runs Mondays from 6 to 8 PM, Rip City Trivia happens every other Tuesday, and there's live music Friday and Saturday nights along with karaoke and a monthly bingo night. None of it costs anything to attend. It's worth checking the events calendar if you're planning around a particular night, since trivia only runs every other week and the band lineup changes.

One regular pattern worth mentioning: Monday nights during Vinyl Night tend to pull in people who show up early just to grab a patio table before the records start spinning, dog leash in one hand, a Pfriem Pilsner in the other, settling in for the two-hour stretch before anyone's even thinking about dinner. It's a slower crowd than Friday night, and the dogs seem to know it too.

Kids, Dogs, and First-Come Seating

The Back Patio is kid friendly as well as dog friendly, with minors welcome in the dining room and on the garden patio until close, every day. That combination, kids on one side of the patio and leashed dogs on the other, shows up a lot on weekend afternoons when it functions more like a neighborhood backyard than a bar. If you're bringing the whole household, the families page has more detail on what that looks like day to day.

There's no reservation system here. Seating is first come, first served, which is pretty standard for a food cart pod but worth knowing if you're planning around a specific table or a big group. On busy nights, especially Friday and Saturday when live music is going, it helps to show up a little before you're starving or before the dog's patience runs out. If you're organizing something bigger, like a birthday or a work gathering for 15 to 80 people, the private events page covers how that gets booked on the patio.

Finding Us in Cully

The address is 3944 NE Cully Blvd, Portland, OR 97213, right across from the Albertsons shopping center at the Cully and Prescott five-way intersection. The TriMet 71 line stops just steps away, so it's an easy trip without a car if you're coming from elsewhere in Northeast Portland. Hours run Monday through Thursday and Sunday from noon to 9 PM, and Friday and Saturday from noon to 10 PM, seven days a week with no closures to plan around.

If you're making a day of it in Cully, it's worth asking the team at Control Factors Portland about pairing an escape room earlier in the day with a patio visit after. They're a few minutes away and plenty of regulars treat the two as a natural pair, puzzle first, beer and dog time second. For anything else about parking, accessibility, or what to expect on a first visit, the visit page and the FAQ page cover the basics, and gift cards are available through the gift card page if you're buying for someone who needs a reason to finally check the place out.