The Clancy and The Smitty are the signatures, though as a creature of habit, I usually end up with a 6-inch “two car” salami ($8). The Sub Station’s handwritten menu is a throwback to a simpler sandwich era. Chuck Wilson, the restaurant’s smiling mascot and co-owner with wife and fellow former Chicagoan Gina, also owns the surrounding Fisher Rossi building, home to many of Beaverton’s oldest businesses. Though indoor dining remains on hold as the business awaits a sewer line repair, the old-school vibe at this train-themed sandwich shop remains largely unchanged after 40 years on Beaverton’s old main street. Have you ever complained about the state of Portland’s sandwich scene after encountering a fancy $18 turkey club downtown? Beaverton Sub Station is the place for you. First timers should spend time with the big pictographic menu hanging between the restaurant and market below. Dressed in subtly sweet sauce, the cross-cut kalbi short rib sizzles in its skillet, perfect for nibbling between bites of kimchi and other banchan. Dolsot bibimbap, with sautéed and seasoned veggies over rice with a fried egg, all tucked into a super-heated stone bowl, has a crispy, golden crust at the bottom worth fighting over. Dduk mandu guk, a milky bone broth with soft rice cakes, beef, egg and bobbing dumplings, is a chicken noodle soup-level cure-all. Fans come for some of the best Korean soups and stews in Oregon, some chilled and chewy, others red and bubbling. The homestyle Korean restaurant (previously just Spring, and before that, Umma’s) sits on the mezzanine of Beaverton’s quirky little G Mart grocery, past the aisles of dried ramen and seaweed and up a winding wooden staircase obscured by cardboard boxes. Too much has been made of the process of finding Always Spring, not enough about the food itself. Families should angle for a plaza-adjacent patio table to let your kids go free range while you wait. But most dishes are well executed, and the dining room is as sleek as they come. Prices remain at Portland levels, including $15 and up for ramen, and the kitchen has its lapses - on one visit, our karaage went unseasoned, on another, our kids’ simple shoyu ramens took 45 minutes to arrive. As with the original in Southeast Portland, the Beaverton restaurant goes beyond noodles, with a surprisingly deep izakaya menu of housemade tofu, lacey winged gyoza, tasty robata skewers, some of Beaverton’s best sushi and a full bar. With its distinctively light broths - still made in Portland using that Bull Run water, CEO Taichi Ishizuki notes - cut with aromatic Japanese yuzu citrus, Afuri is at least a top 5 metro area ramen shop. That might have begun to change with the arrival of Afuri, a Tokyo-based ramen chain that chose Portland for its first location due to the quality of its water. Outside of Nak Won and the Italian pillars Mingo and Decarli (a trio with a combined 54 years in business), Beaverton lacks much in the way of destination dining. Despite the crowd, our wings were delivered to the plaza in less than 30 minutes, just enough time to drink a can of light Korean beer while our kids ran amok in the play area. And get there early - on a recent visit, the narrow, dimly lit dining room was already full by 4:30 p.m. Order the wings the bossam, a sliced pork belly platter with pungent sauces and cabbage leaves for making wraps and the rose tteokbokki (the penne alla vodka of the spicy rice cake world), with chewy rice tubes tossed with bacon in a creamy sauce. Nowadays, it means boxes of crispy fried chicken wings and mozzarella-stuffed corn dogs at 1st Street Pocha, a Korean street food restaurant along First Street’s new car-free plaza. Before the pandemic, that meant hand-pulled noodles, sizzling kalbi and bottles of soju at Du Kuh Bee, one of Beaverton’s most lamentable pandemic-time restaurant closures (a second location lives on in Northeast Portland). Korean food fans have lined up for last-call at the narrow, dimly lit pub next to Nak Won for more than a decade.
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