San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
FRIED CHICKEN SANDWICHES HAVING A MOMENT.
Fried chicken sammies having a big moment here
Don’t worry, tacos. You’ll always be king in San Antonio. But right now, the city’s spotlight is directly on another delectable edible: the friedchicken sandwich. It is undoubtedly having a moment here.
The fried-chicken sandwich war, as the phenomenon has come to be known, heated up in earnest in 2019 when fastfood chain Popeyes debuted a simple version dressed with pickles and mayo. Chick-fil-A fired back via Twitter claiming to be the home of the original.
From there, it’s been a constant onslaught of new friedchicken sandwich contenders from massive restaurant chains and small, independent eateries across the country, all looking to take a bite out of the mighty bird buck. And there’s no sign of a cease-fire: McDonald’s dropped three new versions of the sandwich last month and Taco Bell is even jumping in the ring with a new Crispy Chicken Sandwich Taco served on puffy bread shaped like a tortilla.
San Antonio restaurateurs haven’t been on the sidelines. Whether it’s new restaurants dedicated to the FCS (a shorthand nomenclature for “friedchicken sandwich” that’s become common parlance among restaurateurs and diners alike) or established eater
ies adding one to the menu, the things are selling like crazy across the city.
That’s no surprise to veteran chef Andrew Weissman, who recently added two versions of the fried-chicken sandwich to the menu at his burger joint Mr.
Juicy. He originally launched Mr. Juicy in a cozy spot on McCullough Avenue, but has since closed that space to the public and is using it as a production facility after moving Mr. Juicy into a former Jack in the Box at the intersection of Hildebrand and San Pedro complete with a COVID-friendly drive-thru.
“Initially I was adamant about exclusively doing burgers. But I, like everyone else, see the reality that people want to order fried chicken sandwiches,” Weissman said. “Is it surprising to me? No. Because I know with anything you throw in a fryer, there’s a distinct possibility there’s a demographic that wants to put it in their mouth.”
There’s smart economic reason to be in the fried-chicken sandwich game. They’re relatively easy to make from a labor perspective, and the profit margins are high compared to sandwiches based on other proteins.
A hulking half-pound slab of chicken costs a business somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 cents, whereas ground beef for a burger can easily run twice or triple that. The market research publication foodtruckempire.com says friedchicken sandwiches priced at $6 to $8 can provide entrepreneurs a roughly 350 percent margin.
And following a hellish year for the restaurant industry after the COVID-19 outbreak, anything that’s a guaranteed sale on a menu looks pretty good. And, oh, do they sell. Weissman said on any given day fried-chicken sandwiches represent about 30 percent of his profits.
Just a stone’s throw across Hildebrand you’ll find a socially distanced line of customers out the door and around the corner at Smack’s Chicken Shack. They’re all queuing up for a bite of chef and owner Keenan Hendricks’s creative take on the FCS: massive, crusty slabs of chicken that comically overhang their buns and decked out in global array of toppings ranging from your basic Buffalo to a Koreaninspired sammie slathered with spicy gojuchang and capped with broccoli slaw.
Hendricks launched Smack’s more than three years ago — months before Popeyes started the so-called FCS wars — as a pop-up serving late-night sammies to the bar crowd, which evolved into a food truck. Late last year, driven by the strength of sales from that truck through the COVID-19 pandemic, he gave Smack’s a brick-and-mortar home in the former Big Bob’s Burgers location.
“I honestly think we were ahead of the curve. You weren’t really finding large fried-chicken sandwiches like this before,”
Hendricks said. “And I feel like we’re the first here to do really really unique chicken sandwiches, like peanut butter and jelly on a sandwich. Who does that?”
Well, it may not be PB&J, but plenty of competitors in San Antonio have entered the FCS fracas with impressive and inventive culinary aplomb. The variety of chicken sandwiches currently available in San Antonio is as varied and diverse as the chefs making them.
