BURGER FRIDAY
What happens when a food critic goes to Fuddruckers?
I’ve avoided Fuddruckers for decades simply because its dopey name bugged me, in all its wink-winkiness.
Sure, it was a Texas-based franchise chain, founded in San Antonio in 1979 by none other than our homegrown poprestaurant idea man, Phil Romano. Yet somehow I resisted the lure of the World’s Greatest Hamburgers™ slogan, the promise of beef ground on-site, the house-baked buns, the famous fixings bar with its promise of cheese sauce by the vatful.
I lived through the chain’s ’80s growth spurt to more than 150 units, a bankruptcy and several changes of ownership. (Luby’s is now the parent company, and the chain’s headquarters is here in Houston, where there are four locations.)
Over the past few years, I’ve zoomed past the Southwest Freeway location opposite Greenway Plaza, near the Chronicle’s office, thinking, “Not today, Satan. No way I am turning in at a Fuddruckers sign.”
Snobbery, pure and simple. Yet the joke is on me — as is all too frequently the case — because I finally paid a visit and … I kinda liked it. Let me explain why.
PRICE: $6.75 for the 1⁄3-pound cheddar cheeseburger; $6.29 to make it a combo with fries and shake, for a pretax total of $13.04.
ORDERING: Line up for the counter registers to pay with cash or credit; or for the electronic kiosk to self-order if paying with plastic. You’ll get a buzzer to alert you when your order is ready to pick up at the counter and a table flag if you’re getting a shake delivered. Find a table or booth in the dining room. At lunchtime, seats may be scarce, although the room seats about 200.
ARCHITECTURE: Served in an open-face format to which you add your own condiments and produce, so that the salad stuff ends up wherever you put it. On a poufy, super-toasty sesame-seed crowned bun goes your 1⁄3-pound beef patty and a square of melted cheese. That’s it. You build the rest of the burger yourself by grazing the bright-hued, notably fresh produce, pickles and relishes on the long fixings bar, then grabbing condiments across the aisle from a big array of pumps and cheese-sauce vats.
QUALITY: My first hint that I might be pleasantly surprised by this burger came at the counter, when a staffer asked me, “How would you like it cooked?” Highly civilized question. My next hint came when I cut into my dressed burger and found it exactly the way I had ordered it — medium rare, with a rosy-but-not-too-rosy center.
The beef itself had plenty to recommend it, from its looseenough in-house grind to its clear, expansive flavor. (Fuddruckers advertises “all-natural” beef that’s free of antibiotics and growth hormones, never frozen, and domestically raised.) I liked the patty’s juiciness — it didn’t ooze, but it squished — and its tight, contrasting griddle sear.
No complaints about the fixings and condiments set-up either, even though I prefer a thought-through burger that has its own personality. I scored frilly leaf lettuce, decently red tomato slices, white raw onion rings and thin-sliced pickled banana peppers for my cheeseburger, then took my tray back to my table before I realized I had messed up,
bypassing the many, many condiment pumps.
Back I went, leaving my burger on the table, only to realize that Fuddruckers pros had their own practiced routines, shoving their burger baskets right under the pump nozzles and then blooping big splats of ketchup or mayo or barbecue sauce or deli mustard or yellow mustard or cheese sauce or pink “Fudds Sauce” right on the tissue paper. None of those tiny paper cups for them!
After I applied a little brown-flecked deli mustard and secret Fudds Sauce to my burger, it came together quite nicely. My only real complaint was that the bun-to-meat ratio seemed a bit off with the 1⁄3-pound patty. Next time I’d go for the ½-pound option to see if it balances out better.
And yeah, there will be a next time, since this particular Fuddruckers is right on my gerbil trail home from the office. I enjoyed actually getting a medium-rare burger in these trying times, when my last experiences at more celebrated Houston spots — I’m looking at you, Bernie’s Heights and Hubcap Clear Lake —have been so well-done as to be joyless.
OOZE RATING: Good interior juice, no overt ooze.
BUN OPTIONS: White, wheat, gluten-free, pretzel.
LETTER GRADE: Solid B plus.
BONUS POINTS: Perfectly decent seasoned wedge fries with soft interiors and crispy outsides. Alas, I tried to order the hand-breaded onion rings, but it got trans-combobulated into a heap of sweet grilled onions on another burger.
Cloying, artificial-tasting vanilla milkshake that seemed to be made from very middling soft-serve. And I was slightly rattled by the dirtiness of the table that I finally found, which had not been cleared, and which left a paper towel looking grubby when I cleaned it myself. Presently a passing staffer took a swipe at it with a cloth when she removed the previous customer’s baskets.
MINUS POINTS:
LOCAL COLOR: A diverse, cheerful crowd bustles through this big place at noon, when there are plenty of ball caps and work shirts in attendance, crowding the slightly worn leatherette booths, working the condiments station and checking out sports on the big screens. There’s a pleasant covered dining porch with a quintessentially Houston freeway view, flanked by two enormous rain tanks. In the parking lot, I noted a number of large pickups and vans with ladders affixed to the top, along with a spiffy little Southside Place firetruck.