FOOD

Burger-nomics: How Hill-Bert's, Mighty Fine and P. Terry's are turning ground beef into gold

Also: A restaurant critic strikes oil at P. Terry's

By Mike Sutter
AMERICAN-STATESMAN RESTAURANT WRITER
Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Hilbert Maldonado doesn't want to be grouped with the newcomers in the Austin hamburger business.

The founder of Hill-Bert's Burgers feels that he was squeezed out of his original location on North Lamar Boulevard in 2008 in a real estate market that held little regard for the family business he started in 1973.

Regardless of whether he wants to be part of the herd, Maldonado is a leader in Austin's hamburger bull market, keeping company with the meticulously branded Mighty Fine burger-verse and the design-forward P. Terry's Burger Stand, the newcomer that won a bittersweet battle for the lease on Hill-Bert's birthplace at 3303 N. Lamar Blvd. All three have added locations since the year began, and for P. Terry's and Mighty Fine Burgers Fries Shakes , expansion plans thunder on.

These aren't the only burger businesses making gains in an Austin market craving big comfort at accessible prices. TerraBurger opened on Guadalupe Street in February, with another location in the works sometime in June on Research Boulevard. Doc's Motorworks put a third shop in Pflugerville this spring. Fast-food player Carl's Jr. is a recent entrant, and Steak & Shake is here now, along with Five Guys.

But this story isn't about them or Austin's buffet of legends-on-a-bun — Hut's, Top Notch, the Frisco, Dan's, Fran's, Dirty's. It's about three places with a taste for the past and an appetite for construction. One place to start is the first location of P. Terry's, the boxy little burger stand on South Lamar Boulevard near Barton Springs Road that took Austinites by surprise with lines around the building shortly after it opened in 2005.

A long-gone ideal

Patrick Terry, who grew up in Abilene and carries the easy manner of West Texas in his calm blue eyes and boyish enthusiasm, came to Austin in 1985. Real estate ventures have made him successful, but his resume includes a 1989-93 stint running Rizano's, a pizza place at Seventh Street and Congress Avenue where Thai Passion is now. And in the back of his mind all along had been Mack Eplen's hamburger drive-a-teria in Abilene, a long-gone ideal to shoot for. "What's more authentic than a burger, fries and a milk shake?" he asked.

It's a long story for a place with only 526 square feet, but the former Short Stop burger box had lain dormant for several years, leased by a nearby business but left unused. Terry approached property owner Anne Williams, a fellow West Texan, with the idea of selling hamburgers there, hiring artist Leola Perez to make a retro-futuristic rendering of the restaurant and then shipping it to Williams. She went for it, offering the lease to Terry without haggling.

Telling that story while sitting beside his wife, Kathy, in a booth at the new P. Terry's, he stops, his emotions catching in his throat. It wouldn't be the last time during a 90-minute interview. Another time, he mists up talking about keeping prices at a level where a family of four can eat for $20, telling a story about greeting a family of regulars he hadn't seen in a while. "Dad's broke," the child said.

"What do you say to that?" Patrick Terry said. "You want to try to do something for them." (Four hamburger combo meals, with fries and drinks, comes to $19.27 including tax at P. Terry's.)

If Patrick Terry is the emotional core of the operation, fellow West Texas native Kathy Terry is the one who makes things work, arranging repairs and finding efficiencies that allow the shops to get an order out every 30 seconds at full capacity. The original P. Terry's employs 25 people, a crew loyal enough that there hasn't been a new hire in the past year. The new store, which opened in April, has 43 workers, almost all brand-new, brought up to speed by operations director Ashton Hecker, a recent Dallas transplant who is married to Patrick Terry's sister, Mary, and has 17 years of experience in restaurants.

Michael Hsu's design for a third store planned for later this year follows the same Googie architecture template as the second store, which has the look and feel of a space-age coffee shop, with everything but the coffee: gold vinyl booths and stools, aquamarine accents, inexplicable wings and fins and bubbles like an American car from the 1950s, a time when ashtrays, haircuts and refrigerators all looked like they could fly to the moon and back.

Speaking of moon missions and other improbable voyages, the Terrys were expecting their first child — Katie, who's now 14 months old — during the wrangling over the North Lamar Boulevard location, a process with labor pains of its own.

Old gives way to new

The building of burger dynasties on the ruins of empires past is hardly new. P. Terry's upcoming third location at 4228 William Cannon Drive recently housed a Long John Silver's. Maldonado's original Hill-Bert's was a Burger Chef, and his three current restaurants are carved from old mission-style Taco Bell shops, painted Hill-Bert's signature canary yellow and beaver brown.

In 2007, when it looked inevitable that he'd lose the lease on 3303 N. Lamar Blvd., Maldonado grabbed a lease on a former Taco Bell site across Lamar Boulevard at 1503 W. 35th St. So for about a year, Hill-Bert's clicked along like Starbucks, operating stores practically across the street from each other. And both locations did fine, he said. The reason: Drivers approaching from the west preferred the right-hand turn into the 35th Street shop over making the left-hand turn off Lamar Boulevard to visit the other store. With another restaurant on Cameron Road, Hill-Bert's was up to three.