Weissman leans into Southwest flavors with one of his sandwiches, topped with roasted Hatch chiles and thick, chubby onion rings. His second option goes Korean, dunked in a sweet and fiery sauce based on gojuchang. Weissman, it should be noted, is no FCS rookie. The sandwiches he’s serving at Mr. Juicy are an evolution of the fried-chicken sandwiches he served at his since-shuttered eatery The Luxury for years.
At Gold Feather, a North Side joint that opened last year, they serve a sandwich dubbed the “Rolls Royce.” It lives up to the
“gold” in the restaurant’s name. This thing is layered with candied bacon, foie gras, a fried egg and a $21 price tag.
It’s not surprising Camp Outpost Co.’s FCS is all about Italy. Operational partner Dan Ward has long helmed the popular Italian restaurant Piatti, which has two locations in the city. Camp specializes in wood-fired rotisserie roasted chickens and porchetta, but also has a friedchicken sandwich — although
Dan Ward didn’t intend for it to get as much attention as it has, including a recent feature in Texas Monthly.
Today, that sandwich — it features peppery arugula, pickled red onion and a smear of aioli spiked with Calabrian chile and chicken fried in organic rice bran oil — is one of his top sellers.
“It may be the signature item on our menu,” Ward confessed. “The original intent was more the wood-fired rotisserie items, but that sandwich has come to the forefront. I really thought our porchetta sandwich was going to be more of a focal point, but that fried-chicken sandwich, the quality of the ingredients and the value for the pricing make it a home run.”
And then there’s the unconventional business model version from Philadelphia-based chef Chad Rosenthal. He got into the FCS game during the coronavirus outbreak with the ghost-kitchen concept Motel Fried Chicken as a salve to his languishing dine-in barbecue restaurants, which struggled to find customers willing to sit outdoors in the much colder Northern climate. He brought that concept to San Antonio in December, although that wasn’t his initial intent.
“I wanted to try this in Austin. I mean, every chef wants to have a restaurant in Austin. But I came here and it felt like Philly,” Rosenthal said. “It’s a gritty, hard-working city and I love it.”
With San Antonio’s more attractive real estate prices and seemingly endless appetite for fried-chicken sandwiches, Rosenthal has transformed Motel Fried Chicken from what was originally intended as a six-month pop-up ghost kitchen into a permanent operation with counter service and an outdoor seating area based out of the former 5 Points Local on North Flores Street near downtown.
Rosenthal has also embraced another thing found at most of the city’s FCS spots: dialing in flavors for San Antonio’s unique palate. He uses a barbecue-style dry rub based on ground habanero chiles that’s caked over the surface of the chicken. That goes on a squishy potato bun dressed with a silly quantity of housemade dill pickles and generous smear of the chef-favorite Japanese mayonnaise Kewpie.
“I learned very quickly coming down to Texas if they want something hot, it better be hot,” Rosenthal said. “Something with that habanero spice and zing of our pickles and Japanese mayo just works.”
Hot, but not Nashville hot. Before the 2019 FCS wars, San Antonio fell in love with Nashville at Smack’s and at Cullum’s Attagirl just off the St. Mary’s Strip. The love burned hot before diners were searching for the next big thing.
Hendricks still offers a Nashville-style sandwich, but he has fleshed out his menu with at least 10 other takes on the FCS, including the puro San Antonio “Hoodrat” sandwich, which is occasionally offered as a special. It’s topped with cheese sauce and a fistful of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
“I think if I had just done Nashville hot and that’s it, I don’t think we would have sustained,” Hendricks said.
Cullum’s Attagirl owner pulled the Nashville FCS from his menu and launched a more Texasinspired version: the San Antonio Hot. It’s dunked in hot oil and topped with spicy crema and pickled jalapeños and marketed with #NoRefundsHOT.
“We’re from San Antonio. I was tired of cooking their food,” Cullum said. “We have our own flavor profiles that need to be explored here.”
