Dining Review: Victory Club is the place to be for brews (2024)

Victory Club, Vagabond's downtown taphouse, is a buzzy beer bar, and food not bad if you get the right thing.

Victory Club is the kind of place where you'll find the mayor and the owner of Archive waiting in line for a beer.

Victory Club,Vagabond Brewing's downtown beer bar, swells with people on a Wednesday night, a surprisingly civil line forming where men in Red Sox hats and suits order beer and tacos. Outdoors, in a string-light-lit seating space partitioned off in the club’s alley entrance, a growing group of Oregon big-names mingle, celebrating the Lyft launch. Inside, young women with tattooed arms drink pints of amber ales with just a thin sheet of foam.

Victory Club exudes, without any real effort, that this is the place to be. Like f/Stop Fitzgerald’s in North Salem, Victory Club has become a public house, a meeting place where strangers chat at the bar, where you run into your favorite bartender on his day off or a friend from high school you didn’t know moved back to town.

The owners are all Marine veterans, and it shows:Patriotic gets a hip twist inside. Vintage Victory Liberty ads hang next tosmall, built-in booths for intimate conversations over beer.Couples pose with beers in a wooden photo booth near the back. Bunting hanging from the ceilings, and a framed, saintlike portrait of Secretary of Defense James Mattis hangs behind the bar, as it does at all Vagabond locations.

Service is slow, even on random weekdays, and most of the servers often seem a little overwhelmed. A single-file line always seems to hover near the bar, as opposed to the traditional blob of rowdy beer bros overwhelming the bartenders. More than anything, Victory Club needs more boots on the ground before the Vagabond team continues to open up more outposts.

The bar

Although Victory Clubserves several local spirits like Vivacity (Corvallis)or Brody's Moonshine (Turner),this is a beer bar. Beyond the hoppy, citrus-forward Vagabond IPAs, Victory Clubkeeps other Salem brewery releases on tap, like Gilgamesh's pine-happy powerhouse Doug FIRocious, as well as breweries from across the country like Dogfish Head.

The selection is bold in flavor: Don't expect to find Bud Light on tap. These beers are lengthy, sometimes nasal numbers with serious body and heft.

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Hops heads will be just fine at Victory Club.At the moment, most beers feature bitter flavor profiles, and the bar's India Pale Ale and American Pale Ale selection dominates the taps and orders.For something different, order a Melvin Hubert MPA (Melvin Pale Ale),an easy-drinking, 6 percent alcohol by volume with a touch of bitterness and a floral finish.

The food

The bold flavors on tap dramatically contrast with the bar's lunch and dinner menu. Vagabondand Victory Clubserve lunch and dinner as a partnership with JT's Food Trucks,a culinary business run byTino LandandAugustine "J" Razo, Jr.The menu has a few Mexican-inspired dishes —tacos, fajita bowls, quesadillas— as well as otherbar favorites. That being said, spice is missing from much of the menu.

"Everything that we do, we want to give the best experience possible, and I’ve had experiences like, 'Man, that’s so good, but it’s so in my mouth,'” Land said. "If you put too much heat in someone’s mouth, that may ruin it for them forever."

Understanding an audience is important for a chef, but I would challenge the assumption Salem cannot handle theheat of a jalapeno. The chef omits them from his Texas-style egg rolls,substituting pepperoncini for the green chili. Still, J's Egg Rolls are sacrilegiously tasty with the four main bar food groups: cream cheese, fried foods, bacon and dips. Land's version of the sweet chili sauce often served with wontons or rangoonis assertively smoky, and I end up using the remnants as a dip for fries.

Other dishes beg for a little heat, like the quesadilla or Victory Fries. Pre-frozen shoestring friescome piled with carnitas, mild cheddar, sriracha, ranch and pico,all promising toppings on paper.The resulting dish, however, is surprisingly bland. The ranch is made in-house and is closer to a crema, and the carnitas is so lightly seasoned, you taste little more than pork.

The quesadilla is best with a naturally seasoned protein, like chorizo or pastor; otherwise, the mild cheddar quesadilla offers very few distinctive notes. Even then, you're better off with one of the restaurant's many tacos, which range from chorizo street tacos to Korean bulgogi.

Victory Club's tacos are extremely popular, and with reason. The tortillas are made in-house, served with house-marinated meats. The Korean taco, a menu suggestion from the bar staff, is very tender bulgogi beef and a vaguely Asian-inspired cole slaw. Land thought kimchi would be too intense, but when there are 200 different kinds of kimchiand several other Korean vegetable dishes to choose from, I wish he had tried another recipe. The bulgogi itself is well seasoned and almost velvety.

Chorizo and pastor tacos marinate in a house adobomade with vinegar and chilies (like many Salem tacos, the pastor is really a diced porkadobada). They are both incredibly flavorful, drizzled in a green salsa, holding their own next to the bar's hops bombs. On a Tuesday, when you can get three tacos and a beer for $7, I'll return for those —but give me a bottle of hot sauce. I need my heat.

Email Brooke Jackson-Glidden brookejg@statesmanjournal.com or call 503-428-3528. Follow her on Twitter@jacksonglidden, or like her Facebook pagewww.facebook.com/BrookeJackson-Glidden.

If you go

Victory Club:two-and-a-half out of four stars

When: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays and 11 a.m. to midnight Fridays and Saturdays

Where:155 Liberty St. NE

What to order:Chorizo tacos, J's Egg Rolls, Korean tacos

What you'll spend:$5 to $11 for appetizers, $6 to $10 for entrees,$5 to $7 for beer

For more information:Call971-304-0004 or go tovictoryclubsalem.com.

(Four stars: exceptional; three stars: good; two stars: fair; one star: poor)