BECKS PRIME IN UPPER KIRBY
So I was driving on Loop 610 recently when a billboard for Becks Prime caught my eye. “Bill’s Burger … top 25 in U.S.” it read, or something similar.
It had been 11 years since I had been to Becks. Now I was curious to sample the Bill’s.
First I Googled to see who had put it on their list. Huh, The Daily Meal, which in 2017 assembled a top 101 burgers slideshow that pegged the Bill’s Burger at No. 22 nationally.
The Daily Meal’s description — augmented by a photo scraped from Yelp — read thusly: “With bacon, jalapeños, lettuce, sautéed onions, secret sauce, and sliced cheddar, it’s sure to make your dining companions jealous.”
Reader, if I ever resort to a summation like that, it will be time for Burger Friday to slink offstage in disgrace. But I digress.
Here’s the tale of my return to Becks Prime Kirby, the 1985 original of what is now a locally owned mini-chain with 11 Houston locations (the downtown store is temporarily closed) plus an outpost in Dallas and another in Pflugerville.
PRICE: $12.75 for the Bill’s Burger, $3.25 for a side of french fries, $4.50 for a Jamoca shake, for a pretax and tip total of $20.50
ORDERING: Becks has an efficient, intuitive online ordering system that allows you to pay in advance and specify a future pickup time. Lots of detail, too, including degree of doneness. I entered the drive-thru lane a minute after my pickup time, spoke over the intercom, waited seven minutes while cars in front of me got their orders and then waited another five minutes for my food to be handed through the windows by a gloved and masked staffer.
ARCHITECTURE: Salad stuff, in the form of lettuce shreds, on the bottom. On a toasted sesameon seeded bun went Becks’ pink mayo-based “Prime Sauce,” shredded lettuce, a whopping beef patty, a slice of melty cheddar, a sprawling tangle of grilled thickcut onion, a couple rashers of bacon and a flock of pickled jalapeño wheels set into more Prime Sauce, so that they formed a mosaic on the underside of the top bun.
QUALITY: Wow. Becks has always been about its ground-inhouse Angus chuck patties grilled over mesquite coals, and the beef my Bill’s was exceptionally good: cooked to the medium-rare I had specified, with a rosy interior strip and a smoky sear. Toasty sesame seeds added texture to the sunny-yellow egg bun, which held up to the task.
There were meat juices for days, and they commingled with cheese and sweet onion and the laid-back pink secret sauce in a highly satisfactory way. The electric sparks were provided by crunchy bacon slices and sharp pickly bursts of jalapeño. If I had had friends with me, I suppose they would have been jealous.
As a control, I ordered a chili cheeseburger medium instead of medium-rare. It was delivered well-done, and devoid of the juices that had made the Bill’s so voluptuous.
OOZE RATING: Most excellent. LETTER GRADE: A for the Bill’s Burger. (Chili cheeseburger was a B.)
VALUE: Seemed OK for a big, high-quality, cheffy burger, but I found myself wishing they’d throw in the fries with the $12.50 price. (For the record, a cheddar cheeseburger cost $7.25 in 2009, and I called my $14.75 total with fries and shake “steep.”)
BONUS POINTS: The milkshakes here are great: just thick enough that you can wallow in their ice-creaminess, just liquid enough to sip easily through a straw. The Jamoca struck a particularly delicate balance between coffee and chocolate. I’d drink one every day if I could.
Fresh-cut fries had nice, dense unfrozen potato texture and serious browning. I admired their cardboard takeout container stamped with nickel-size holes to let the steam out. The texture and temperature was a little compromised by the wait time — 13 minutes after designated pickup,
which means I should have arrived early to compensate for cars in front of me. But the fries were judiciously seasoned, which I appreciated, because I’ve encountered quite a few overseasoned fries of late.
I also appreciated the chance to lay in a supply of dishes to enjoy later: an extra-lively crunch of Caesar salad (I bet it would be great with Becks mesquite-grilled chicken, one of several add-on options); and a stout meaty bowl of chili, which I used to make breakfast and lunch tacos, but could just as easily have frozen.
MINUS POINTS: I had high hopes for Becks’ queso, as I have been requiring regular infusions of it lately. Their version had just-so, chip-coating texture and smoothness, a good level of chopped-green-chile heat and a lot of salt. Too much for me to eat more than a little bit at a time, when I would have preferred to just scarf a lot of it for dinner.
ESSENTIAL WORKERS: As I waited at the window for my order, I could see four young men working ceaselessly in the kitchen. They looked frazzled. All were wearing masks, but one of them had let his slip beneath his nose, and the auntie in me wanted to warn him to pull it up.
I could not help but notice that everyone in my line of sight was a person of color, a stark contrast to the Becks management team group photo I had gazed upon as I placed my online order.
I hoped they were getting hazard pay. And suddenly I was stricken, because I realized the flaw in Beck’s ordering setup: I had not been prompted to add a tip for these brave souls. And I had forgotten to bring any cash. If I had had a twenty I would have forked it over out of sheer gratitude for their service.