Hamburger America (51 page)

 

 

A
ny visit to Dallas, Texas, warrants a stop at this tiny, beloved burger stand. Impossibly small and showing its age, Burger House (aka Jack’s from a previous owner) serves excellent, fresh-meat burgers to hungry college students and locals in this wealthy Dallas suburb. Constantly topping best-of lists, Burger House, opened in 1951, has been a favorite of Dallas natives for generations.

Jack Koustoubardis built Burger House and worked at the Hillcrest location flipping burgers for over 30 years. Even though there is no mention of his name anywhere in the restaurant’s signage, dedicated regulars still refer to the restaurant as Jack’s Burger House. In 1982, friends of Jack’s, Angelo Chantilis and Steve Canellos, bought the burger stand and the recipe
for its now famous “seasoned salt.” The salt goes onto all of the burgers and fries and creates the taste that regulars crave.

The restaurant is split in two—one part a tiny, fluorescent-lit diner (no more than two hundred square feet) with a few stools and a narrow counter, the other an alleyway dining room with a sloped concrete floor and carved-up picnic tables. Of curious note, the stand closes every night at 9 p.m., but the dining room side stays open all night. Manager Nicholas told me, “That’s just the way it was. Jack kept it open all night.” Angelo, aware of the extremely low crime rate in this suburb, confirmed the policy, but said of would-be thieves, with a chuckle “Let’em walk in instead of breaking the damn glass.”

The most popular burger at Burger House is the double cheeseburger. Every morning Burger House gets a delivery of large, flat quarter-pound patties of 80/20 chuck. Angelo told me, “We buy from a local purveyor of meat and they only give us the best.” The burgers have been cooked on
the well-seasoned, original griddle from opening day at Burger House, a griddle that’s over 50 years old. A wide, toasted sesame-seed bun is standard, as are shredded lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, and mustard. The double with cheese is a large, two-fisted wad of greasy goodness that will fill you up and have you dreaming about your next visit even before you take your last bite.

The seasoned salt, a garlicky secret recipe invented by Jack’s brother, Jerry, is so popular that in the 1990s Angelo and Steve decided to bottle and sell the stuff. “People would walk off with the shakers of the salt that we put out,” Angelo told me, “so we figured we should just start selling it.” Now you can attempt to re-create Jack’s burger at home.

Today, Burger House is a mini-chain with seven locations around Dallas and more to come. The enormous Mockingbird location (with its large dining room and drive-thru) does the most business, but it’s the original Hillcrest location with its red, white, and blue neon sign that burger lovers visit to get their dose of Americana. I asked Angelo if there were plans to keep expanding, and he responded with an emphatic. “Hell yeah.” Angelo’s confidence in the franchise led me to believe that there might just be one near you in the future.

 

 

C
asino El Camino is not a burger joint. It’s a dark punkabilly rock bar with tattooed and pierced patrons that maintains one of the best jukeboxes just about anywhere. People go to Casino to drink and listen to great tunes at this bar on the Sixth Street party strip in downtown Austin, Texas. I was in a rock band for 10 years so I feel at home in a place like Casino. But it wasn’t until my third visit that I realized they offered amazing burgers to the buzzed clientele.

I was informed of Casino’s burger prowess by a film crew member of mine in Austin, John Spath, who begged me to give it a shot. In a town whose burger culture is dominated by Hut’s and Dirty Martin’s, and in a state enormously burger-proud, I was skeptical. Even John commented, “It’s not the kind of place you’d expect to find good food.”

I approached the tiny opening in a dark back corner of the bar to place my order. The small kitchen is manned by a staff of one. A solitary chef takes orders, preps buns, and grills the burgers. When the chef on duty that night, Orestes, was through tending to burgers on the grill, he reluctantly sauntered over to take my order. I waited over half an hour, but for my patience I was rewarded with a heavenly burger.

The burgers at Casino el Camino start as fresh-ground 90 percent lean chuck that’s hand formed into 3 quarter-pound patties. They are cooked on an open-flame grill, placed on a bun, halved, then the two halves are placed back on the grill again, cut side down, to achieve a decorative grill brand on the cross section of your burger. It should be noted that cooking over a flame and achieving decent results don’t often go together. Most grill cooks, especially those working from a Weber in their backyards, manage to overcook and ruin burgers. Every time I’ve been to Casino, the burger has been cooked perfectly. Casino el Camino cooks their burgers to temperature. If you ask for rare, get out the napkins and listen for that mooing sound. The cooks know what they are doing. Even a medium-well comes out juicy.

The menu lists burger concoctions that use the three-quarter-pound burger model and add condiments. There’s the “Buffalo Burger,” which is not actually buffalo beef, but a regular burger topped with hot wing sauce and blue cheese. Or try the “Amarillo Burger” with roasted serrano chiles, jalapeño cheese, and cilantro mayo. My favorite is the standard bacon cheeseburger with cheddar, listed as the “Chicago Burger.”

