The Cabyn wins best bar, bartender and lunch in reader poll
The Cabyn’s reader-poll sweep gave Baker City’s downtown bar and kitchen a regional boost, with wins for best bar, bartender and lunch.
The Cabyn’s sweep of best bar, best bartender and best lunch in the 2026 Go! Reader’s Choice awards gave downtown Baker City a visible lift in a category where repeat customers, word of mouth and tourism all matter. For Ryan Duley and Jenn Rominger, the three wins signaled that the couple’s carefully built restaurant has become more than a neighborhood favorite: it is now one of Eastern Oregon’s most recognized dining and nightlife stops.
The awards landed with added weight because The Cabyn opened only in August 2024 at 1825 Main St. Duley and Rominger, who each brought 30 years of restaurant-industry experience, spent more than a decade developing the concept before bringing it to Baker City. Their background across restaurants and bars in Oregon and Idaho helped shape a business built around travel, curiosity and a menu meant to stand out in a small-city market.
By May 18, the proof was visible in the details inside the restaurant. Rominger said The Cabyn’s bottle collection had grown to 354 bottles, including 151 tequilas and 115 whiskeys, while another wall held at least 50 different hot sauces. Since opening, the pair had kept refining the menu and adding cocktail recipes, a sign that the business has leaned on experimentation as much as consistency to build repeat traffic.
Those wins matter for Baker City because independent places like The Cabyn help define what downtown offers after dark and at lunch. A bar that can win best bar and best bartender while also taking best lunch suggests a wider customer base than a late-night crowd alone. That broader pull can help steady sales across the day, support more hours of operation and strengthen the case for hiring in a downtown where hospitality businesses help set the pace of foot traffic.
Travel Oregon describes Baker City as the centerpiece of Baker County and a base camp for Eastern Oregon, and it calls historic downtown one of the largest and most intact turn-of-the-20th-century downtowns in the Northwest. The Cabyn fits that setting as a homegrown business with a distinct identity, one that uses a mix of tequila, whiskey and food to draw both locals and travelers into the core of the city.
The Cabyn was one of only a few businesses to win multiple categories in this year’s poll, alongside Sweet Wife Baking and repeat winners such as the Eltrym Theater, Wallowa Lake Lodge and 1188 Brewing. In a contest shaped by reader nominations and weekly voting across Eastern Oregon, the results showed that The Cabyn has become one of Baker County’s clearest examples of local hospitality turning reputation into momentum.
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