Hash S.
Yelp
The guy from my old stomping grounds in Boston who reviewed this place in 2018 had it right: You WANT it to be the South Street Diner, the Liberty, Victoria's, or any of the other countless club-car diners in that town. Hey, you want it to be one of those World's Fair diner kits that proliferate the entire Northeast.
This, my friends, ain't that. This is someone who pulled this scrapper off a lot, polished the chrome, put a bunch of Coca-Cola and Hershey's tchotchkes on the walls next to old Life magazines, and charged people $25 to $35 a plate to eat in a diner museum on a sad orphan highway across from an Intel factory.
The thing about actual diners is that they aren't nostalgia factories. They aren't pulled off of the lot of American Graffiti and plunked down into your town. They're institutions that spend 24 hours a day serving the community and getting their menu down to a science. When your "diner" is scarcely open half the day and more concerned about looking the part than actually feeding people, it'll show.
Every time I stop into this self-proclaimed "retro gem" in an attempt to address my hunger for the South Street's banana-stuffed french toast by ordering banana pancakes, I'm amazed by the Blue Moon's commitment to undercooking griddle items. Short of serving you eggs, flour, spices, and a whole banana, it would be difficult for them to send you more underdone ingredients than the pale wraiths that they call pancakes. The french toast is little better, as you can see the egg holding onto the wedges of toast and cinnamon by fingertips after a brief dalliance with the griddle.
Flash-frozen fries are brought to modest golden texture. The bread on the club sandwich, meanwhile, is toasted to the hardness of certain diamonds. Woe to those who enter this place for dinner and choose a dish from any page other than the burger menu, as my cousin once referred to the pork chop plate as "chew toys."
The thing is Beaverton has an actual diner with some history behind it--Tom's Pancake House--that does all of the above far better than this place that's living every day as if it's a rerun of Happy Days. It doesn't look like "the '50s" because it doesn't have to. It's a diner, not a convalescent home for octogenarians whose failing minds can't handle the march of time.
If you spend more time giving people quick dishes they can enjoy at a reasonable price and less time pinning up pictures of Lucy and waiting for Fonzie to pull up outside, you might actually convince people you've been a staple here at least as long as the surrounding strip mall.