"But I knew the day of reckoning was coming," Maldonado said. And in 2008, after years of leasing the original site month-to-month, he chose not to match the lease offer involving P. Terry's, and the family threw a closing party in September. The equipment went into storage until Maldonado, worried about providing for the three of his four grown children who had taken up the family business, made a bid for another former Taco Bell building on Burnet Road.

With the same stools, the same flame broiler and the same phone number from the original location, the Hill-Bert's on Burnet Road opened last month . Putting his GDI (Gosh-Dang-Independent) pride aside, Maldonado is squinting to see the bright side of his three-cornered empire. "My customers ask me every day, 'What happened at Lamar?' " he said. "I put a smile on my face, and I say, 'That's a long story. But look what we have now.' "

Back to three, and back to the business of establishing his points of difference with his competitors, such as:

• Delivery: On the roof of the 35th Street Hill-Bert's is a sculpture of sorts, an old Volkswagen Rabbit towing a hamburger, something Maldonado commissioned from artist-provocateur Bob "Daddy-O" Wade to remind the neighborhood he was one of the first nonpizza places in town that delivered. All three locations deliver within about a 2-mile radius for a small fee and as low as a $7.50 minimum order. At the Burnet Road store, I met Hugo Sanchez, whose loyalty to the first Hill-Bert's was forged during his time as a student at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired on 45th Street. "He'd come out to us if we couldn't get to him," Sanchez said. And Hill-Bert's had a Braille menu.

• Onion rings: Fresh onions are hand-battered daily at each store.

• Flame-broiled, fresh beef, made-to-order burgers: Long before the big chains started building ad campaigns around making actual fresh food, it was part of Maldonado's core mission.

• Customer service: During an interview with Maldonado, one of the day's first orders was sent back. Too cold. "It tastes like it's been sitting there awhile," the customer said. Maldonado personally made sure his crew remade the order, then he realized the problem: the store's air-conditioning and ceiling fans were conspiring to cool the food the minute it hit the table. The problem got solved, and the customer was joking with Maldonado on her way out.

Milk shake flow chart

The management team at Mighty Fine Burgers Fries Shakes lives and dies by customer service. "Everything we do is designed around one thing: to ensure that our customers are delighted," said Ken Schiller, who along with Brian Nolen runs K&N Management, the ownership group for the area's three Mighty Fine stores and four Rudy's Country Store and Bar-B-Q franchises in Austin.

Mighty Fine is all about process. A color-coded flow sheet for a chocolate milk shake — hand-dipped with Blue Bell ice cream — includes eight steps for making the chocolate syrup (cooked from scratch) and another 10 steps for making the shake itself. Every menu item, every cleaning task, every customer interaction has its own flow chart. Even lemonade — lemons, sugar, water and a secret ingredient — is codified down to the number of stomps with a hand-held ramrod (300, if you're counting) to separate the fresh lemon pulp from the peels. The result is lemonade that deserves a strong two-word modifier here, something like "powerfully swell."

The operation is so squared away — from the vintage storefront-style logo printed on everything but the food to the picture window where uniformed employees weigh chuck patties (ground on-site) and feed fresh potatoes into a $40,000 crinkle-cutting beast — that it's easy to assume a conglomerate overlord.

But that assumption would be wrong. Schiller and K&N area manager Marlis Oliver speak with the twang of native Texans. Schiller was born in Cameron and studied aviation before running an insurance company that worked with restaurant people. That explains the passion for process. Oliver is a native Austinite with a degree in agricultural business from Texas A&M University. That explains why the menu calls mustard "yeller." (Seriously, the menu's "red, yeller, white" sauce options come from Oliver's experience as a kid going to a volunteer fire department burger cookout in San Saba, where one old gent just hollered "yeller or white?")

And "Mighty Fine"? It's something Schiller's grandfather said, a kind of "see you later" send-off. But that's just the name. The goal of the place itself is to establish a gold standard for Austin burgers, Schiller said, in the same way he considers Kincaid's to be Fort Worth's landmark burger joint. To do that, Mighty Fine strips the menu to its core: quarter- or half-pound burgers, fries, lemonade, shakes, sodas. No veggie burgers or chicken tenders or sauteed mushrooms. The only extravagance is a chopped chili dog, made with sliced beef franks from Taylor Meat Co., ground chuck and spices.

The formula seems to be working. Mighty Fine is looking to open a fourth location in the coming year, likely in Central Austin. The better to pay for that commercial during the last Super Bowl. About that: "I like to do things quality and big or not at all," Schiller said.

msutter@statesman.com; 912-5902

The burger-meisters

Hill-Bert's Burgers

www.hill-bertsburgers.com

• 7211 Burnet Road, 452-2317

• 1503 W. 35th St., 452-3287

• 5340 Cameron Road, 371-3717

Mighty Fine Burgers Fries Shakes

www.mightyfineburgers.com

• 10515 N. MoPac Blvd. (Loop 1), Suite 205 in the Shops at Arbor Walk, 524-2400

• 5601 Brodie Lane, Suite 1300, 735-2800

• 201 University Oaks Blvd., Suite 1380, Round Rock, 381-3310

• Coming this year: Central Austin

P. Terry's Burger Stand

www.pterrys.com

• 404 S. Lamar Blvd., 473-2217

• 3303 N. Lamar Blvd., 371-9975

• Coming this year: 4228 W. William Cannon Drive