Casino el Camino is both a bar and a person. Casino el Camino, the stage name for this rocker and bar owner, came to Austin for the famed South by Southwest Music Festival in 1990. He was impressed with the forward-thinking Texas town and told a friend back in Buffalo, New York, that it would make a great spot for a bar. “Before I went I thought Texas was all tumbleweeds and fucking cowboys,” the Long Island, New York, native admitted. Casino el Camino, the bar, became a joint venture between Casino and the Buffalo restaurateur, Mark Supples.

Expect to wait for your burger, sometimes forever. Casino told me, “The grill only holds fifteen burgers at a time so we are limited in what can come out of that small kitchen.” On busy nights the wait can be over an hour. But so what? Enjoy the music, gawk at the crazy piercings, and get a drink. If you complain, you may make it worse. Just remember, this is not fast food. It’s slow food at its best.

 

 

C
hris Madrid is like no other hamburger icon that I’ve met. If you are searching for him in the vast, sprawling 34-year-old burger joint, just look for the guy with jet black hair who is smiling and hugging customers. Chris has been hands-on since opening day in 1977 and can still be found moving briskly from kitchen to dining room to bar checking constantly on every moving part of the restaurant. And it seems that every customer in the place knows Chris. “That just means I’m getting old,” Chris told me with a chuckle.

In the late ’70s Chris bought a tiny burger stand in San Antonio on the corner of Blanco Road and Hollywood called Larry’s Place. Fresh out of college, he saw potential in running a taco and burger stand. He renamed the place Chris Madrid’s Tacos & Burgers but dropped “tacos” from the name (and menu) in 1980. “The burgers were selling so well and we had so many things on the menu,” Chris told me. “We needed to simplify.”

Originally, there were three burger sizes to choose from—the Baby, the Mama, and the Papa, but Chris streamlined that as well. In 1980, inspired by the Village People’s hit song “Macho Man,” Chris decided to call his larger eight-ounce burger “macho” sized. The smaller four-ounce “regular” sells well, but the macho is hard to resist. You can keep it simple and order the Old-Fashion Hamburger, a Texas classic with mustard, pickle, lettuce, onion, and tomato, but there’s a better reason to eat at Chris Madrid’s—the “Tostada Burger.”

The Tostada Burger at Chris Madrid’s is legendary. Chris did not invent this staple of San Antonio burger culture but he most definitely made improvements on the classic. The original version, called the “Beanburger,” was supposedly invented at the now-defunct Sill’s Snack Shack in San Antonio in the ’50s and was soon copied by many other burger joints. A traditional Beanburger consists of only four basic elements—a hamburger, refried beans, Fritos, and Cheese Whiz. That’s it, with no lettuce, pickle, or anything else to get in the way. Chris changed the name and altered the ingredients slightly for his version but has kept the basic integrity of the original intact. The Tostada Burger uses refried beans, but replaces the Cheese Whiz with cheddar and uses house-made corn chips instead of Fritos.

The macho Tostada Burger is a sight to behold. As you contemplate how to eat this enormous pile of heavenly goo, take a moment to appreciate what is in front of you. The bun, toasted on the grill, can barely contain the brown-and-yellow hues of its contents. The burger patty itself, a thin-pressed wonder made from fresh 75/25 beef, is hidden beneath a layer of refried beans and cascading cheddar.

The burger is impossible to pick up. I found
that cutting it in half made things slightly easier. My first bite of this legend sent me soaring. As I easily made my way through the macho I wondered why this burger was not replicated in every corner of America. The beans and chips worked so well with the beef, and the cheddar tied it all together. Chris said it best when he told me, “It’s like a hamburger and an enchilada plate in one.” What an amazing invention.

Chris Madrid’s is enormous and has grown slowly over the years. Chris bought the icehouse (the Texas version of a deli/package store) next door and eventually put an awning over the large gravel parking lot between the two buildings and added more tables. The awning was replaced by a glassed-in structure and seating capacity increased to over 300. “We had to. It was too hot under there,” Chris explained of the connecting addition. Today, the core of the restaurant is the connecting structure, a high-ceilinged dining room filled with mismatched tables and chairs. The icehouse side of the restaurant contains a beautiful recycled bar that Chris bought from a closed convent in the ’80s and the original thick refrigerator doors from the icehouse are still functioning.

Every once in a while a mariachi group will wander through the restaurant entertaining customers downing their Tostada Burgers. Chris doesn’t hire the musicians. “They just come in,” he told me. Grab a local Texas favorite beer, Shiner Bock, while you wait for your burger. It’ll come wrapped in “pickle paper,” or waxed paper, to keep your hands dry from the bottle sweat. “That’s the way they used to do it back in the icehouse days,” bartender of 24 years Jimmy told me. Jimmy is not the longest-running employee at Chris Madrid’s. That honor goes to Chris’s sister, Diana. “She’s seen it all,” Chris told me. “She was here on day one.”