The Two Blocks of Broadway Where Beaverton Stopped Needing a Car

For years, a good dinner in downtown Beaverton meant picking a strip mall and driving to it. Korean barbecue at Nak Won, a stop at one of the food cart pods on the other side of town, maybe a wine bar if you already knew where to park. The food was good. The evenings that connected one stop to the next were not, because nothing sat close enough to walk between.

That changed this year, and it changed on one specific stretch of SW Broadway. Between a former movie theater that spent decades as a bakery and the storefront a few doors up, you can now spend a Saturday in downtown Beaverton without moving your car after you park it. That has not been true here before. It is still not true anywhere else in the city.

What Landed on Broadway

At 12395 SW Broadway, in the building longtime residents still call the Beaverton Bakery, chef Gabriel Rucker opened the third location of Canard in October 2025. Rucker holds two James Beard Awards, and this outpost is the largest of his three restaurants, built out to roughly 2,800 square feet with an upper mezzanine for private dinners. He told Axios the decision to open west of Portland was straightforward, calling it "a no brainer" and pointing to the number of people who now live outside city limits and want a serious non-chain restaurant close to home. The menu carries over Canard's steam burgers, oysters, and chicken liver mousse, plus a smoked s'mores icebox cake that exists nowhere else on the menu, including the original Portland location. Weekday lunch runs 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and weekend brunch starts at 10.

A short walk up Broadway, at 12500 SW Broadway, the team behind Don's Favorite Foods opened Salami Mammi in the original storefront this July while the main restaurant relocates to a larger space nearby, expected to reopen later this year. Salami Mammi keeps its menu simple and Italian: eggplant parm sandwiches, chicken Caesars, Aperol spritzes, rainbow cookies. It is an order-at-the-counter kind of place, built as easily for a quick lunch as for picking up dinner to carry home.

Two openings on the same stretch would not normally add up to a story. What makes this one is what a resident can now do on foot between them.

The Two Blocks Where You Don't Need the Car

Walk that part of Broadway on a Saturday morning and the pieces click into a real itinerary, not a hypothetical one.

• Park once, near the Beaverton Farmers Market at 12375 SW 5th Street. The market runs Saturdays through November 21 this year and is often called Oregon's largest all-agricultural market.
• Get there early for produce and flowers, before the midday crowd sets in.
• Walk over to Canard for brunch, or plan a dinner there later in the week when the mezzanine is free for a bigger group.
• Stop at Salami Mammi on the way back for a sandwich to go.

None of that required starting the car twice. A year ago, the same Saturday meant the market, then a drive somewhere else for lunch, then a third stop entirely across town. The geography of downtown Beaverton has not expanded. It has compressed, at least on this one stretch, into something you can actually walk.

The city's Night Market offered a preview of what concentrated foot traffic here looks like at full scale. It returned to The Round on August 8 this year for its twelfth run, hosted by the city's Diversity Advisory Board, with food and craft vendors representing more than a dozen countries and a crowd that the event's organizers put at around 14,000 people over a single evening. The Night Market has always proven people will show up on foot when there's a reason big enough. The open question has been whether that same energy could exist on an ordinary Tuesday, not just once a summer.

Everywhere Else, You Still Drive

The two blocks on Broadway are the exception right now, not the new shape of downtown Beaverton. Cross a few streets in almost any direction and the car comes back into the picture.

Anderson, co-owner of the wine bar Syndicate, has lived in Beaverton since 1999 and watched this pattern up close for most of that time. Audiences leaving a show at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, a few blocks from Broadway, rarely walk over afterward to eat.

"They'll eat at Mingo and Decarli, but they won't walk."

The roads between Old Town and the Reser Center are busy, and the sidewalks connecting them are thin. The city has secured federal funding for a project called The Loop, meant to make Watson Avenue and Hall Boulevard safer to walk and stitch downtown together from north to south. Design work is underway, but nothing has broken ground yet. Until it does, the walkable core of downtown Beaverton is smaller than a glance at the map would suggest. Right now, it measures two blocks.

Why It Landed Here Instead of Spreading Out

Canard and Salami Mammi ended up on the same stretch of Broadway less because of any coordinated plan and more because of what buildings happened to be sitting empty and ready. The old Beaverton Bakery space had already cycled through a movie theater, a bakery, and a sign shop before Canard's team found it, which meant it came with the square footage and structural bones a flagship restaurant needs without a ground-up build. Salami Mammi inherited an existing restaurant footprint a few doors up when Don's Favorite Foods expanded into a bigger space nearby. Both moves reused buildings that already sat on a walkable block, rather than requiring new construction somewhere that would need a parking lot to make sense.

Compare that to the rest of downtown's food scene, which is genuinely strong but scattered by design. BG's Food Cartel sits across from City Hall with more than thirty carts. Breakside's 200-person beer garden runs its own five-cart lineup a short drive away, including Farmer and the Beast and the vegan cart Chubby Bunny. Both are worth the trip on their own terms. Neither sits close enough to Broadway to walk between without crossing the same busy roads Anderson was talking about. The concentration on Broadway happened because two specific buildings became available around the same time, not because downtown Beaverton solved its walkability problem all at once.

What This Means If You Live Here

If you already live in or near downtown Beaverton, the practical change is small and specific: there is now one stretch of the city where a Saturday can run from market to brunch to dinner without a single drive in between. That is worth knowing on its own terms, whether or not it changes anything else about how you use the neighborhood day to day.

It also says something honest about how downtowns actually grow. Not all at once, and rarely on a master plan's schedule. Two buildings fill in first because two buildings happened to be ready, and the rest of the city waits on infrastructure like The Loop to catch up to what Broadway has already done. Beaverton's version of that story is still being written one storefront at a time, and right now it fits on two blocks.

I write about the neighborhoods across Portland's Westside because small, specific changes, a new tenant in an old building, a market extending its season, tend to tell you more about a place than any broad description of it ever could. If you're thinking about your own next chapter on the Westside, whether that means a different kind of home or simply understanding how a neighborhood like this one is evolving before you commit to it, Shannon Janssen would be glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.