How long will this new FCS love last? Cullum, for one, isn’t worried. And that’s largely because unlike other food trends, fried chicken — be it on a bun or in a basket — is as timeless as it is American.
“Yes, it’s trending just like fro-yo ... But fried chicken isn’t going anywhere,” Cullum said.
Note: The Express-News is suspending traditional restaurant reviews until restaurant dining rooms fully reopen.
Two of the city’s biggest downtown restaurant openings this year couldn’t be more different from one another. One is a rustic barbecue lodge popular with guys in hardhats. The other is a midcentury modern salon of chef-driven Texas food at a hotel where a suite can run $3,500 a night.
It’s old school vs. new cool, but Pinkerton’s Barbecue from Houston and Landrace at the Thompson San Antonio hotel share a primal cooking approach: mesquite, oak, fire and smoke.
Pinkerton’s velveteen brisket can compete with San Antonio’s best, while Landrace suggests that chef Steve McHugh might be his own strongest competition with the work he’s already doing at his other restaurant, Cured at the Pearl.
Either way, the downtown dining scene comes out a winner.
Landrace
It’s not often you hear the word “terroir” applied outside of the wine world, but McHugh returns to it again and again to describe his approach at Landrace, which opened last month at the posh new Thompson hotel.
It’s in the restaurant’s name, really. The lowercase “landrace” means a plant or animal that’s adapted and evolved to suit its territory, and the uppercase Landrace applies that philosophy to the chiles, grains, herbs and livestock it uses to express the restaurant’s Texas identity.
It’s hard to miss that Texas identity, even in a setting that looks more “Mad Men” Manhattan than San Antonio, set with muted grays and greens and clean geometry, from the wallpaper to the slatted ceiling. Texas is there in the residual aroma of the mesquite and oak smoke coming from the kitchen’s massive woodburning grill hung with wheels and pulleys like a steampunk leviathan.
From that grill came a lamb sirloin sliced in ruby sections with a sear that carried the folksy twang of mesquite, set off by a vibrant herbal chimichurri ($31). The wood smoke curled through dots of crème fraîche alongside elegant Wagyu beef tartare, chopped to a silky texture and crowned with caviar and a quail egg presented toad-in-a-hole style with toast ($13). And it was in a side of grilled broccoli rabe ($7), energized by citrus and mint, and a salad of Little Gem lettuce charred over the fire with Cotija cheese and herbed mayo ($10)
Mesquite even found its way even into the cocktail menu, its sweet pods lending an enigmatic, dulce de leche swerve to the Sin and Smoke cocktail with mesquite-infused Maker’s Mark, bitters and simple syrup ($15).
Texas food can put on a show when it wants, and beef short ribs ($45) came to the table in two fall-apart sections with clean bones like xylophone keys, glazed in its own juices and served over grits and dinosaur kale cooked down like greens. At
the table, a waiter carved cheese from a fat wheel of raclette to mix in with the grits, and the result was a composed but dashingly informal plate.
Like the team approach he fosters at Cured, McHugh leans on chef de cuisine Martin TaylorFunk to pull off his vision for Landrace. The outlook for that vision is strong.
111 Lexington Ave. at the Thompson San Antonio hotel, 210-9426026, landracetx.com. Open for breakfast 7 to 11:30 a.m. daily; lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; dinner 5 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
Dine-in and takeout available.
Pinkerton’s Barbecue
Barbecue has a reputation as blue-collar food, but it’s hard to see that as guys in hardhats and reflective vests shake their heads over lunches hitting $30 and beyond. That’s the reality of good barbecue, because beef is at a premium, and $25 a pound for brisket is part of the landscape at Pinkerton’s Barbecue, the Houston juggernaut that opened its sprawling 7,000-square-foot compound across from the Frost Bank Tower last month.
