YES, YOU REALLY WANT
THIS BURGER.
I’ve been wanting to try the burger at Cherry Block Craft Butcher & Kitchen ever since chef Jess Timmons told me she used her mac-and-cheese sauce as part of the equation.
I already knew the meat would be special, since Cherry Block, the brainchild of Felix Florez, gets all its pastured beef through Black Hill Meats, his celebrated network of Texas ranch operations. I learned to appreciate Florez’s sourcing and butchery skills when he helped open Ritual, the meatcentric restaurant in the Heights, and I’ve looked forward to his next project ever since.
What I didn’t expect to discover there, beyond beef and cheese sorcery, was one of the most ingenious burger condiments I’ve ever tasted. Schedule a trip downtown to Bravery Chef Hall, on the corner of Travis and Preston, walk towards the rear counter where Timmons and company do their thing, and find out why.
PRICE: $14 for the cheeseburger and beef-tallow fries; plus an optional $9 glass of Perrin Côtes du Rhône on tap from the long central bar. Total for food and drink: $24.
ORDERING: Grab a seat at the counter, if you can, where there is full service. If you’re meeting friends who are grazing at other counters, or at a table in the middle of the hall, line up at Cherry Block’s to-go register on the left of their kiosk.
ARCHITECTURE: Salad stuff split into bottom and top portions. On a buttered and griddle-toasted bun goes a chiffonade of iceberg, bread and butter pickles, one 3-ounce beef patty, a sploosh of mixed-cheese mac-andcheese sauce, another 3-ounce beef patty and a slice of American cheese. Then comes a splash of pork demi-glace (!), two thin tomato slices and two rings of raw onion.
QUALITY: An expansive, clear beef flavor is the salient feature — the gift of Cherry Block’s daily rib-eye and tenderloin steak trimmings, overnighted back to Black Hill Meats in west Houston and ground together with fat and a bit of chuck. This mix is formed into 3-ounce patties that are given a robust salt and peppering and a hard sear on the flattop, so that you’re getting four crusty surfaces instead of just two.
Amazingly, while the house
style is medium to medium-well done — the latter generally over my doneness comfort zone — the patties stay juicy and appealing. Everything else complements the soaring beefiness rather than crowding it: the sweet-sour pickle bite; the good red tomato; the gratifying stickiness of the melted cheese slice wrapped in the liquid ooze of the cheese sauce. Most brilliant of all is the dark, umami tug of the heritage pork demiglace, which outlines and comments on the beef rather than stepping on it. Its smoky tinge comes from the smoked bones used to make the stock, which adds an outdoorsy note that’s rare in a griddled burger.
Mustard, mayo, hot sauce … who needs ’em, when you’ve got pork demi-glace from Black Hill pigs in the mix?
Oh yeah, the bun. It’s a shinytopped custom hybrid of challah and brioche made by the local Cake & Bacon bakery, with a bit of sweetness and a soft sturdiness that holds up well to the stack of ingredients.
OOZE RATING: Good, thanks to cheese sauce and demi-glace and interior beef juices.
LETTER GRADE: A+
BONUS POINTS: The skins-on potatoes fried in beef tallow and dusted with herbed salt are good, but texturally they weren’t appealing enough for me to scarf them like a ravening wolf. Their exteriors were a little crisp, but softish. I would have preferred a harder fry with more crunchy and glazed bits. And I loved the option of ordering a terrific romaine wedge salad from the Cherry
Block kitchen and a swell glass of red from the Bravery wine bar.
LOCAL COLOR: Bravery Chef Hall is so full of venues and customers and action that it’s like going to a food circus. The night I visited, the sushi chefs from Kokoro struggled to extract a 350pound tuna from a giant, ice-filled cooler. They finally wrestled it onto the hall’s display kitchen counter and gave a butchery demo that was still going on when I left. The next night, Timmons told me, her sous chef and salumi expert, Andy Schlag, was going to butcher a whole hog in the same space. If you haven’t been down here to see what the hall’s all about, you’re missing out.