Cruise In Diner

Here's a plug for a great little burger diner. It's Cruise In.

What's special about it, besides the vintage car motif and oldies music?

They serve local grass-fed beef burgers, local buffalo burgers, local Dave's Killer Bread buns, local beers (12 microbrews on tap), homemade desserts, and local wine (Cooper Mtn and Oak Knoll, though they also serve 14 Hands wines, in order to capture the warm-weather red grapes).

The burger patties are THICK; kind of interesting. Grass-fed beef, and buffalo, have no unhealthy saturated fat (grain-finished beef--feedlot beef--is full of artery-clogging saturated fat). Yes, a vegetarian diet would be better for us (and they do have three different veggie burgers), but if you want a beef burger it can't be healthier than this. You can get just about any kind of burger toppings there that you can name.

The fries are fried in rice bran oil, which is free of trans fats and has a high smoking point. Check out the rice bran oil's maker here.

The fries are bottomless (all you want to eat). They are CHEAP.

The desserts are divinely good, homemade, and CHEAP.

The burgers are pretty good; they're kind of lean so I have to add stuff like cheese and mayo. Prices for them are I think very fair, given the high-quality ingredients.

The staff is friendly and they tell groaner jokes (what did the daddy buffalo say to his male child, as the dad headed off to work? "Bye, son." )

The only drawback is the remoteness: Go out Highway 10 from Beaverton, through Aloha and go a few more miles through the countryside, and you'll find Cruise In at the intersection with River Road. But the drive is worth it!

Here is the diner's website.

I know of NO other place in Portland Metro that is so committed to healthy and local food, while still serving good burgers and fries. They deserve our support. (Burgerville and McMenamins are noteworthy for serving Oregon Natural Beef, but those cows are finished on grain and thereby they develop lots of unhealthy saturated fat. All the other mass market burger places use grain-fed beef from cows that spent too little time in the fields and received antibiotics and hormones. If you do nothing else in your life, at least avoid the mass market burgers, as they will kill you.)