What you get for that premium price is brisket that’s as supple as a wave, glowing with properly rendered fat under a salt-andpepper crust, cut by people who know what they’re doing. You walk the serving line, shouting above the din through your mask to order hot and cold sides first, then meat in a kind of barbecue theater punctuated by hand gestures to help figure out how much a half-pound looks like.
That’s the key to ordering barbecue at Pinkerton’s. Pick your meat and pick your pounds.
The smart money goes to pork ribs ($19.50 a pound) glazed to a new-car finish with a competition-style bite that keeps just enough tension on the bone so the meat doesn’t slide off. Pulled pork ($18 a pound) is the workhorse, filling the corners of your appetite in long and short threads of fat, lean and bark that can be piled onto white bread with pickles, onions and Pinkerton’s strong, mustard-based sauce.
Brisket makes a strong showing chopped into a side of gooey macaroni and cheese, a $1.50 add-on and worth every penny. Sides run from $3.50 for a small paper boat up to $8 for a plastic pint bowl. Besides the mac, the best of these are straight-up tangy mustard potato salad and classic crunchy purple coleslaw with black pepper and mayo.
I missed out on Pinkerton’s jalapeño-cheese sausage through all the shouting, but I wound up with decent links of regular smoked sausage ($16 a pound) in thick casings sweating from their time in the smoke.
My lunch at Pinkerton’s came with some sticker shock. But here’s the thing about barbecue: No matter how many deer heads are on the wall, no matter how picnic-y the thick wood tables make you feel, no matter if the napkins are just rolls of paper towels on the table, good barbecue is worth the money.
It’s a match made in hamburger heaven at the new J’Dubs Burgers & Grub.
A few years ago, J’Dubs partner Luis Colón was crowned for having the best burger in the state by Texas Monthly at his since-shuttered restaurant Folc. The other half of this powerhouse team is chef Jeff White, who’s long sated the city’s biggest appetites with refined takes on rib-sticking classics at Boiler House and Eastside Kitchenette.
These two have, predictably, unleashed a monster of a hamburger: the Double Double Dubs ($10). This behemoth is nestled on a squishy, sweet and distinctively yellow Martin’s Potato Roll — famously favored by burger aficionados and restaurateurs across the country, including the celebrated chain Shake Shack.
Colón and White stack a pair of expertly seasoned patties — they’re griddled to a hard char on the exterior and remain a rosy pink inside — on top of that bun and drape each with a slice of gooey cheese. Lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles and a splash of Dub Sauce (it’s like a cheffed-up McDonald’s Special Sauce) round out the affair, all of which is barely but successfully contained by the Martin’s roll.
It’s a hot and sloppy two-fister mess of a meal that rings all the exemplary burger bells with a huge, soul-satisfying flavor and a wide range of textures. If you crave the type of burgers that require a whole forearm wash after eating, this is your jam.
You can, if you’re on a “diet,” get a single patty version for $8.
This is an honest, hardworking burger that shines without hogging the spotlight. And that’s part of its charm, especially considering the pedigree of the chefs behind it. They’ve both sizzled up significantly more elaborate burgers
in their previous kitchens.
The other offerings at J’Dubs include a terrific fried fish sandwich ($10) with a perfect flaky tempura crust, and a chickenfried steak sandwich ($12). The latter will prove nostalgic for anyone who remembers White’s stellar chicken-fried steak at Eastside
Kitchenette, as he’s using the same recipe.
J’Dubs Burgers & Grub is based inside the same kitchen at the former 5 Points Local building near downtown where Colón and White also operate the friedchicken sandwich restaurant Motel Fried Chicken.
To place an order, go inside and order at the counter or, if you prefer to stay socially distanced, visit JDubsburgersandgrub.com and click “order online.” This will launch a page to order from both Motel Fried Chicken and J’Dubs.
Scroll past the Motel Fried Chicken menu to find the offerings from J’Dubs. When your order is ready, a masked staffer will bring the goods to your car.