Food & Drink

Marination Station is Simply Tasty

The permanent home of Seattle’s superstar food truck is well worth the wait in line.

By Seattle Mag August 8, 2011

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This article originally appeared in the September 2011 issue of Seattle Magazine.

Dr. Dre, Warren G, Jay-Z: The soundtrack keeps it bumpin’ at Marination Station, the tiny Capitol Hill Korean-Hawaiian takeout spot from the Marination Mobile women. Owners Roz Edison and Kamala Saxton’s success with their roaming Marination Mobile—voted America’s best food truck by Good Morning America—spawned this wildly popular stationary spot upstairs from the QFC at Broadway and Pike streets.

Parking is easy, and as soon as the doors fly open at 11 a.m., there’s a line of hungry folks waiting to order and bopping teir heads to the music. (Larger orders can be made by using Yorder, an iPhone and Android app; the station doesn’t have a phone.)

The kitchen staff works feverishly to fill warm, soft Hawaiian buns with griddled Spam or shredded pork, cilantro-flecked slaw and a lashing of sweet mayo ($2.25), and to fry eggs ’til perfectly oozing and then place them in a Chinese takeout box filled with fried rice mixed with kimchi ($5.50).

There’s really only room for about eight folks to squeeze in and eat on stools (another eight can share space at a communal table on the tiny patio when the weather cooperates), so plan on taking your food to go. And though I wish the kimchi had a deeper, stinkier funk to it (this tastes like fresh kimchi, if such a thing exists), the food here is simply tasty. I can’t recommend ordering the specials enough, the Spam musubi (basically Spam sushi) in particular.

Lunch and dinner daily.
Capitol Hill, 1412 Harvard Ave.
marinationmobile.com/station
$

 

 

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